By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: August 3, 2008
NEGIN FARSAD, a filmmaker and comedian who lives in the East Village, recalled a time not long ago when European friends would visit New York to see her, and not, she said, to use her apartment as a “temporary locker for their shopping bags.”
Ms. Farsad, 32, recently escorted two friends from London on the inevitable Europeans-clean-out-the-Apple-store shopping excursion, where they bought a 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 downtown restaurants and partied at a chic bars, without concern as to cost.
“I remember the next morning, my friend looked in her wallet and said, ‘Oh, apparently I spent $165 buying three rounds of shots for everybody,’ ” Ms. Farsad recalled.
“Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “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, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, 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 — at bargain prices.
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. 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.
Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).
“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”
Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes 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 picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”
Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals 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 for our size 11 ½ Ferragamo party slippers,” recalled Ms. Blitzer, 32.
The Europeans, she said, “brought over bags and bags of shoes” while the salesman wrapped their orders and chatted them up about restaurants and travel. “I didn’t want to do the ahem-I’m-sitting-here thing, but we had to sit there for 5 or 10 minutes while these big spenders small-talked.”
She was always used to first-class service, she said, adding, “But now, there’s an ultra-first.”
Manhattanites without Bergdorf budgets often find themselves working overtime — figuratively and literally — to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.
Jessica S. Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm who lives on the Lower East Side, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker, in part to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.
These friends from Europe and Asia “come over and play in New York like it’s Candyland,” she said in an e-mail message.
Yes, she is jealous of friends like the one from London, who arrives with empty suitcases, ready to buy her fall wardrobe. But, she added, she tries 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 in June, July and August is expected to rise by about 118,000 from 3.12 million last summer (that number itself was a record —and an estimated 20-percent jump from 2006), according to forecasts by NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing bureau.
Meanwhile, the euro has hovered near record highs against the dollar all summer; it is up 22 percent in the last two years, and since 2001, has nearly doubled against the dollar. Over the last five years, the yen is up nearly 12 percent against the dollar, the British pound 23 percent, the Swiss franc nearly 31 percent, the Danish krone 42 percent, the Australian dollar nearly 45 percent.
Feeling flush, foreign visitors are noticeably more lavish in their spending habits, said some New York merchants and restaurateurs.
Richard Thomas, the marketing director of Marquee, the Chelsea nightclub, said he has seen a surge of European clients this summer, and even visitors who appear to be of humbler origins than the usual Gucci-clad jet-setters are now “willing to play in the arena of bottle service,” he said, referring to the practice where drinks are purchased only a bottle at a time, for hundreds of dollars or more.
These are “people with more modest incomes, who wouldn’t just walk up and say, ‘Hey, let me get a table’ if they’re back home in London, where it’s too expensive to go to Boujis,” Mr. Thomas said, referring to a popular club in that city’s Kensington district. “But in New York, they can get away with it.”
EYTAN SUGARMAN, who is an owner, along with his partners, Trace Ayala and Justin Timberlake, of the restaurant Southern Hospitality on the Upper East Side, said it is not unusual this summer to see foreign tourists order a few different entrees apiece, just to taste, and not finish any of them.
City officials and business owners welcome such extravagance. Many have hailed New York’s wave of tourists as a major factor keeping the city economy afloat during a troubled economic period.
At EOS New York, a boutique watch and accessories store in the West Village, the customer base is now about 70 percent international tourist, said the company’s owner, Mukul Lalchandani. “Needless to say, with the bad economy, we could use that extra boost of traffic,” he said.
At Buddakan, the hangar-like pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district, foreign traffic has increased by 20 to 30 percent in the last four months, said the owner, Stephen Starr.
“It’s a wonderful thing that in a tough climate economically, you sort of have this insurance policy of foreign money,” Mr. Starr said. “And to be honest with you, it’s great to be in a restaurant and to hear so many different languages. It adds to the theater of the experience.”
NYC & Company calculated that spending by international tourists rose 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. While that agency does not finish compiling statistics for tourist spending during the summer months until the end of the year, such trends usually hold strong through the warmer months, said Tiffany Townsend, an agency spokeswoman.
Earlier this decade, it was Americans snapping up bargains on the Champs-Élysées.
Marie Monte, 23, a law student from Paris who was vacationing in New York last week, said she felt sorry for today’s currency-challenged Americans. “But I remember,” she said, “it was not a very long time ago, it was much more difficult, when the money here was very strong. If you wanted to go to New York on holiday, you didn’t know what you would be able to do there.” While some New Yorkers may wrestle with envy, others admit that the trend has its side benefits, too.
Sarah Geary, a British-born marketing director for Mulberry, the English fashion company, often finds herself working pro bono for her British friends as tour guide, personal shopper and cartographer (she draws them a map of insider New York cool, starting at Barneys, meandering through the meatpacking district for stops at stores like Scoop and Jeffrey, then ending downtown for dinner at places like Freemans or Socialista).
In return, the visitors are unusually willing to pick up the check at the end of the day. “They will literally say, ‘Come meet me for dinner — and bring some friends!’ ” Ms. Geary said.
“That,” she said, “is something British people never do.”
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Published: August 3, 2008
NEGIN FARSAD, a filmmaker and comedian who lives in the East Village, recalled a time not long ago when European friends would visit New York to see her, and not, she said, to use her apartment as a “temporary locker for their shopping bags.”
Ms. Farsad, 32, recently escorted two friends from London on the inevitable Europeans-clean-out-the-Apple-store shopping excursion, where they bought a 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 downtown restaurants and partied at a chic bars, without concern as to cost.
“I remember the next morning, my friend looked in her wallet and said, ‘Oh, apparently I spent $165 buying three rounds of shots for everybody,’ ” Ms. Farsad recalled.
“Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “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, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, 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 — at bargain prices.
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. 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.
Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).
“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”
Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes 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 picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”
Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals 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 for our size 11 ½ Ferragamo party slippers,” recalled Ms. Blitzer, 32.
The Europeans, she said, “brought over bags and bags of shoes” while the salesman wrapped their orders and chatted them up about restaurants and travel. “I didn’t want to do the ahem-I’m-sitting-here thing, but we had to sit there for 5 or 10 minutes while these big spenders small-talked.”
She was always used to first-class service, she said, adding, “But now, there’s an ultra-first.”
Manhattanites without Bergdorf budgets often find themselves working overtime — figuratively and literally — to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.
Jessica S. Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm who lives on the Lower East Side, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker, in part to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.
These friends from Europe and Asia “come over and play in New York like it’s Candyland,” she said in an e-mail message.
Yes, she is jealous of friends like the one from London, who arrives with empty suitcases, ready to buy her fall wardrobe. But, she added, she tries 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 in June, July and August is expected to rise by about 118,000 from 3.12 million last summer (that number itself was a record —and an estimated 20-percent jump from 2006), according to forecasts by NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing bureau.
Meanwhile, the euro has hovered near record highs against the dollar all summer; it is up 22 percent in the last two years, and since 2001, has nearly doubled against the dollar. Over the last five years, the yen is up nearly 12 percent against the dollar, the British pound 23 percent, the Swiss franc nearly 31 percent, the Danish krone 42 percent, the Australian dollar nearly 45 percent.
Feeling flush, foreign visitors are noticeably more lavish in their spending habits, said some New York merchants and restaurateurs.
Richard Thomas, the marketing director of Marquee, the Chelsea nightclub, said he has seen a surge of European clients this summer, and even visitors who appear to be of humbler origins than the usual Gucci-clad jet-setters are now “willing to play in the arena of bottle service,” he said, referring to the practice where drinks are purchased only a bottle at a time, for hundreds of dollars or more.
These are “people with more modest incomes, who wouldn’t just walk up and say, ‘Hey, let me get a table’ if they’re back home in London, where it’s too expensive to go to Boujis,” Mr. Thomas said, referring to a popular club in that city’s Kensington district. “But in New York, they can get away with it.”
EYTAN SUGARMAN, who is an owner, along with his partners, Trace Ayala and Justin Timberlake, of the restaurant Southern Hospitality on the Upper East Side, said it is not unusual this summer to see foreign tourists order a few different entrees apiece, just to taste, and not finish any of them.
City officials and business owners welcome such extravagance. Many have hailed New York’s wave of tourists as a major factor keeping the city economy afloat during a troubled economic period.
At EOS New York, a boutique watch and accessories store in the West Village, the customer base is now about 70 percent international tourist, said the company’s owner, Mukul Lalchandani. “Needless to say, with the bad economy, we could use that extra boost of traffic,” he said.
At Buddakan, the hangar-like pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district, foreign traffic has increased by 20 to 30 percent in the last four months, said the owner, Stephen Starr.
“It’s a wonderful thing that in a tough climate economically, you sort of have this insurance policy of foreign money,” Mr. Starr said. “And to be honest with you, it’s great to be in a restaurant and to hear so many different languages. It adds to the theater of the experience.”
NYC & Company calculated that spending by international tourists rose 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. While that agency does not finish compiling statistics for tourist spending during the summer months until the end of the year, such trends usually hold strong through the warmer months, said Tiffany Townsend, an agency spokeswoman.
Earlier this decade, it was Americans snapping up bargains on the Champs-Élysées.
Marie Monte, 23, a law student from Paris who was vacationing in New York last week, said she felt sorry for today’s currency-challenged Americans. “But I remember,” she said, “it was not a very long time ago, it was much more difficult, when the money here was very strong. If you wanted to go to New York on holiday, you didn’t know what you would be able to do there.” While some New Yorkers may wrestle with envy, others admit that the trend has its side benefits, too.
Sarah Geary, a British-born marketing director for Mulberry, the English fashion company, often finds herself working pro bono for her British friends as tour guide, personal shopper and cartographer (she draws them a map of insider New York cool, starting at Barneys, meandering through the meatpacking district for stops at stores like Scoop and Jeffrey, then ending downtown for dinner at places like Freemans or Socialista).
In return, the visitors are unusually willing to pick up the check at the end of the day. “They will literally say, ‘Come meet me for dinner — and bring some friends!’ ” Ms. Geary said.
“That,” she said, “is something British people never do.”
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