Colin Huggins, the piano man of Washington Square Park, sat at his Steinway baby grand the other day playing one of Claude Debussy’s frolicking arabesques. A few onlookers wore surgical masks and listened from benches. Elsewhere in the park, a Black Lives Matter protest was starting and a worker climbed up a ladder to scrub away graffiti from the Washington Arch.

Mr. Huggins, 42, then stood on top of his piano stool to address his sparse audience.

“This next one is by Franz Liszt,” he said. “I’ll be back tomorrow. After that, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure things out these last few weeks. You’re welcome to put a donation into these buckets near my piano.”

Mr. Huggins faced a lean day ahead. That afternoon, just a few people slipped $1 and $5 bills into his donation buckets as he played Chopin and Philip Glass, whereas normally, Mr. Huggins can make a decent sum in a couple of hours.

For the last 15 years, Mr. Huggins, a slender and studious-looking man with tattooed hands, has been a superstar busker in Washington Square Park, performing to big crowds who fall under the sway of his balletic playing and the striking sight of seeing someone perform outdoors on a 900-pound Steinway. With his classical piano act, Mr. Huggins has earned enough money to survive modestly in New York for years, but that livelihood is held together by a delicately calibrated system, and the pandemic has obliterated it.

Mr. Huggins is now facing the stark uncertainty that every street performer in the city is reckoning with: no tourists, and the audiences that do show up are thin, hesitant, and socially distant.

His bills have piled up. He’s late on his rent. And his income, he said, is less than half of what it used to be. Mr. Huggins typically performed long sets on Saturdays and Sundays, but to make ends meet he recently played for two weeks straight until he was delirious with exhaustion. When he couldn’t perform in the park at all — when, like the rest of the city, he was in strict quarantine — he hunkered down in his small apartment on St. Marks Place, taping together ripped dollar bills that he received over the years (which he stores in a little box) to scrounge up enough cash for a frozen pizza.

The other day, when he saw his landlord walking down the street, he broke away mid-conversation with someone to jog up to him and assure him that he was going to make good on his rent soon. That afternoon, he let two scruffy young men who have been living in Washington Square Park, and who were sorely in need of a shower, freshen up in his apartment.

“Everyone just thinks of me as the piano guy and they want me to play my music,” he said. “No one ever thinks about what I’m going through as a person during all of this.”

The other burden in Mr. Huggins’ life at the moment weighs 900 pounds: his 1959 Steinway baby grand. The enormous instrument is integral to his performances — he invites people to lie beneath it and be cocooned in a wall of sound while he plays — but playing it requires him to heave it to and from Washington Square Park constantly.

He has long engaged in this laborious routine, hauling it like a boulder through city streets with an intricate system of ropes and dollies. But recently, the matter of the Steinway’s storage became a serious problem, forcing Mr. Huggins to heave it across downtown Manhattan throughout the pandemic in a scramble to find a home for it.

In March, the Steinway was stored in a small, street-level space he was renting in Alphabet City. When the pandemic took hold, he said, drug dealers began hanging out around the building, and he had a fallout with his landlords. Next, he made arrangements to keep the Steinway in a shuttered vegan restaurant on St. Marks Place, and he pushed it there during a night of protests in May, shoving it past trash fires and chanting crowds. Recently, the restaurant made plans to reopen, so Mr. Huggins needed to start his search again.

When Mr. Huggins started busking in 2007, he played on a battered upright piano that he bought on Craigslist. In 2018, he obtained the Steinway through a crowdfunding initiative, and it has since become the majestic lure that helps draw audiences to him. Because of all the bumping and thumping the Steinway endures, he employs a piano tuner named Arpad Maklary, 51, who visits him regularly in Washington Square Park.

As Mr. Maklary recently assessed Mr. Huggins’ Steinway, he said that times were tough for him, too, because he usually works on pianos for New York University. “I’m lucky I sold a piano just before this all happened,” he said. “I’m still gnawing off the legs of that sale.”

During lockdown, Mr. Huggins tried to adapt his act. Alongside clips of famous movie scenes, he live-streamed improvisations on the upright in his living room, which brought in some donations, but he found the experience disheartening. “It feels like you’re performing to your iPad,” he said. “I felt like I wasn’t connecting with my audience anymore.

“Most people follow the money, but I don’t do that,” he added. “I’m a street performer. I follow the emotional experience and the ability to give someone a powerful experience. It means I’m poor, but so what.”

Mr. Huggins grew up in Decatur, Ga., and he briefly studied at a state music conservatory. In 2003, he moved to New York and became an accompanist for the American Ballet Theater. A couple of years later, he tried busking in Union Square, and he found the experience exhilarating. Gradually, he became a full-time street performer.

In late June, Mr. Huggins posted a message to his Instagram announcing that he might have to leave New York and that his next performance in the park could be his last. Since then, Venmo donations have streamed in, buying Mr. Huggins some time.

“I’m thankful, but I can’t rely on charity forever,” he said. “My parents have a big place in Virginia, so I could put everything I have in a truck and head there, I guess, but I want to do whatever I can before that happens.”

Early this month, Mr. Huggins finally got some good news: Judson Memorial Church, which is conveniently located opposite Washington Square Park, offered him temporary storage in its basement.

The other day, he got ready to play in the park, and he began the process of moving the Steinway into the church’s little elevator. He wrestled with the piano, pushing his wiry legs against a wall to cram it through the elevator’s doors. Outside, as he dragged it toward the park, he saw a group of police officers and paramedics gathered around the park’s fountain.

They had surrounded a young man who recently started living in the fountain — along with the comforts of a couch and a sun umbrella — and was now refusing to leave. He was naked and he yelled as they tried to remove him.

Mr. Huggins approached Jimmy Pearl, 63, a musician who wore Ray-Bans and lots of silver jewelry.

“Pearl, what happened?” he said.

“They’re taking Jesus out. He’s been disrupting the park. He even got into a fight with Ronnie the Birdman.”

The paramedics finally carried Jesus into an ambulance.

“You’re late today,” Mr. Pearl noted.

“I’m still figuring things out,” said Mr. Huggins.

Settled at his usual spot, Mr. Huggins started untying ropes and hoisting the Steinway into place. Soon, the music of Chopin and Scriabin would float through the park. Yet again, his audience would be small.

Mr. Pearl, who is a familiar face in the park, was aware of his fellow musician’s travails, but he was optimistic. He suggested that maybe the city itself would look out for the piano man.

“No one else here plays as beautifully as Colin does,” Mr. Pearl said. “I don’t think the park will let him leave New York.”