What will happen to Big Apple’s core? Clues from reopening.

Neal Taparia has found he kind of likes running his Manhattan-based tech company from his home.

When the pandemic began to ravage the city last March, he and thousands of other “nonessential” office workers were suddenly forced to leave their Manhattan conference rooms and cubicles and work remotely, via Zoom and Slack. 

The virus put a sudden halt to what could be called the city’s classic professional lifestyle: the crowded commutes downtown and back; the long, meeting-packed days at the office with meals at your desk; the hard-charging ambition of a city that, as the saying goes, never sleeps.

For Mr. Taparia and many of his employees, the jarring transition, both emotional and professional, was far from seamless as the built-in boundaries between home and work life dissolved. “But once we started establishing sound practices for working from home, it became pretty clear that our employees, and even myself, we loved the flexibility,” says Mr. Taparia, a tech entrepreneur who last year co-founded SOTA

A large-scale experimentThe end of the office?Fleeing to the burbs