It's Electric!

Okay. So here's the sad fact: the tourists are coming.

It happens every year. November comes and so come the non-residents to shop and eat and see Christmas spectacular and the like.

As a New Yorker, both living and working in Midtown (where the tourists are most dense) this time of year always leaves me feeling as though strangers have set up camp in my back yard, traipsing through my flowerbeds and tracking in dirt when they need to use the toilet or the phone. It's disquieting.

So here's my big idea. The best idea to come along since the personal sherpa several blog entries ago: The Tourist Zone.

Here's how it works:
Tourists, upon entering, are fitted with a wrist band. Tourists are permitted to travel between 34th and 57th Streets North and South and between Third and Ninth Avenues East and West. If they leave the zone, their wrist band will shock them. Zap!

Honestly, they don't need more room than that, most of what they want to see is in that area, and confining them would give the rest of us - who LIVE here - places to go to get away from them. Also, this would just be from Nov. 1 through January 1 which means that touristy areas NOT in the tourist zone - SoHo, the Met, Whitney and Guggenheim Museums could all thrive those other 10 months of the year. This would ALSO mean that, during those holiday months, New Yorkers would fillt he cultural institutions because we'd know it was SAFE. And that would be very cozy and community-building for us.

I think Bloomberg would like it.