Caught between a rock and a hard place by the COVID-19 pandemic, resilient New Yorkers scrawled messages of hope on both.

The first, a simple call for optimism, was hand-painted in black letters against a white background on the stone: “Everything will be alright.” It was left on the banks of the East River in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The second was written in black paint on a piece of plywood nailed over the entrance to Dylan Murphy’s, a popular Upper East Side bar shuttered by coronavirus like so many businesses across the boroughs. “We’re all in this together,” declared the homemade promise of unity.

The small calls for our shared recovery loom large in a city filled with iconic symbols: The Statue of Liberty, the new World Trade Center, the Wall Street Bull, the Brooklyn Bridge.

They remain the constants in a city changed in so many ways since the first coronavirus case was confirmed in early March: The bright lights of Broadway and Madison Square Garden went dark. The schools, the bars, the churches and the restaurants remain shuttered. Opening Day in Yankee Stadium and Citi Field, the annual rites of spring for baseball fans in the Bronx and Queens, exists only as an unfulfilled promise.

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But life goes on, too — and nowhere more than in New York. Folks in the five boroughs take care of their own. More than 16,000 New Yorkers already lost their lives to the pandemic, with their families gathering to mourn. And then they get back to the business of trying to find that place of normalcy that disappeared in an infectious flash.

“Love is never canceled,” read a sign in the front door of one city church. “However, our building is closed until further notice … You are in our prayers.”

On the marquee of the Beacon Theater, where Bob Dylan performed late last year and two shows by Queens native Jerry Seinfeld shows were postponed last month, a simple message greeted passersby: “We ♥ New York.” The sentiment was shared across the East River in Brooklyn, and father north on Broadway in the Bronx, and across the 59th St. Bridge into Queens.

And on the front door of a West Village restaurant, a promise: “We will be back.”