Letter: A Season of Change indyweek.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from indyweek.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
As the world began to shut down, the overarching sentiment was things wouldn’t go on like this: Whether it was the president’s fanciful message about a two-week lockdown or public health experts’ vision of an escalating, focused campaign to beat back the virus, the situation was definitely going to keep changing, somehow. Instead, all the different optimistic visions were replaced by open-ended stasis, immense loss, and extreme isolation. Refrigerated trucks turned into disaster morgues sat on New York street corners last spring, while U-Hauls outside of a local funeral home housed the dead who couldn’t be preserved. Neither cohort could be honored or enshrined by loved ones.
2020 in Review: Goodbye to the Triangle Restaurants That We Loved and Lost This Year
Illustration by Annie Maynard
It did not have to be this way. In early April, it became apparent that restaurantsâreliant on foot traffic, mingling, and all the intimate, communal elements of public life that weâve had to give up this yearâwere going to suffer during the pandemic.Â
We bought gift cards and T-shirts. We pledged to get takeout. But without federal and municipal relief, it was always going to be impossible for restaurants to continue to pay overhead costs and make payroll. And so weâve watched our cities get rewritten in real time.Â