The Tourism Crisis

Michele Angerosi, a well-dressed man in his 30's, was sitting at the bar in Il Bocconcino restaurant in Greenwich Village on Tuesday evening. But he wasn't drinking. He'd come in to tell a friend, the restaurant's owner, Gilberto Petrucci, that he'd just been laid off.

Mr. Angerosi, a waiter at the nearby Ennio & Michael restaurant — described in the Zagat Survey as a "first-rate Village Italian" — thus joins the scores of thousands of New Yorkers caught in the employment downdraft that has followed the Sept. 11 catastrophe.

"For waiters, it's tough," said Mr. Angerosi. "We pay our bills with tips, so we don't make money if people don't come to eat."

"It's sad," he added. "You get to a point where you have to pay the rent and you can't work. I don't know what else to do. I came here from Italy and I've been a waiter ever since. I don't know how to do anything else in this city."

At 5 p.m. there were no customers in Il Bocconcino, which is at the corner of West Houston and Sullivan Streets. "Things are very bad," said Mr. Petrucci. "We were closed for a week after 9/11 and things never got much better. The Village is for tourists and there are no tourists. All business is completely down."

Mr. Petrucci does not think he can hold out much longer. "If it continues this way," he said, "we'll close. I can't survive another month like this."

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of tourism to New York City. It's a $25-billion-a-year industry, and it has to recover for the city to recover.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/29/opinion/29HERB.html