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The city is a schvitz. Your friends are packing up for the Poconos. Your emails get instant replies: another colleague out of office. Parking is abundant; your upstairs neighbors have taken their tap-dancing routine on the road.
Summer — August, in particular — is a gloriously dead time in the city and, turns out, that can be a good thing.
THE CITY looked at a handful of metrics to see just how much slower, and less crowded, the city gets in August — especially for folks who use summer as a noun and not a verb.
You can see it in the city’s ubiquitous and aromatic trash mounds. THE CITY analyzed Department of Sanitation tonnage from summer and spring of 2023 and found a reduction in trash output in August from May. With more people gone, there are fewer bags of garbage for trucks to cart away.
The August trash drop is most pronounced in some of the neighborhoods with the highest median incomes, like the Upper East and Upper West sides, and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Now is a great time to indulge in an early morning walk in a tony neighborhood.
Fewer people in the city also mean emptier subway cars (may yours always have strong air conditioning!), less crowded ferries, thinning crowds at beaches and more space on sidewalks.
The exodus shows up in the patterns of subway ridership in August. As temperatures rise, and people leave the city, subway ridership shrinks by nearly 20% in late summer.
Elsewhere, the city’s wealthiest are making summer the busiest time for helicopter rides. At Fly Blade, a luxury helicopter service that advertises five-minute shuttle flights to area airports, business is brisk when the rich are ditching town.
“We do about 85% of our volume in summer months, being May to September,” said Roisin Branch, a spokesperson for the company. And while helicopter shuttle flights are the bulk of Fly Blade’s business, for crowd-adverse customers with extra money to spend, the helicopter ride to the airport is just the start.
“A lot of people going on vacation during those months are choosing to skip the commercial airport and fly a private jet,” Branch added.
Their loss, our gain. The downtick in demand for lots of New York’s offerings means Peak Summer is also one of the best times to see a Broadway show. According to data from The Broadway League, attendance at Broadway shows dip in August, but theatergoers say the city’s most popular shows remain tough to get tickets to — and prices don’t cool much either.
More things to try in August: It’s also a great time to try getting a reservation at a tough-to-book-restaurant. Restaurant Week (which lasts longer than a week) bleeds into August and was created to drive head counts during a seasonally sleepy time.
“Those are slower periods of time for visitation,” said Tiffany Townsend, executive vice president at New York City Tourism and Conventions, which organizes summer restaurant week.
Townsend said restaurant week, the first and largest of its kind in the country, began in 1992 in an effort to lure attendees from the Democratic National Convention into eating in local restaurants. Now, in its 32nd year, the program features 600 restaurants aiming to reach New Yorkers and tourists alike.
Less crowds means more peak-of-the-season heirloom tomatoes for you.
But, don’t get carried away: The tourists are still swarming, no matter the season. Times Square is still crowded — though a slight dip in pedestrian traffic starts hitting the area in the later summer months — but as a local, the area remains a no-fly zone.
For Amber Flannery Field, a tour guide who says the bulk of her business happens over a three-month period, August is typically slow.
“As a tour guide our busy seasons are when movies are good in theaters, so when things start getting bad is usually late summer or after the Christmas rush season,”said Flannery Field, 39, of Forest Hills, who described the tour industry as “feast or famine.”
But in a way, the tour guide to others gets to be a tour guide for herself during down periods.
“People hate the heat but I feel like New York City is the most New York City when the weather is ‘Do The Right Thing,’” Flannery Field said. “I’m a tourist of my own city.”
