Spring Break
This is Easter Week and I guess that for much of the world, this is a good week for a vacation. I find it a funny time to take a vacation. I also understand that for people with kids in school, you take your vacations when your kids’ school holidays are planned. Both of my ex-wives were quite rigid on the subject of taking kids out of school to take family vacations. For some reason they felt it would be the demise of western civilization if the kids missed those days at school versus planning our holidays to coincide with the convenience of the local school board.
April is a funny month. Back in the days when I skied, I found it too late for good skiing in the mountains of Utah. Whatever pleasure there was in good corn snow (as spring snow if often called) was over by 11am as it turns to slush and is ready to tear up your knees on one bad turn. I will admit that the siege de soleil on the deck of the ski lodge is not a bad place to be, but overall it always felt like I was pushing the ski season outside its natural limits. As for the beach, it’s nice to get a start on the summer tan, but damn, the crowds at the popular spots make the scene way too raucus for me. During college, the spring break scene of Daytona Beach or Cancun is lots of fun. As an adult, especially with kids, it seems more than a little unnecessary.
Holidays are spread out all over the year and perfect spacing is not really considered when declaring a new one. The gap between the President’s Day break in February and the Memorial Day holiday in late May is quite a long stretch of 90 days or so. That is simply too lang to work without a break apparently, so we invented spring break to more or less coincide with Easter/Passover. Easter falls on a date set by the Council of Nicaea in 325AD, when it established that Easter would be held on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. That means between March 22 and April 25. Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, which typically falls in March or April of the Gregorian calendar. When you figure that all out, you are qualified to be on a school board setting school’s spring break.
Probably the biggest question is whether to declare the week before Easter or the week after Easter as the holiday week. It all seems rather complicated to me and if I were on a school board I would vote to have the month of April be a review month that allows for lots of independent study (generally a good thing for students to learn anyway). That way, you could say to parents, take your kids for a week in April and just let us know when. That would uncongest the vacation venues and make the whole thing a lot smoother for everyone.
I am fortunate not to have kids in school anymore to worry about and consequently I don’t think in terms of Spring Break. But it still goes on around me and I have become an observer of Spring Break. What I see from my window overlooking New York Harbor is a flock of mostly foreign tourists (NYC gets some 60 million of them per year) lining up for hours to get on a ferry to go out to Liberty Island. They are going to see the Statue of Liberty, the number one tourist attraction in New York. Before 9/11 there use to be 5.5 million tourists per year that went out to Liberty Island. Since then the NYPD and the National Park Service have significantly tightened up on security and restricted the traffic to 4 million visitors per year. The other thing they have done is made it much harder to get inside the statue itself. In fact, only about 15% of the visitors are allowed inside the statue.
It used to be you could walk up to the crown and even the torch. Then, due to structural issues they closed the torch and your ascent was limited to the crown, but the crown views were pretty spectacular. Now I think they let you go inside the base and no one goes up into the crown either. After all, the old lady is over 140 years old. So now people wait in line for three hours or book several months in advance for the pleasure of a ten minute boat ride to walk around Liberty Island and see the exhibits and museums and probably not even go inside the statue. It must be worth it since demand still outstrips supply.
New York is a helluva town as the song goes. There’s still plenty to do here during Spring Break, but you have to know where to find it. Everyone’s logical starting-point is Times Square and there’s plenty of attractions thereabout both for the day-tourists (naked Cowboy and all) as well as in the evening when the theaters start to light up. The combination of attractions, shopping, dining, events, museums, sporting events and night life have made NYC the number one urban tourist destination in the world. That was not by accident, it was by design as orchestrated by Mayor Bloomberg and NYC&Co., the city’s tourism agency.
What we have now in New York is a big midtown attraction centered on Times Square and a big downtown attraction centered around the Harbor and extending east to the South Street Seaport and west up to the Whitney Museum and up the Highline back to midtown. Every borough has something to brag about in terms of hidden tourism gems that get marketed as perfect Spring Break things to do.
I guess I am more than a little aware of NYC tourism marketing, having plowed that furrow for six years with the New York Wheel Project, which now stands indefinitely on hold (though the jungle drums tell me something is afoot with the site that remains half-built). It is hard for me to see all the tourists here for Spring Break and wonder how many of them would be up in a capsule on the Wheel right now if things had gone differently. The lesson there is to never minimize the degree of difficulty of making anything BIG happen in the world.