Poster from 1994

Bainbridge Avenue, Bronx NY, between 210th and 204th Streets, May 2 and 3, 2020, at the height of the Coronavirus epidemic and updated for the catastrophic 2023 fire. This is the shopping area of a working-class and largely immigrant area of the north central Bronx (MAP). There are no investors or hedge-fund managers here; people earn money by working and then they spend it in the neighborhood, like in the lost world of Frank Capra movies except in a multitude of languages and skin tones. In early May 2020, most of the shops were closed and some of them never came back because they had lost months of income, but still had to pay rent, insurance, and so on, and I doubt if any of them received a penny of federal small-business stimulus (in fact, it turns out that Bronx businesses received only 1% of the small-business loans distributed in the city). Already before the virus, there was an epidemic of shop closings due to uncontrolled and constant increases in commercial rents. One business owner told me her lease allowed the landlord to raise the rent each month.