Fleet Week Memorial Day Weekend Returns to NYC Following Covid Cancellation
By: Serach Nissim
New York City is back open for Fleet Week and tourism this Memorial Day weekend, for the first time since the pandemic hit in 2020.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the 32nd year of Fleet Week kicked off on Thursday in Times Square, with Mayor Eric Adams attending a Marine breakfast with Department of Veterans Services’ leaders and sailors from the Navy, Marines and Coastal Guard.
There are thousands of tourists expected in the Big Apple, giving the city an economic boost. Some 3,000 service members alone are visiting NYC. Multiple ships, including the USS Bataan, the United Kingdom’s HMS Protector, four U.S. Naval Academy yard patrol boats and the USS Milwaukee have been docked along the Hudson River and across Staten Island as of Thursday. Tourists are welcome to view and board the ships this week.
Mayor Adams boasted that there are roughly 210,000 veterans living in NYC, making it the only major city where the Department of Veteran Affairs is housed. “This is a veteran friendly city, and we’ll always be a veteran friendly city. And I’m proud to say that that is a label that we’re going to hold onto and dear to our heart,” Adams said at the breakfast.
As per Crain’s, Midtown business development coalition members are hopeful that Fleet week, coupled with Memorial Day will breathe life back into the city following the two years of pandemic-related shutdowns and slowdowns. “We had over 323,000 people in Times Square yesterday. It was a great Thursday,” said Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance. “I’m optimistic that we’re going to hit 2019 averages this weekend in Times Square of 365,000 visitors per day.” On Thursday evening, there was public programming and dancing set up between 45th and 46th streets in the Times Square Plaza. Harris said that there is strong demand for Broadway shows, and that 35 theatrical shows are currently running. “The lines for TKTS [discount Broadway tickets] were around the block on Wednesday,” he added.
Vijay Dandapani, CEO of the Hotel Association for New York, did not share much of the optimism, however. He noted that international tourism is still slow, and blamed the lingering requirement for overseas travelers to get a 24-hour antigen test. “Fleet Week sailors go back to ship, they don’t stay in our hotels,” Dandapani said. “But it’s good for restaurants and it’s good for some of the other attractions.”