international travelers "come over and play in New York like it's Candyland,"
New Yorkers envy free-spending foreign tourists
By Alex Williams Published: August 2, 2008
NEW YORK: Negin Farsad, a filmmaker and comedian, recalled a time not long ago when European friends would visit New York just to see her, and not, she said, to use her apartment as a "temporary locker for their shopping bags."
Farsad, 32, recently escorted two friends from London on the inevitable Europeans-clean-out-the-Apple-store shopping excursion, where they purchased a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro for nearly $3,000, plus hundreds of dollars worth of extra memory (why not?), and continued on a spree that included East Village boutiques and Bloomingdale's downtown. During the evenings, the couple - both of whom work in television production back home - dined at a trendy downtown restaurants and partied at a chic bars, without concern as to cost.
"Back home they're just run-of-the-mill cubicle people," Farsad said, "but here, they're like three parts Kimora Simmons and two parts Oasis, circa 1995."
This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad - projected to top the record number reached last summer, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style - the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs - on the cheap.
But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it's easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions of dollars. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.
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Their party is raging just as New York's hangover has started to set in. Frictions do arise, especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let's not even get into the six weeks of summer vacation in most European countries).
"It's Psych 101 - jealousy," said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomed the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but "sometimes you feel like it's going to become a situation where they stop and take a picture - 'Look at that endangered species - a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work."'
Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who runs a beauty Web site, said she felt like this summer had turned into a turf war with free-spending Europeans over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.
She said the point was driven home to her on a recent trip to Bergdorf Goodman to help her fiancé select a pair of shoes to go with his tuxedo for their wedding. Wearing the sort of outfit that usually acts as a siren for department store salespeople - a Tory Burch shift dress and Jimmy Choo slingback heels - she instead found herself waiting behind a European couple in sneakers and bike shorts who "had made such massive purchases that we couldn't get anyone to give us the time of day," Blitzer, 32, recalled. She was always used to first-class service, she said. "But now, there's an ultrafirst."
New Yorkers without Bergdorf's budgets often find themselves working overtime - figuratively and literally - to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.
Jessica Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at the chic and expensive WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.
These foreign friends "come over and play in New York like it's Candyland," she said in an e-mail message. Still, she said she tried to keep it in perspective. Last year, she went to Vietnam and enjoyed evenings of fine dining for 10 people at less than $20 a person, where, she said, "I felt like I was in my own Candyland."
The number of international travelers who will visit New York between June and August is expected to rise by 120,000 from an estimated 3.12 million last summer (that number was a record and a 20 percent jump from 2006), according to forecasts by NYC, the city's tourism and marketing bureau. |
