One City, Two Storms

Two women named Anya wrote about their experiences with the storm and its aftermath in Brooklyn for n+1.

Anya Yurchyshyn, in Red Hook:
“Here’s what you heard in Red Hook during the following days: the buzz and hum of generators, the concerned voices of your neighbors, and the sad sounds of cars coughing and whimpering as their owners tried and tried and tried to start them.”

Anya Ulinich, in Park Slope:
“I asked a clerk at a deli across the street from the lifeless Coney Island Hospital how high the water had come in his store. Setting down a box of lighters he’d salvaged, he gestured — counter-high … That night, at a hipster bar, I drank artisanal beer and played pinball with a couple dressed as a slab of bacon and a banana. I kept thinking of the look in the eyes of the deli clerk, and I felt as if I’d been a disaster tourist in my own city, only a few miles from this bar, earlier that day.”

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