After City Relocates COVID Vaccine Hub, Bushwick Neighbors Step In To Ease Confusion
arrow Mutual aid group volunteers sit outside the shuttered vaccine site at Bushwick Educational Campus. Courtesy of Bed Stuy Strong
After Tanner Celestin, 27, arrived for her second COVID-19 vaccine appointment at Bushwick Educational Campus last Thursday evening, her confusion quickly turned into annoyance. This was the site she had visited for her first shot, but now it looked closed.
That frustration was fleeting because as Celestin walked toward the building, she was quickly intercepted by a volunteer with the mutual aid group Bed Stuy Strong.
They told her that the site had been relocated to a hub about a mile-and-a-half away. The volunteer handed Celestin a slip of paper with a code for a free Lyft to get to the new spot at 455 Jefferson Street, along with a flyer featuring a little map of the area.
But remembering the past is also a way of believing that
this moment will someday be the past. Which is to say, nostalgia for the past is also a way of believing in the future. Daydreaming about the After Times the Before Times’s mythic counterpart is in part an exercise in imagining what it will be like to look back at the pandemic. And imagining the time when we might have even the slightest glimmers of nostalgia for daily life during the pandemic the wall hooks holding our masks or the makeshift shacks of outdoor tables filling the city streets is a way of believing there will be a time when it’s finished, a time when we can look back and survey the entire arc of the story.
Dimitri Rodriguez
In her head, she envisioned a big, festive event. Celebratory. Perhaps in a park, or on a brownstone-lined street, the sun streaming through the trees. People of all races, religions, and backgrounds the people she seeks to represent would flood together in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where she grew up, and she, Dianne Morales, a girl who was poor and didn’t know it, now a woman rich in the perspective that comes from a life spent proving people wrong, would stand on a platform and declare that she was a candidate for mayor of New York City a city brimming with possibility, but one that has yet to live up to its potential as the greatest in the world.