OWS Good for Tourism?

The removal of the barricades around Zuccotti Park could've just been the result of good legal work by civil liberties lawyers.

Or maybe something else was going on here as well.

Mayor Bloomberg on October 7, 2011 expressed concern that the Occupy Wall Street protests will deter tourism. He was eager to pass the 50-million-tourist mark in 2011.

Protests like the demonstrations in London would certainly not have been good for New York City. But tour operators have found that tourists want to see the OWS camp. They want to walk around and take pictures. In the words of a tourist in the following three-minute video by Columbia Journalism student Judy Le, they want to be "part of history in the making."

The Mayor likes to look at the facts, and two weeks after his original distress about the impact on tourism he acknowledged that OWS might be a tourist attraction.

Tourist job numbers are now in through November and the industry tourism did fine during the two-month OWS encampment. The November 2011 increase for New York City in leisure-and-hospitality-services employment was close to 13,000 jobs above the year before, and that was nearly twice the corresponding increase in 2010. The percentage increase is 3.7 percent, an excellent number.

OWS can't take all the credit for the good news. The Mayor has been an active promoter of tourism. But OWS doesn't seem to have hurt.

Has the mayor decided to look more favorably on OWS now that it has been market-tested as good for New York City?

 

 

 

Follow John Tepper Marlin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cityeconomist

Comments

[castlemike]

10:02 PM on 01/12/2012

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/occupy-wall-street-returns-to-zuccotti-park-ows.html

Thursday, January 12, 2012
#Occupy Wall Street Returns to Zuccotti Park (#OWS)

I don’t know how many of you had been to lower Manhattan since the police cleared Zuccotti Park last fall, but it was about as open to the public as a demilitarized zone: barricades covering more than half the area, heavy police presence. It was so inhospitable that entering the park had the vibe of getting your name on an official Enemies of the State list, and apparently if you lingered at all, the police would shoo you away.

But we had thought the city’s efforts to change the rules for a privately owned but nevertheless public park were awfully heavy-handed, since these spaces were quid pro quos for zoning variances and are a long standing feature of New York. And the court agreed.

This video gives a brief update. As of this hour, the police-favoring New York Times has not deigned to report on this development.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Bod5_Yvhd4k