With no tourists, New Yorkers see Statue of Liberty, 9/11 Memorial and other sites usually thronged by the visitors coronavirus travel curbs are keeping away
- New Yorkers – famous for not visiting renowned sites in the city, according to a National Park Service worker – are enjoying its crowd-free landmarks
- Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the number of visitors to New York has fallen. ‘It’s about time we get back to the normal hustle and bustle,’ one resident says
New Yorkers are taking advantage of the absence of tourists during the pandemic to visit sites in the Big Apple that they would normally avoid.
At 10am on a recent Friday, barely 10 people were on Liberty Island’s roughly 200-metre (650-ft) promenade, staring up at the Statue of Liberty. In normal times, even although it is not peak season, hundreds of tourists would be posing for selfies.
Alexander Lumbres, a student at City University of New York, has been to the island 20 times, but has never been able to enjoy a crowd-free view of the statue.
“It was really hard for me to take pictures. Usually, we would go around the back, just to get like a proper picture with the family and everything,” he said.
Roughly 67 million tourists visited New York in 2019. In 2020, visitor numbers were a third of that, and most came before the pandemic began ravaging the city in the spring.