Social distance and chill
This week marks a dubious anniversary.
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life five years ago, shutdowns cast a shadow over the local music and arts scene. Venues shuttered, performances were canceled, and journalists who covered the creative community found themselves scrambling for a new approach.
For journalist Katie Lembo, then an arts and entertainment writer for TheSpot518, the sudden halt of live events meant rethinking not just her beat but the very nature of arts reporting.
“The first year of the pandemic was uncertain,” she said. “Within a week, everything shut down, meaning all of the events, listings, etc. we were covering were canceled. It was surreal to go through the paper (on deadline day, no less), essentially put a big red ‘X’ over the hours of work we had done, and start back at square one.”
COVID hardly arrived like a thief in the night. It was more like the Boogeyman our keepers spent weeks warning us about. We all lay in bed with the covers at our noses before being the first to pull the sheets over our heads.
Albany’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade was that weekend. Mayor Kathy Sheehan was defiant on a Wednesday, delivering a bold declaration that the parade was still on. By Friday, that changed when New York City’s theater district closed its doors before sweeping mandates
shut all but essential operations down to start the following week.
Which left us with Saturday.
Our weekly back-page gallery still needed pictures, and it was going to feature sights from the parade. North Pearl Street was abuzz in an odd sort of sense—the streets were silent, but establishments were full of devil-may-care revelers inside.
I went downtown to take pictures, but watching the volume of people huddled and squeezing by one another made me stop. Austin had canceled South by Southwest two weeks before. The governor’s office was urging people to avoid large gatherings. Albany County reported two people who had contracted the virus that week, prompting Sheehan to cancel the parade, but nothing was said about restaurants. As I walked back to my car, I took to social media to ask followers to share their photos, whether they went out or stayed home.
“[Michael Hallisey] and I looked at one another at one point and said, ‘Well, how do we make something of this?’” she recalled.
We first replaced four of the five pages of the weekly calendar with music reviews and an article suggesting how readers could avoid contracting COVID. We draped a dark veil over the calendar’s front page, accompanied by a message.
“This week’s edition reflects the chaos of the past few days. Our theatres are closing. As of this moment, bars and venues are beginning to follow suit,” wrote our publisher, John McIntyre. “As we promise that it will return to you, we will return, too.”
Production day decisions are seldom made with hesitation and never followed by second-guessing. Where the margins of each page previously promoted events, we collected statements from several of the scene’s stakeholders—the Proctors Collaborative, Albany Center Gallery, and more. Katie’s feature previewing a Guthrie Bell Productions fundraiser for Planned Parenthood was kept, though the show was canceled. As I stated five years ago in an editor’s note, her article served as a pertinent message that captured the current events surrounding women’s health rights.
“Surprisingly enough, around that time, we heard from creators and artists all over the area asking for coverage on what they were doing in the meantime,” Lembo said.
The weekly challenge of producing a paper when news seemed scarce was difficult to convey to family members, but collaborating with others who shared that struggle created a sense of solidarity. Subsequent editions would showcase rainbow chases, painted messages of hope left on rocks for others to find, and the emergence of home-streamed concerts from Wild Adriatic to the Albany Symphony.
The following April, Katie earned first-place honors in the New York Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest for her coverage of the arts.
“The awards, the glory, the praise; all of that is fun,” Lembo said. “However, dreams were made of people like you giving us the push to keep trying, and people like those artists who refused to take it lying down.”
TheSpot518 exists today, in part, because of the resilience of the local creative community, its journalists, and its audience. As live music has returned and the arts scene has slowly rebounded, Lembo’s reflections stand as a reminder of what it took to get there.
“Most of all, I remember the undying support from our readers,” she said. “We were lucky that not only were people reading, but they were going out of their way to support our team as writers, as creatives, and, most importantly, as humans.”
Live performances have resumed, and venues once dark have filled with music again. But the lessons of that uncertain year remain. The pandemic may have rewritten the way we experience and cover the arts, but it also reaffirmed why we do it—to tell the stories of those who refuse to stop creating, no matter the circumstances.
