New jobless hope seeds of tourism can be resown in Big Apple

For New York City tour guide Megan Marod, the first warning of the pandemic's financial toll came weeks before Broadway’s theaters and Manhattan’s museums closed.

In just one late February day, she lost $5,000 from cancellations by student groups that typically flood the city in the early spring — her most lucrative months.

“I started panicking, and people told me not to,” she said. “Everyone said I was overreacting. Then everything started shutting down.”

Since those early days of the city’s coronavirus outbreak, out-of-towners have become scarce. Times Square, the “Crossroads of the World,” is eerily empty, and a section of Central Park is home to a makeshift field hospital. It all has devastated the tourism economy that aided the city’s recovery from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and posted a decade of steady spending growth that topped out at $46 billion last year.

Roughly 300,000 people are employed in the industry, driving double-decker buses, taking tickets at theaters and cleaning hotels — more than the number working in the city’s finance and tech sectors, according to a study by the Center for an Urban Future, an economic think tank.

Now a large share are unemployed and facing months without work, not knowing when the tourists or their jobs will come back. The attractions that draw big crowds are unlikely to open soon, and Mayor Bill de Blasio said last week there won’t be any public events through at least June, dealing a blow to restaurants and retail stores as well.

Marod, who’s also an actress in musical theater and works as a guide at the One World Trade Center observatory, said it’s hard to overestimate the sudden downfall.

“Tourism literally encapsulates everything in the city,” she said. “When you take out...