World

They’ll Take Manhattan, in Cash

by Criticom | August 4, 2008 at 06:01 pm

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New Yorkers are trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip

They’ll Take Manhattan, in Cash
NEGIN FARSAD, a filmmaker and comedian who lives in the East Village, recalled a time not long ago when European friends would visit New York to see her, and not, she said, to use her apartment as a “temporary locker for their shopping bags."

TURF WAR Polly Blitzer, a New Yorker, says Europeans and locals are competing over the city’s bistros and stores.

Ms. Farsad, 32, recently escorted two friends from London on the inevitable Europeans-clean-out-the-Apple-store shopping excursion, where they bought a MacBook Pro for nearly $3,000, plus hundreds of dollars worth of extra memory (why not?), and continued on a spree that included East Village boutiques and Bloomingdale’s downtown. During the evenings, the couple — both of whom work in television production back home — dined at downtown restaurants and partied at a chic bars, without concern as to cost.

“I remember the next morning, my friend looked in her wallet and said, ‘Oh, apparently I spent $165 buying three rounds of shots for everybody,’ ” Ms. Farsad recalled.

“Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “but here, they’re like three parts Kimora Simmons and two parts Oasis, circa 1995.”

This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.