Do New Yorkers Hate Tourists? A Nicky Tours Investigation
Greetings from NYC, where last week I was one of the lucky New Yorkers who got to see Free Shakespeare in the Park at the newly renovated Delacorte Theater on a beautiful evening in Central Park. How’d I get in? If I tell you, I’ll have to—well, actually, if you stick around to the end of this post I’ll let you know.
This month’s newsletter is going to focus on the unique relationship New York has with its tourists, but before we get there, a few reminders:
💸 Every private Nicky Tour is still eligible for a 20% discount through the summer using the promo code NICKYTOURSNYC20 at checkout
⭐ After a summer push, we’re up to 46 Google Reviews (100% 5-stars, obviously). Thank you to everyone who’s taken a private NYC tour and left a review! If you’ve taken a tour with me and would like to leave a review, here’s the link to do so.
📷 The Nicky Tours team is pumping out some excellent, fun, and informative content (like this) on social media. Follow us on Instagram here for more.
Thank you! Now, let’s do some investigating: do New Yorkers hate all those tourists?
Tourism in NYC
Interacting almost every day with people visiting New York, I field a lot of questions which the average New Yorker would never bother to ask. Is it safe to take the subway? What’s going on in Brooklyn? What could have possibly been in my iced latte to make it cost $14? (don’t worry: we ask ourselves that last one, too)
Recently, a guest asked me a question which got me thinking about the unique role tourism plays in the fabric of New York life: how do New Yorkers really feel about all the tourists?
I hesitated as I calculated how to answer the question, and found my mind drawing a blank: What do New Yorkers think about all the tourists? After a few moments, I came to a realization: New Yorkers don’t really think about tourists at all.
Okay, it’s not quite so bad as (NYC icon) Don Draper makes it out to be there. It’s not that we don’t respect tourists, or think they’re important, or even ignore them: it’s that tourists in New York City don’t really get in the way. And, ultimately, this has the effect of creating some really exciting opportunities for visitors to experience the city like locals…if they just know where to go.
The Tourist Experience In New York
To illustrate what I mean, let’s contrast New York for a moment to a city that’s been in the news lots recently for its extremely antagonistic relationship with tourists: Barcelona. Tourism to the Catalonian city has tripled since 2004, and last year close to 12 million tourists visited the city. The increase (particularly the heavy use of home-sharing websites like Airbnb) has led the average Barcelona long-term rental price to skyrocket by 68% in the last ten years, forcing many locals out of neighborhoods their families have occupied for generations. Last summer, the backlash came to a head as locals stood outside popular tourist destinations with water guns, spraying unsuspecting visitors as they walked by.
Here in New York City, we receive something like 60 million tourists annually, five times more than Barcelona, a number which is almost exactly proportional to the city’s relative population. Per-capita, we get just as many visitors here as Barcelona. So why aren’t New Yorkers lined up on Broadway, throwing dirty-water-hot-dogs at tourists as they walk out of Hamilton? There are three main reasons.
NYC is already quite expensive for locals.
The median rent for a studio apartment today in Manhattan is close to $3,800. One of my favorite games to play with my guests is guess-the-rent (now that I think of it, this is New Yorkers’ favorite came to play with each other, too); over and over, no matter how high I set expectations, visitors almost always end up underestimating the price of the one and two-story apartments I point to downtown. New York is already a really expensive place to live, and it’s not as easy to scapegoat tourists for that as it is in other places because…
Locals and tourists tend to congregate naturally in different parts of the city.
This is a biggie. In Barcelona, tourists are definitely concentrated in certain areas (near the Sagrada Familia, on La Rambla), but they’re also more evenly diffused over the rest of the city, filling into Airbnbs across L’Eixample, Gràcia, and the old Gothic Quarter. In New York, things look really different: for the most part, all the tourists are sequestered into a single area: Midtown. That’s, of course, an overgeneralization; as discussed last month, the long pizza lines in Greenwich Village are definitely full of visitors. But the vast majority of tourists are staying in Midtown, near Times Square, an area where many New Yorkers go to work or transfer on the subway…but don’t exactly go to hang out. Ditto for the Financial District and Wall Street, another NYC tourist hotbed where locals simply aren’t spending that much leisure time. Because of this particular dynamic, locals don’t get the same daily, nonstop exposure to visitors which you see in Barcelona. On top of that…
New Yorkers are really, genuinely helpful and kind.
This is not our reputation! We can be loud, and prone to over-honk our horns, but anyone who’s found themselves looking lost in a subway station can attest, there’s nowhere in the world where locals are more willing to help out with directions or point a tourist in the right direction. We are kind! Plus, in a city filled with transplants, there’s no greater stamp of “local” status than being asked for directions by a tourist. More often than not, we’re flattered!
All of this leads to tourism being treated in the local imagination as more of a curiosity than a nuisance—which is really good news for visitors! The formula of (high concentration in touristy areas) + (naturally friendly locals) equals conditions that are actually quite excellent for visitors interested in experiencing the “real” New York in uncrowded, quiet areas away from the throngs of visitors which gather in Times Square. For anyone thinking of visiting NYC, this is exciting news. If only you knew a private, 5-star tour guide to show you around the city like a local…
Free Shakespeare in the Park
Every summer, the Public Theater puts on a free showing of a different Shakespeare play at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. After a few years of theater renovations, the show is back on this summer, with a performance of Twelfth Night and a cast led by Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Peter Dinklage. Needless to say, these tickets are nearly impossible to score.
And yet, last week I managed to get my hands on four!
How did I pull off such a Herculean feat? Let’s call it *calculated* luck. There are a few ways to apply for tickets, but in my opinion the best is showing up to the noon lottery drawing at the Public Theater itself, located by Astor Place in the East Village. You line up to grab a lottery ticket between 11am and noon, and then, just like the old days, numbers are read out and tickets are collected. There were a couple hundred people registered on the Tuesday I went, and both my and my cousin Ben’s numbers were called within the first fifty drawings. Lucky, yes, but we did know where to go to maximize our odds. Theater staff don’t announce exactly how many tickets are distributed at each raffle, but you have decent odds of scoring if you show up consistently. Much better, in my humble opinion, than lining up at 5:30am outside Central Park in a six-hour line…for a chance at tickets for that night (more info on free Shakespeare tickets here).
And the show was great! A perfect summer NYC night in the perfect NYC summer location. I’ll be back for more next year.
Until next month from your private, local tour guide,
Nicky
