A Closed Brooklyn Bridge and 40,000 Pounds of Deli Meat: New York Is That Crowded

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/nyregion/crowded-new-york-holidays.html

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Just how crowded is New York City in the run-up to the ball drop?

So crowded that 40,000 pounds of pastrami and beef were served in a week at Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where 3,000 to 4,000 visitors flocked each day, standing in lines that stretched three-plus blocks, the owner said.

So crowded that skaters waited more than an hour to glide in Bryant Park.

So crowded that a brief but unusual shutdown of the pedestrian and bike lanes across the Brooklyn Bridge was necessary on Saturday afternoon, after the police were called because of the dangerously large crowd.

“The city is buzzing,” said Jake Dell, the owner of Katz’s Delicatessen. “You step outside and you can’t help but feel it and see it.”

The holiday season always draws millions of visitors to New York, but this weekend the hordes of people seemingly brought some city institutions to their tipping points.

“I’ve never seen it like this,” said Juliette Barge, a former Brooklyn resident who now lives in Amsterdam, as she stood on the Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday.

Ms. Barge, 59, was hoping to bike over the span, something she did often when she lived in Park Slope. But, on Sunday, she was relegated to walking her bike, zigzagging around the crowds. Riding would have been a near-Herculean task with thousands of people filling both the pedestrian and the bike lanes.

On Saturday, with springlike temperatures and sunshine, the crowd on the bridge grew so large that the police shut down the pedestrian lanes “for approximately half an hour,” a spokeswoman said.

Larry Shah, who has sold posters outside City Hall on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge for the past eight years, said the crowds on the bridge this weekend were unlike anything he had encountered before.

“Yesterday was horrible,” Mr. Shah, 66, said, adding that his business suffered on Saturday as a result. “If there are a lot of people, they are just pushing and going across the bridge. There were a lot of people, but not a lot of buyers.”

Andre Goetres, who was visiting from Germany, called the slalom course of bikes and pedestrians “quite annoying.”

“You have to walk to the left and to the right, and there’s those bikes that nobody has their eye on,” said Mr. Goetres, 38, who lives in Berlin. “I prefer the Williamsburg Bridge.”

But visitors like Mr. Goetres will likely have a hard time finding respite elsewhere.

“Right after Christmas, the crowds tend to build in anticipation of New Year’s Eve,” said Christopher C. Heywood, a spokesman for NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketing arm. He added, “You’re getting a very strong mix of day trippers coming in from the tristate region, but you’re also getting a lot of international visitors coming for holidays.”

In Times Square, there have been an average of 353,540 pedestrians each day in December, marking a nearly 6 percent increase from last year, according to the Times Square Alliance.

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, officials decided to keep the gallery open on New Year’s Day, when it is usually closed, to accommodate the large crowds. A spokesman said the museum always expects an uptick in visitors during the holiday season, but even more so this year because of their popular Andy Warhol exhibit.

Similarly, the week between Christmas and New Year is the busiest time of the year for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so much so that the museum said it takes “extraordinary measures” to prepare for the crowds. During this week, the Met typically attracts an average of 30,000 to 40,000 visitors a day.

“We have a couple of our staff famously joke, ‘Get out your long underwear,’” said Kenneth Weine, a spokesman for the museum. “They are in and outside all day long, giving advice on how to navigate the museum.”

Though the city welcomes the influx of visitors during the holiday season, Mr. Heywood said his agency has also taken steps to encourage tourists to visit at other points during the year when the city is not as crowded.

Mr. Heywood touted cheaper hotel rates, shorter lines at museums and restaurant reservations that are easier to come by as reasons tourists might opt to arrive in slower periods of the year, such as in January and February.

“We welcome people any time of the year but we want to emphasize that New York City is open for business 365 days of the year,” he said. “It’s not a consolation prize to visit New York City after the holidays.”