City seething with rage at influx of tourists

If you’ve got a big city worth living in, you inevitably end up with a bunch of tourists, with their fanny packs and foreign ideas about gun control. And that’s fine, they bring in some money, we get characters like anti-Semitic Elmo and funny Tumblrs. But now city residents are declaring they’ve had enough with the city’s outreach efforts to get tourists to come here. While they aren’t calling for the city to actively discourage tourism, we’re probably pretty close.

amNewYork has the story of residents in neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea complaining about bar hopping yahoos from the suburbs and people gawking in their windows on the High Line. Which, we think the window gawking could stop if you just commit to having sex in front of your windows with the blinds open. Just an idea. Of course, there are more serious issues as well, like a community farm stand with cheap produce being shoved out for a boutique hotel, and open storefronts being immediately turned into bars or gift shops instead of having a chance to become something like grocery stores or laundromats, which you need in a neighborhood more than a souvenir store.

The rage directed at tourists is wrapped in gentrification-related anger according to people am talked to, and also because that’s what all the anger in the city is related to in some way. Jeremiah Moss of Vanishing New York took the opportunity to publicly call for a law limiting chain stores from opening in the city, to which we’d add that maybe the city should also explore commercial rent caps as a way to tilt the field towards mom and pop shops.

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