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New Yorkers Sing Together Out Windows during Coronavirus pandemic

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New Yorkers lean out their windows and turn a locked-down block into a chorus.

As New York City ground to a halt under the first wave of coronavirus restrictions, an ABC News segment captured something no press conference could: neighbors singing to each other from their apartment windows. The video, titled “New Yorkers Sing Together Out Windows during Coronavirus pandemic,” shows residents leaning out across courtyards and empty streets, trading verses of a song everybody already knew by heart.

• Residents joined together to sing The Beatles’ 1966 classic “Yellow Submarine” from their windows during the early days of New York’s coronavirus lockdown.
• The moment echoed the balcony singalongs that had already spread across Italy during that country’s national lockdown weeks earlier.
• The footage arrived as New York City and New York State moved to restrict public gatherings, close schools, and shut down dine-in restaurants and bars.

A City Suddenly Gone Quiet

By mid-March 2020, New York had shifted from the busiest city in the country to something closer to a held breath. Broadway was dark, schools were shuttered, and bars and restaurants had been ordered to cut off dine-in service as officials tried to slow a virus that was spreading faster than testing capacity could track it. For a lot of residents suddenly confined to studio apartments and walk-ups, the change happened within days, not weeks.

That’s the backdrop for the ABC News clip: block after block of windows, normally just backdrop noise for a city that never stops moving, becoming the only stage anyone had left. The stakes weren’t abstract — the state’s restrictions were tightening by the day, and nobody in the video knew yet how long the isolation was going to last.

Borrowing a Page From Italy

The idea wasn’t invented in New York. Weeks before American cities locked down, Italians under national quarantine had already turned their balconies into makeshift concert halls, singing and playing instruments to connect with neighbors who were otherwise sealed off inside. New Yorkers picked up the same instinct once their own lockdown arrived — leaning out of windows instead of doors, since balconies aren’t exactly standard in most five-story walk-ups.

In the ABC News footage, the chosen song wasn’t a local anthem or a tribute to first responders — it was “Yellow Submarine,” a Beatles tune more than five decades old, sung not because it fit the moment thematically but because everybody on the block already knew the words.

Neighbors who’d probably never exchanged more than a nod in the elevator were suddenly singing “Yellow Submarine” to each other across an empty street.

An Early Signal of What Was Coming

This particular clip predates the more organized rituals that New York would later become known for — the nightly 7:00 PM ovations for healthcare workers that eventually spread across the boroughs. What the ABC News segment captured was rawer and less coordinated: just residents improvising a way to feel less alone while schools and public life shut down around them.

It’s a small moment, but it’s the kind that tends to stick — a handful of apartment windows, one old Beatles song, and a city figuring out in real time that isolation didn’t have to mean silence.