Picture break
Four years later: A Bay Area Covid retrospective.
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Last Sunday the New York Times published a photo essay featuring the “social distancing” stickers that bloomed on sidewalks during the early months of the Covid pandemic, and whose tattered remnants serve “as a reminder of that surreal time when we struggled to protect ourselves, collectively yet in isolation, from an invisible enemy.” (Gift link here.)
I’d been thinking about my own documentation of the early pandemic, a project I began on March 7, 2020, one day after California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency. Santa Clara County had declared a health emergency nearly a month earlier, on February 10, after a county resident became the first person in the Bay Area to test positive for the virus. The first known U.S. death from the Covid-19 virus, a 57-year-old woman, had occurred in Santa Clara County on February 6; the Diamond Princess cruise ship, with hundreds of infected passengers, docked in Oakland on March 9.1 The situation in the Bay Area may not have been as glaringly dire as in Manhattan, where refrigerated trucks served as makeshift morgues, but we were very much a hot spot.
I focused mostly on signage: official, ad hoc, professional, poignantly amateur. Unlike the pavement stickers, these signs were ephemeral. Here’s what we were seeing from March through May 2020.2
March 7: A sign in a San Francisco CVS pharmacy, which had already sold out of face masks and medical gloves.
March 11: A sign in Berkeley for “botanical disinfecting wipes.”
March 12: Trader Joe’s, Oakland. Many shelves and frozen-food compartments were bare, and checkout lines were long.
March 17: The Grand Lake Theater, a fixture in my Oakland neighborhood since 1926, is famous — or notorious — for its marquee pronouncements, which often express the political views of owner Allen Michaan.
March 20: Marquee at Bimbo’s 365, a San Francisco nightclub. I wrote about the origin of the Bimbo’s name in a 2022 post on my old blog.
March 20: Swimmers at Aquatic Park, San Francisco. I stayed “strong and well” by swimming in the bay throughout the emergency. The Dolphin Club clubhouse, with its showers and saunas, remained closed to members for more than a year; we coped by lugging hot water from home and shivering companionably on the Aquatic Park bleachers.
March 23: Whole Foods, Oakland. A diptych.
March 24: Infection-themed display in the window of Walden Pond Books, another Oakland fixture.
April 3: Sidewalk sign, Oakland.
April 7: The end of the toilet-paper drought, at least at Costco.
April 9: A warning from the city of Piedmont.
April 25: Social distancing, Aquatic Park, San Francisco.
April 26: The lost graduation.
May 11: Billboards from PassItOn.com on Oakland’s Grand Avenue.
May 21: A handmade sign in Oakland.
May 21: Earnest but confused handmade sign, Oakland.
May 24: Nautical humor at the Richmond marina.
December 2020: I wrote about Covid and nostalgia: “No matter how bleak and angry this year has been, many of us will, in five or fifteen years, invent a narrative about 2020 that frames it as ‘the good old days’.”
See my previous Picture Break, from January 2024.
The U.S. president at the time wanted to leave the infected passengers on board. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” said Donald J. Trump.
I originally posted some of these photos on my Instagram account.