We Clap Because We Care And Because It’s Fun

At exactly 7 pm on Friday, March 27, New Yorkers clapped their first round of applause for essential workers. Boo Boo and I happened to be walking along 44th Street heading the park at that very moment. People spilled out of their front doors and windows and onto their stoops and fire escapes to clap, holler and bang on pots and pans.

Narratively speaking it might be fun to say that I was caught off guard thought everyone was cheering for me as I hauled my toddler up the hill in a carrier to the park (hauling an almost 30 pound child up a hill is always preferable to carrying a stroller up the stoop to our building). But I had totally gotten the memo on Facebook and then had subsequently forgotten about it.

The applause was not roaring, but it was vigorous and fun. And then it never happened again–not on that block anyway. How did the passion die so quickly? Was a daily applause routine too much of a commitment? I don’t know, but I accept that there’s a number of extremely valid reasons not everyone in New York City is clapping:

1. My friends, who also have a toddler, have explained that 7 pm is when they start putting their daughter to bed. There are lots of toddlers in the city. Maybe one of them is yours and maybe that’s why you’re not clapping.
2. There are a lot of essential workers and at 7 pm many of them are, essentially, working.
3. Some essential workers are not working at this time. They are trying to sleep so they can work the night shift.
4. Many New Yorkers are sick, mourning, or in desperate situations.

But there are many who do not fall in those categories who have still not joined the clapping. Boo Boo and I have made the 7 pm applause for essential workers an essential part of our routine. If we are at home a window is flung open. I slide a small cooking pot through the window guards and bang it with a wooden spoon. Boo Boo places an overturned pot on the windowsill and bangs it with another spoon. 

Our neighbors down the block have a noise maker that sounds at exactly 6:59, according to the digital clock on our oven. But we always wait for the church bells at Saint Michael’s, a few blocks down Fourth Avenue. When they are done ringing the hour we start banging away. There are as many churches in Sunset Park as there are Starbucks in Midtown, and before the pandemic the neighborhood would ring out with all their competing bells, but only Saint Michael’s has been our stalwart collective clock and now it alone plays the Angelus bells and vesper bells, and all the other bells. Wherever we are in the neighborhood we will always know when it is 7 pm. Even Boo Boo knows what time it is when the sun is dimming and the bells are ringing. If I’m chopping vegetables for dinner and not minding the oven clock, Boo Boo will spring into action from whatever he was doing, this evening it was using our chairs to create an overpass for his cars and trucks, and alert me of the time.

“Drum! Drum!” He says as he runs to me and then rushes to the window. I gather our pots and pans and we make our noise.

***

Often we are at the park by the time the essential hour rolls around. At first we just stood and clapped our hands, hoping others would join. But as weeks turned to months the applause turned into a more coordinated cacophony in some corners of the park. While the inhabitants along 44th Street have been resolutely non-participatory, the inhabitants of 41st Street have turned 7 pm into a feast of noise. 

People use their roofs and fire escapes as stages to bang whatever instrument they have at hand. With a proper cooking spoon a fire escape becomes a xylophone and your pots and pans become drums, and your plastic jar of calcium supplements are maracas. People hang out of their windows with kazoos, some with blow horns and others  with vuvuzelas they’ve been keeping since the 2010 World Cup. For some 7 pm becomes a vocal exercise of hooting and hollering. Whatever the antics the window will frame them as the people at the park watch, clapping hands in applause for workers, and for the spectacle. I’ve peered into these windows many times if I’m walking along the park at night and know some of the interiors pretty well, but these are the only times anyone is peering out.  

Now Boo Boo and I bring a small pot and spoon with us whenever we’re in the park in the evening. I will look at the time on my phone to make sure we have time to get to the right side of the park when the cheering starts. The first noise comes from a brownstone on the corner, right before the bells begin. A middle aged man and woman, sometimes joined by a teenage son, gather on the roof banging their pots and pans and whooping. Then others start cheering and clapping. Boo Boo and I will bang on our pot, and just as we subside an eruption comes from the far entrance of the park, near the co-op apartments right next to our favorite coffee shop. We resume our banging, and since we’re the nearest racket people in the park take cues from us and start applauding again.

***

Sometimes we bring our noise directly to our block. At 6:45 I carry Boo Boo and our instruments down four flights of stairs–if I let him walk he’ll touch all available surfaces–and we take a stroll. I don’t bring a watch because I know Saint Michael’s will keep the time. 

“Drum? Drum?” Says Boo Boo when the bells toll. 

“Right here!” I say as I pull out our pots and spoons. If he has a stick, Boo Boo will station himself on the sidewalk to bang on a wrought-iron gate, but we are at our most effective when we parade down the block trying to raise the hue and cry. 

Slowly a gray-haired lady with rollers will open a  window and clap two floors above us. Across the street, a kazoo sounds. Up the block we hear the metallic clanging of cooking implements. Nothing becomes something.

Sometimes we’ll post ourselves in front of the brownstone of our neighbor who has two kids. A few weeks after the shutdown began we ran into him in front of the pharmacy when we were on our way to the park and he wanted to know why I had a pot with me. Though Tom had been woefully out of the loop, he seemed excited to learn about the applause for essential workers. The kids would love it, he said. We’ll do it tomorrow, he promised.   

Two months later we still haven’t heard a peep from Tom or his kids, but Boo Boo and I are working on it.