New York: the sites that attract tourists

This is another record for the American metropolis: last year, it welcomed 65.2 million tourists. Attendance that has been steadily increasing year after year for ten years, after experiencing a soft patch between 2001 and 2008. Among the visitors, there are 51.6 million Americans and 13.5 million foreigners, including a majority of Britons (1.24 million). The other nationalities most attracted to the Big Apple (the “Big Apple”), its nickname, are the Chinese (1.1 million), the Canadians (1 million), the Brazilians (920,000) and the French (807,000).

To accommodate so many people, hotel capacity is constantly increasing: in 2018, 36 new hotels opened and a hundred more are under construction. A quarter of the tourist budget is also devoted to accommodation, the rest of the expenses being divided between food, shopping, outings and transport. The sector employs nearly 400,000 people and brings in nearly $40 billion to the city.

If the French are the tourists who most favor museums (65% against 54% of other nationalities), they also do not resist going shopping (88%), visiting monuments (48%) and they are even almost a third take advantage of their stay to attend a traditional Broadway musical.

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But the city has many other attractions: opened last year, the VR World NYC, a center dedicated to virtual reality, is always full. Just like the elevator that leads to the top of the One World Trade Center tower (541 meters). Even though the Empire State Building remains a must see, more and more tourists are experiencing this spectacular climb. During a 47-second journey that takes the visitor to the top, the elevator turns into a 360 degree screen. Worthy of a Disney film, the history of New York scrolls by to reach in images the 102nd floor of the building built on the site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed on September 11, 2001.

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Beyond the technical prowess, this time-lapse illustrates a city in perpetual motion. “It’s both exciting and exhausting. And it’s also sometimes hard to live with,” notes like many of his compatriots, Dominique Ansel, a Franco-American pastry chef who has lived in the American metropolis for more than twenty years. On the One World platform, the vertigo is absolute and the message is not subliminal: New York always gets up! “It’s a phoenix,” remarks Eric Ripert, chef at Bernardin, a three-star Michelin restaurant. “I have known the ups and downs of the city, here we only remember the first”, adds Daniel Boulud, installed since the 1980s, and inventor of the foie gras hamburger. In a few months, he will open his sixth restaurant in one of the towers under construction.

The competition is raging to “scrape” the skies of the Big Apple. On the outskirts of Central Park, a 433-meter tower is under construction. It is so thin that it already makes New Yorkers tremble and bluffs tourists, always with their noses in the air. At nearly 30,000 dollars per square meter, it is still higher. Real estate pressure shapes Manhattan, where you have to pay at least 2,000 dollars a month for a studio equivalent to a Parisian maid’s room and where it is not uncommon for owners to claim monthly income corresponding to three times the rent.

In the Lower East Side, the former Jewish quarter, historic buildings must thus give way to new constructions. Katz’s Delicatessen, rooted since 1888, is making resistance. In this restaurant, where the mythical scene of the film’s simulated orgasm was shot When Harry meets Sally, people come from all over the world as if on a pilgrimage to taste one of the most robust pastrami sandwiches in the city. Rebellious movement or fad, in the neighborhood, the “speakeasies” (clandestine bars), invented at the time of prohibition, are resurfacing behind the scenes of a pharmacy or a barber.

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On the other side of the East River, in the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which looks more and more like an amusement park for bobos without borders, the old factories are transformed into luxury hotels. The “rooftop” is mandatory to taste the spectacle of the Manhattan Skyline while sipping a locally brewed beer and biting into a piece of raw milk cheese bought on the Greenmarket in Union Square.

On the shore of the Hudson, this time, the Javits Center, a gigantic conference center, will host on its green roof one of the largest urban farms, a new paradise for birds and bats, according to the highly respected National Audubon Society, an American environmental organization. New Yorkers say they have come across coyotes, foxes and even deer on the run in Central Park! Inspired by the René Dumont green corridor in Paris, the High Line, which follows the route of an old railway line, allows you to walk or run a large part of the west bank of Hell’s Kitchen, in Lower Manhattan.

Greener, New York is also becoming safer every year. You can walk there without fear until dawn. This was still far from being the case at the end of the 1980s (330 homicides listed in 2017 against 2,245 in 1990, according to the New York Times). At that time, we didn’t venture beyond 85th Street. The zero tolerance put in place by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994 seems to have paid off. Surveillance cameras criss-cross the city and, at the slightest incident, the police arrive instantly, like Starsky and Hutch. So much so that the territories to explore now extend beyond Harlem and the Bronx…

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