[Retrospectiva 2020] New York: the Big Apple will celebrate a confined Christmas

December 22, 2020

With its iconic sites such as Times Square or Rockefeller Center empty, Broadway and its dozens of silent theaters, and with thousands of inhabitants of Hispanic origin looking for new ways to survive, New York City, the “Big Apple”, ends the 2020 confined by the coronavirus pandemic.

With our correspondent in New York, Silvina Sterin Pensel.

You don’t see as many people in New York this Christmas season as you used to. There are no crowds fighting for photos of the Rockefeller Center tree or crowding around looking at the dreamy decorations in store windows. The pandemic prohibits crowds and has made domestic and international tourism languish.

However, it is New Yorkers themselves who are enjoying the magic of the city and helping, in turn, to lift the Big Apple financially.

“The city is not yet ready to receive international tourism. The spirit of Christmas in this city is marked by foreign tourists, but now we are exploring a New York for New Yorkers ”, Adriana Aristizabal, an employee at NYC & Company, the office that promotes the city around the world, tells RFI. “Since the pandemic hit New York the tourism sector froze. But never before in history has the city been so accessible, economically speaking, to be able to visit it. There are historical discounts. I would say that this is a great gift from New York for its own people ”, adds Aristizabal, whose company has designed communication campaigns aimed at local inhabitants with a clear goal: that they stay in the city and do internal tourism to make up for the lack visitors from abroad.

Battered by a worrying second wave of coronavirus infections, the way we celebrate the end of the year holidays has changed in New York.

In this particular time of party, with a New York hit by a severe and, everything has changed. Even the traditional way of saying goodbye to the outgoing year and welcoming the new year.

“This time around there will be hundreds of thousands of people in Times Square for obvious health reasons,” Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, the organization charged with welcoming 2021 with the descent of the iconic ball, tells RFI. crystal. “We will have a limited number of guests, which we call the“ Heroes of 2020 ”who will be in small sheltered tents and socially distanced. We will have a hospital worker, an investigator, ambulance personnel ”.

Beyond the guests, the area will be empty, because the general public will not be able to be physically there. But as was the norm this pandemic year, technology comes to the rescue again.

“We are going to have an application to celebrate the New Year virtually. People are going to be able to create their own avatar in the app and virtually participate in the New Years Eve party as if they were actually in Times Square, ”says Tompkins.

But the show must go on, and that is why there will be several artists who will participate in the event. Among them Gloria Gaynor, who at the age of 77, will sing her classic song, “I Will Survive” [“Sobreviviré”].

Source

–