With more than one million residents jobless and an unemployment rate double the nation’s average, New York City faces a longer, harder recovery than most other U.S. cities, analysts say.
Broadway theaters are dark, and cultural events have been canceled or pushed to next year. By most estimates, no more than 15 percent of office workers have returned to downtown, demolishing thousands of small businesses that relied on commuters’ trade. Travel bans have kept conventions and tourists away.
As of 1 September, the city was still 600,000 jobs short of its number a year earlier, according to the state’s Labor department. During September, about 1.3 million city dwellers were collecting unemployment benefits, a New School study found.
The job losses are concentrated among hotels, restaurants, arts organizations, transportation, and building services, all of which depend on tourists and office workers, New School economist James Parrott told The New York Times.
Frozen Arts
The New York City Ballet canceled its winter and spring seasons, and dancers are not expected to be onstage again until Autumn 2021.
It joins Broadway theaters, which will remain dark until at least May, and the Metropolitan Opera, which will not return to Lincoln Center until at least September.
On the museum front, the New York Historical Society has cut workers’ pay and postponed or canceled 11 exhibitions so far this year.
On busy days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, visitors sometimes have to wait in line on the sidewalk to have their temperatures checked before they can enter.
In September, about 91,500 people came to the Met, less than a quarter the number of visitors in September 2019.
The museum, which depends on ticket and gift-shop sales for a third of its revenue, already has let go 20 percent of its staff.
Of the 30,000 people visiting the Whitney Museum of American Art in September, 90 percent were from the New York metro area, compared to 30 percent a year earlier.
The Museum of Modern Art saw only 14 percent of the number of visitors it welcomed in September 2018. (It was closed during September 2019.)
New York City’s museums lost $3.5 million a day in potential revenue in April because of social distancing and other restrictions, according to the Museum Association of New York.
While that figure has improved since, at least 12 of the city’s museums are discussing mergers or outright dissolution, Erika Sanger, the association’s Executive Director, told The New York Times.
TREND FORECAST: As economic conditions deteriorate, no longer are the Presstitutes promoting Wall Street’s forecast for a “V- shaped” economic recovery.
And as New York City sinks deeper into economic and social despair, long forgotten was Mayor Bill de Blasio’s statement that residents of the Big Apple should feel positive now that “Phase 1” of the reopening process has been declared.
On 8 June, as some 400,000 workers were allowed to get back to work, His Honor declared, “This is a triumph for all New Yorkers that we’ve gotten to this point.” (According to the State Comptroller’s office, before the pandemic, the city averaged 4.5 million people working each day.)
The exodus from New York City will continue as violent crime, homelessness, and robberies increase.
There will only be a brief respite of dire economic decline when office workers and tourism return.
