Is It Safe to Feel Safe While Visiting New York?

The headlines are scary:

“Jogger Raped in Central Park by Gang.”

“Utah Youth Killed in Subway Protecting Mother.”

“French Tourist Killed in Mugging.”

And the list goes on: Just last weekend, a Los Angeles woman on her honeymoon was attacked by a group of female youths in a racial incident as she jogged in Central Park.

And, if such unfavorable images of New York aren’t enough, there’s the best-selling novel, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which depicts the extremes of racial tensions and social disparities in what is known throughout the world as “The Big Apple.”

But do these incidents and descriptions of New York City keep tourists away? Is it still safe to come to Gotham?

Probably, yes. The chances that a visitor will be mugged or raped are minimal. But the possibility certainly exists.

New York City’s crime-spree victims are seldom visitors. And most of the crimes take place far from areas where tourists and business people visit. There are shootouts in the Bronx killing innocent children and grandmothers. Robberies take place in the far reaches of Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens.

Still, there are those who won’t come near New York City these days. They envision themselves as victims of horrendous incidents.

Others come here and go about their business or their sightseeing without a worry in the world.

“I think people are really hysterical,” says Karin Rath, a 21-year-old visitor to New York from Passau, Germany. “Everybody warned me before I came--’Don’t go to Brooklyn. Don’t go to Harlem. Don’t go on the subway.’ But if you walk straight and do not show that you are scared, you will be left alone.”

But even Rath took some precautions: She bought a knapsack, hid her camera when she wasn’t using it and avoided the subway at night. But “when I got here, I saw the atmosphere is not aggressive.”

Those whose job it is to lure travelers here say New York is getting a bad rap. There are nasty incidents, but, when it comes to visitors, they are infrequent. People can feel relaxed like Rath, they maintain.

New York’s defenders say the city’s prominence is the cause of its poor image.

“Crime in the United States continues to be an important issue,” says Marshall E. Murdaugh, president of the New York Convention & Visitors Bureau. “But perception of crime is not reality in New York City. New York’s pre-eminent position as the media capital of the world sometimes works against us.

“When a crime is committed in New York City, it is more likely to appear as a lead story in major media around the world than if the crime occurs in other cities. This heightened media exposure can and often does create the perception that the city’s crime rate is greater than the reality.”

Murdaugh emphasizes that New York ranks 13th among the nation’s cities in crime statistics supplied by the New York Police Department. Included as crimes are homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and vehicle theft.

(Dallas heads the list, followed by Seattle, San Antonio, Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, El Paso, Jacksonville, Fla., Phoenix, Houston, Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. The crime ratings were culled from FBI statistics.)

Howard Rubenstein, a New York City public relations man who is a longtime friend of Mayor David Dinkins, is trying to help change the city’s image.

“These crimes have done a great deal of damage to our image,” he says. “But the mayor is going to put 7,000 more policemen onto the streets. We are not going to roll over to the perception that New York City is dead.”

When Rubenstein and the mayor met recently to discuss the problem, a prime topic was the August cover story of Time magazine, called “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” The story confirmed that New York City has suffered a black eye. And that tarnished image translates into lost tourist dollars. Tourists and conventioneers spend about $10 billion in New York annually, a sum which translates into 144,000 jobs.

And when they do occur, violent incidents stab New York in the back.

Consider the following, related by Thomas Nulty, president of Santa Ana-based Associated Travel management, which has 18 branch offices in California.

A month ago, Nulty’s leisure marketing manager made a trip to New York to inspect a new cruise ship. In a cab on the way to the vessel with several other travel agents, she couldn’t believe her eyes. There, in broad daylight, six people mugged a man, threw him to the ground, held a knife to his back, took the ring off his finger and relieved him of his watch.

Not exactly what city fathers would want anyone--certainly not travel agents--to witness.

The incident solidified an already warped image that Nulty has of New York City. Small wonder that, according to the executive, in the last 12 months, Associated Travel has sold 700 New York City packages to Californians, off 53% from about 1,500 in the same period a year earlier.

Recently, New York Newsday commissioned USTravel Systems Inc., the nation’s third-largest travel agency, to make a study of how the city is perceived by its agents. The Rockville, Md.-based firm queried 2,000 of its agents.

The study found that more than eight of 10 of its agents, who work with potential visitors, said that the Big Apple was a less desirable travel destination than it was a few years ago; none said it was better.

The reasons that New York got a bad name were crime and drugs, high costs, crowding, rude people, filth and decay.

“It is very rare that people go on vacation in New York City,” Nulty says. “They come to visit relatives and friends. But for vacations, they go to Disneyland, Hawaii or on Caribbean cruises. People who go to New York on business will continue to go to New York on business. It is a must.”

Thus far, all of this seems not to have drastically hurt New York’s travel business.

Joseph E. Spinatto, president of the Hotel Association of New York, says that he concedes it is only human to be concerned about safety in travel, but “we have to make clear to the visitors that if they use normal common sense and precaution, they are no more unsafe than in any other city in the world. They put us up as No. 1 (in crime). But we are not No. 1. There is a perception that we are No. 1.”

To date, says Spinatto, the city’s hotels have not noticed any negative impact from the bad publicity.

John Fox, a principal in the accounting firm of Pannell Kerr Forster, which specializes in the hospitality industry, disagrees. He says there has been a falloff. The firm tracks 41 major New York City hotels. They have 22,795 rooms, or about a third of the total. He says that the occupancy rate of these hotels dropped slightly in the first eight months of 1990 to 71%, from 72.4% in the same period last year. But in August, there was a fall to 74.5% from 78.2%.

“There has definitely been a softening of the market,” Fox notes. “But to attribute this to any one reason is very difficult. There are a number of factors at work--the most significant is not crime. It is an economic issue, the general economic conditions both locally and nationally.”

Yet some of the city’s most famous travel sites, which would make good but unscientific gauges, say that their business has grown considerably, despite the morbid headlines.

Officials at the Circle Line, which provides boat tours around Manhattan Island, report that the company has grown 10% in the summer just completed, compared to one year earlier.

Business at the Empire State Building observatory--as famous a symbol of New York as the Eiffel Tower of Paris--is also going well. The site is open till midnight and, according to spokeswoman Laura Fries, many people aren’t afraid to visit the site--at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan--late at night.

The Port of New York and New Jersey, which operates the metropolitan area’s three airports, says that in the first seven months of this year, there were 30.6 million domestic arrivals and departures (about half and half) and 13.1 million international. That is off from 33 million domestic, but up from 12.3 million international.

The decline in the domestic traffic was caused more by the troubles of Eastern Airlines than by New York City problems. The international traffic rose because the dollar declined in value, according to spokesman Allen Morrison.

But public relations man Rubenstein fears that there is still a storm on the horizon, the movie version of “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which, though considerably kinder to New York, can still do some damage, he believes. The film will be released soon.

“About 100 million people are going to see it,” Rubenstein says. “It will be like a mini-atomic dropping on New York.”