VOA常速英语:疫情下的纽约街头

At the Museum of the city of New York, we think a lot about what makes New York New York and when we bring it down to just four ideas, money, density, diversity and creativity. They are all rooted in and felt in the vibrant street life of New York, and that energy of New Yorks street life is what I find most viscerally absence during this strange and quiet time of sheltering in place staying at home social distancing and quarantine. Use hand sanitizer. Please cover your nose and mouth at your elbow when you cough and sneeze. Let's work together to keep healthy. The streets are dense, they're diverse full of creative people. People from all over the world, the crowds that jostling, people bumping up against strangers and hearing all the languages of the globe. That's typically the experience of moving through the streets of New York.

So much of the way the city was organized and the systems that were built were designed to fight the unhealthy environment that was understood to be the sources of disease. And so, big pieces of infrastructure were created like the water system, the very existence of the sanitation system the housing codes that shaped the way the buildings were built. But as you get into the 20th century, the changes that you see as a result of infectious disease are more metaphorical. They're about human behavior shaping how people relate to each other and how we think about certain spaces. It's going to be interesting to see the aftermath of this, really historic period and whether it changes the direction or the slope of New Yorks development. New York has a lot of monikers and nicknames. One is famously the city that never sleeps. Yet right now people are feeling that the city that never sleeps is at least napping, and yet when you look closer at what it takes to keep the city moving and all the people putting their lives on the front lines whether literally in hospitals or just keeping the subways and buses moving, deliveries coming and food on the shelves. There is still a lot of people not sleeping in New York.