Sharjah24 – AFP: New Yorkers are taking advantage of the absence of tourists during the pandemic to visit iconic sites in the Big Apple that they would normally avoid.
At 10:00 am (1500 GMT) on a recent Friday, barely ten people were on Liberty Island's roughly 200-metre (650-ft) promenade, staring up at the Statue of Liberty.
In normal times, even although it is not peak season, hundreds of tourists would be posing for selfies in front of the copper icon of freedom.
Roughly 67 million tourists visited New York City in 2019. In 2020, visitor numbers were a third of that, and most came before the pandemic began ravaging the city in the spring.
Today, 90 percent of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art come from the local area, according to a spokesperson. Ordinarily, locals make up fewer than half.
NYC & Company, which markets the Big Apple around the world and which cut its workforce by almost a half because of coronavirus, launched the "All in NYC" campaign to encourage New Yorkers to visit their own city.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, the Empire State Building observation deck recorded a 94 percent drop in visitors compared to the same period the year before, despite being open for the full three months.
At the 9/11 Memorial, only a few dozen people tend to walk amid the former home of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
- Broadway the catalyst -
Many New Yorkers avoided the memorial during its first few years, either out of trauma or because it was too crowded, to the point that organizers launched a specific marketing campaign in 2016 entitled "Our City. Our Story".
Despite enjoying New York's new-found quietness, locals are beginning to crave the manic old days.
With the partial reopening of cinemas and large arenas such as Madison Square Garden, NYC & Company's Heywood sees positive moves in the right direction.
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