Main Street was shut.
The money moved online.
While these blocks stayed masked and shuttered, nearly $800 billion in PPP loans moved through some 5,500 lenders — and one fintech portal promised the application in five minutes, for free.
On the street: closed gates, empty blocks, masks. On the screen: a loan portal that set out two federal loans in six steps.
This gallery holds only images that can be dated to the pandemic window. The photographs are Library of Congress documentary work; the portals and the ad are web captures, dated below each image.
The record
How every image here is dated to 2020–2022
The Street (11). Photographs from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress — her COVID-era photographs of New York City. Each carries a 2021 LoC accession number. Eight of the eleven show a pandemic marker in frame: face masks in all eight, and a COVID-testing ad in one. The remaining three (“Emptied blocks, Lower Manhattan”, “Brooklyn Bridge, quiet water”, “Lower Manhattan, across the river”) are emptied-street and skyline frames from the same dated series: they are placed here for the vacancy they record, and carry no marker of their own.
The Portal & The Pitch (6). Web captures from 2020–2021: the loan applications and company sites via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (dates shown per image), the SBA disaster-loan and Restaurant Revitalization portals as they stood in the program window, and a Womply ad recorded in Meta's Ad Library as running in March 2021.
Images that were only about the period — later enforcement pages, present-day portraits — were deliberately excluded. Nothing here is a re-enactment or a stock stand-in.