The News from Times Square, NYC
The day before New Years Eve, 2004
by Adam "Rev" Hulnick
New years eve is bearing down on us and if it more
visible anywhere than Times Square, I don’t want to be
there. The tourists are flocking in numbers too great
to ignore, the hawkers are out in force selling their
cheesy New Years crap: horns, noise makers, those
glasses that say “2005” with eye holes in the zeros.
(they only have four years left of those treasures.)
Of course with so much new years crap for sale out
there, the hawkers have to yell as loud as humanly
possible to get your attention.
“New Year Tomorrow! Get Ready Party!”
And the tourists are getting thicker with each passing
day. You can literally watch their numbers growing.
Swelling like those little blobs you watched under the
microscope in high school biology. Tourist mitosis.
Then, emboldened with greater numbers they are
venturing further out from their usual safety spots
like ESPN Zone and The Olive Garden and filing in to
the little lunch counters where I eat.
Now, I have written and will continue to write much on
the subject of tourists. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a
mean-spirited person. I want people to enjoy their
visit to my city; it’s a great place. The problem is
that the majority of them act like complete assholes.
Granted, they are probably assholes back home, which
frees me to hate them on an individual basis.
The problem with tourists, and this is a universal
fact, is that they ignore the fact that their vacation
spot is where someone else actually lives. New York
City is not a theme park. Neither is DC or Key West or
pretty much anywhere, excepting the theme parks. No,
there are nine million people who live in this city
and a ton more who just work here, and we all have one
thing in common: we have things to do. We have places
to be. This does not set us up to have a lot of
tolerance for couples in matching “I heart NY”
t-shirts who are strolling down the busy sidewalk,
holding hands two arms length apart. Guess what,
you’re not just lovebirds, you’re a roadblock.
In general I like to see tourists taking the subway,
bravely venturing away from the tourist spots that
mean very little to the real world of NYC and seeing
more of what life here is really about. I salute their
courage; the subway system is confusing to people who
ride it every day. But when, as happened yesterday, a
group of them were blocking every turnstile into the
subway and caused me to miss my train, that’s not
cute. Hahaha, you’re having such a good time, laughing
and joking, forging memories about the time you
couldn’t figure out how to use that metrocard. Forge
them in ONE turnstile and leave the others for those
of us who want to be on that train whose doors are
about to close.
I suppose I have helped further the stereotype of the
“pushy New Yorker” as I shoulder my way through the
packed Times Square sidewalk/obstacle course on my way
to and from the office. But think about it, where does
the stereotype originate? You never hear New Yorkers
saying “we’re so pushy.” It’s the tourists who amble
down the sidewalk, their digital camcorders
documenting what a crowd looks like, holding hands and
pulling overnight bags on little wheels, suddenly
stopping in the middle of the sidewalk – they’re the
ones who get the most of my shoulders and elbows. When
they go home to Podunk, they only tell about the rude
strangers, not the fact that they were effectively
stopping foot traffic on that block.
And that goes back to the original problem. This is an
amusement park for them. Walking is a novelty in their
world so they don’t consider that for millions of
people it is the way to get around. Our sidewalks are
our major thoroughfares – it would be the equivalent
of going to their suburban neighborhood, getting on
the highway and then slamming on the brakes in the
middle of traffic, blocking two or three lanes. The
only difference is that you don’t have to trade
insurance info when you shoulder-check a tourist, so I
go ahead and go for it.
But, as I said, lately the tourists are becoming more
and more numerous, to the point that the only apt
description is that Times Square is lousy with them.
You can barely move out there. My office is in a
pretty non-descript office building: restaurant on the
ground level, some big gates in front and revolving
doors that lead into a lobby. One of a thousand of its
kind. On my way to lunch I saw some tourists taking a
picture of their kid in front of it. Perhaps the bona
fide landmarks are all too crowded to take photos? And
New Years Eve isn’t even until tomorrow.
But soon it will be over. The ball will drop, they
will pack their cameras and their plastic statues of
liberty into their suitcases on wheels and head to the
airports in droves, stiffing cab drivers en masse.
They’ll go home bragging about how expensive and dirty
everything was and how pushy those New Yorkers were.
Their numbers will thin until the sidewalks of Times
Square become simply annoying rather than impassable.
Once again the tourists will become a minority and
they will know their place, if not out of
consideration, then out of fear.
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