Good morning. It's Friday. We'll look at how the Omicron variant affected tourism in New York at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. And we'll see why Thursday was a momentous day for Letitia James, the state attorney general. |
Also, so you know: I'm taking a staycation next week. Corey Kilgannon will be here. |
 | | Karsten Moran for The New York Times |
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The highly contagious Omicron variant sent coronavirus case counts soaring to new highs in New York in December and January. Another measure of Omicron's impact became clear on Thursday: The variant dragged down tourism in New York City just as visitors were returning in significant numbers. |
The hit from Omicron amounted to 1.7 million visitors, according to officials of NYC & Company, the city's tourism agency. |
That was the difference between the forecast for 2021 that it had issued in October — 34.6 million visitors — and the total of 32.9 million visitors that it has now calculated actually arrived. Officials of NYC & Company chalked up most of the drop to a weaker than expected December, when Omicron made tourists rethink their travel plans. |
The total for last year was slightly less than half the 66.6 million visitors in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. But it was 47 percent more than the number NYC & Company reported for 2020, when New York was the epicenter in the early stages of the pandemic, and officials ordered a broad economic shutdown to curb the spread of the virus. |
Omicron also kept visitors away in early January, prompting NYC & Company to scale down its projection for 2022. The agency now expects 56.5 million tourists this year, 1.3 million fewer than it had predicted previously. |
Still, Fred Dixon, the president of NYC & Company, pointed to rising hotel occupancy figures that indicated that New York remained the nation's most desirable destination. Nearly 82 percent of the city's hotel rooms were occupied during the week that ended Dec. 11, according to the travel research company STR. And revenue per available room jumped nearly 500 percent in December, compared with the same month in 2020, according to a report to be issued next week by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. |
But once Omicron hit, occupancy rates plunged as low as 40 percent during the week that ended on Jan. 15. They began to rise as Omicron receded. |
"If you want some good news, it is that tourists or leisure travelers are returning pretty much in force," said Sean Hennessey, a professor at New York University, "and amazingly enough, they are in many cases willing to pay more for a night's room than they were prior to Covid. But the return to the office has gone slowly, and that has dampened expectations of a robust rebound in corporate travel." |
The hotel occupancy rates may reflect a change in the mind-set of travelers. "People are recognizing this virus is here to stay," Dixon said, and are "ready to get on with their lives." |
Expect strong winds and a chance of showers in the morning. The evening is mostly clear, with temps dropping to the high 20s. |
In effect until Monday (Washington's Birthday). |
A momentous day for the state attorney general |
Letitia James, the state attorney general, scored a major victory in her investigation of former President Donald Trump and his company: A judge said she and her team could question him and two of his children. |
Lawyers for the Trumps had charged that Ms. James was politically biased and was using her investigation to help a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office, which she is also participating in. But the judge, Justice Arthur Engoron of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, declared that "this argument completely misses the mark." |
The decision came hours after James accepted the Democratic nomination for another term as attorney general. In an 18-minute speech, she did not discuss her campaign for governor, which she announced in October and called off weeks later. (She said then that she wanted to continue the work she was doing. By dropping out of the race, she solidified Gov. Kathy Hochul's place as the front-runner.) |
She mentioned — but only briefly — Trump and another former official with whom she has tangled, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has blamed her for his resignation. James oversaw an investigation that found that Cuomo had sexually harassed a number of women — claims he has steadfastly denied. |
"It has become clear the former governor will never accept any version of these events other than his own," she said. "And to achieve that, he is now claiming the mantle of victim, disgracefully attacking anyone in his path, pushing others down in order to prop himself up, but I will not bow. I will not break." |
She then mentioned both adversaries in the same sentence: "I will not be bullied by him or Donald Trump." |
Yoko Ono, who is 89, 'screams like no other person' |
 | | Richard Perry/The New York Times |
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It's Yoko Ono's birthday today. She is 89. |
The music historian Brigid Cohen reached out to her more than a decade ago for a book about cultural crosscurrents in the Cold War years of the 1950s and early 1960s. "Yoko Ono replied once and only once: to an inquiring letter I mailed in 2008, she responded with an overnight FedEx package containing photocopies of her own archival materials," Cohen wrote in "Musical Migration and Imperial New York," which will be published in April. "Follow-up inquiries, which focused more extensively on herself and her work, went unanswered." |
Cohen wrote that she figured the lack of response reflected "the justifiable need of celebrity for protective silence, especially given Ono's own experiences of gendered and racialized exploitation in the media." |
But Cohen amassed enough material to recount Ono's work as an avant-gardist in New York years before John Lennon of the Beatles encountered her work — and her. One milestone that Cohen described was a recital in 1961 at what was then known as Carnegie Recital Hall that involved a performance of "AOS — To David Tudor." (He composed and performed electronic music.) |
"She described it as an opera, but it didn't have any music as we conventionally think of it," Cohen said in an interview this week. "It culminated in the end with Ono doing a screaming performance. She screams like no other person." |
Has she screamed for Cohen? "Not personally," Cohen said. "I have heard recordings. She makes a real art of it." |
- For almost a decade, the unofficial honor of closing New York Fashion Week went to Marc Jacobs. This time round, it's Telfar Clemens, the designer behind the Bushwick-based label Telfar.
- A retrospective of Faith Ringgold's trailblazing career shows how she survived as a Black artist in a racist world — and thrived.
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Some years ago, I helped drive a panel truck filled with about a dozen weighty sculptures from Omaha to a gallery in SoHo. My companion on the trip was Lee Lubbers, a sculptor and Jesuit priest at Creighton University. |
His medium at the time was recycled railroad boxcar axles. He heated them in a huge oven belonging to the Union Pacific Railroad and then, using a giant hydraulic anvil, forged them into modern steel menhir that weighed three-quarters of a ton and were about 11½ feet tall. |
We were assured twice before leaving for New York that the gallery had a 12-foot ceiling. |
After arriving on a cold, gray afternoon, we unloaded the first of the sculptures and tried to erect it, only to discover the gallery's 12-foot ceiling had apparently shrunk to about 11 feet. |
We retreated to a nearby shop to discuss our options over coffee. There was only one other person, a woman, there, and she clearly had not been served yet. She sat at a small table, seemingly unable to get the attention of the man who served us. |
After continuing to ignore her for a while, he finally looked at her. |
"What's wrong with you?" he said in an annoyed tone. |
"I'm not feeling well," the woman replied. |
"When you're not feeling well," he said after a pause, "you go to the doctor, not to the deli." |
"I just came from the doctor," she said. |
"What did the doctor say?" |
"He said go down to the deli and get yourself a cup of tea." |
On Wednesday, we misstated how many years have passed since the Sandy Hook massacre. It has been nine years, not 11. — J.B. |
Melissa Guerrero, Sadiba Hasan, Olivia Parker and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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