(Bloomberg) -- New York City Mayor Eric Adams spent much of his first two months in office devoted to helping New Yorkers regain their “swagger.” Now comes the next phase: getting people to spend more time and money in the city.
The mayor embarked on a campaign across the city Monday to highlight New York's newly rolled back Covid-19 restrictions and back-to-normal messaging, with stops including lunch at a Ukrainian-American restaurant and a town hall at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s headquarters. There, he extolled the importance of being in the office and having workers around to bolster small businesses.
Two years after Covid shut down the city, Adams is trying to restore New York's formerly thriving office culture and its status as a beacon for both domestic and international travelers -- two once-reliable pillars of the economy. The mayor's packed public schedule Monday was meant to help cajole residents to get past the feeling that the city was shut down, he told reporters.
“I keep saying this over and over again,” he said. “Our prosperity is going to be tied to symbolism and substance. The symbolism is that we felt that our city was closed.”
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His efforts took the form of a two-hour walk-and-talk tour of the bars and restaurants of the East Village, where Adams bopped in and out of four eateries and hugged bystanders. At one point, he picked up a dog and asked it “Do you love me?” He chided a heckler for smoking cigarettes, promised a young man on the street with a nose piercing to get one himself, and pledged to visit the neighborhood's famed Russian and Turkish baths.
To show solidarity with New York's large Ukrainian population, Adams lunched at Ukrainian-American coffee shop Veselka, mugging for reporters standing outside the restaurant's glass windows as he ate vegetarian borscht and mushroom-and-rice stuffed cabbage. He briefly commandeered a stunned teenager's skateboard in Tompkins Square Park before heading downtown to address Goldman Sachs bankers. Then, he attended a restaurant industry trade show at the Javits Center and had a nightcap at the Blue Note, a famed West Village jazz club.
Economic Reality
While some parts of New York's economy have revived -- Opentable data shows that restaurant reservations had nearly returned to once-normal levels around Valentine's Day -- the city is still struggling. New York City's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 8.8% in December 2021, as high as 11.1% in the Bronx and 6% in Manhattan, roughly double the fast-recovering national rate.
Only about a third of the New York region's office workers had returned to their buildings as of March 2, based on card swipes measured by security company Kastle Systems. And business travel and hotel occupancy rates are still far from pre-pandemic levels.
Adams said his decision to lift the vaccine mandates for indoor recreation and dining might help draw tourists again. Foreign visitors are required to provide negative Covid-19 tests to enter the country, and he dismissed concerns about unvaccinated domestic tourists, given the city's high levels of testing and vaccinated residents.
“We're fighting two problems. We're fighting the pandemic, and we're fighting our economy,” Adams said. “We have to get our economy back operating. And tourism is a major booster for our economic stability.”
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While the Goldman Sachs meeting was closed to the press, Adams said he planned to tell employees how critical it is that they rely less on remote work and begin going to their offices in-person, to bolster the fortunes of the coffee carts, shoe shiners and other smaller businesses that rely on the city's white-collar workers.
He has an ally in Chief Executive Officer David Solomon, who last year called working from home “an aberration,” not the new normal. Goldman workers have been back in the office since last June, with a brief pause as the omicron variant swept through New York last year. They resumed coming back in February.
After the Goldman Sachs meeting on Monday, Adams said the bank is “up to a couple of thousand employees,” working in person, “a far cry from before.” He said he asked the Goldman employees to partner with him to revitalize New York's economy.
“We were just talking about how we can do this together,” he said of the meeting. “How can we get this city up and operating?”
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