This New Year's Eve, we're toasting NYC's resilient spirit

This New Year’s Eve, the crowds will be gone from Times Square. The bars will be quiet and the dance floors empty. The clocks, however, will still strike midnight. There will be dancing on rooftops and inside apartments. The magic that happens in the city whenever we enter a new year will still be sparked. In a way, isn’t that the perfect end to 2020? In a moment of quiet resilience with the cheers of the city ringing out from our windows?

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We all want a moment of finality for the last year. An end point that lets us start a new chapter. But there’s also so much to celebrate about the last 12 months. When the clock strikes midnight, we’ll be surrounded by a city transformed by the compassion, artistry, creativity and gumption of our fellow New Yorkers.  

The second we enter 2021, we’ll be surrounded by neighbors that banded together to create free fridges and mutual aid networks and flooded the streets to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black lives lost to police violence. We’ll be living in a city where cultural institutions brilliantly innovated to keep us entertained and inspired—from the Metropolitan Opera streaming free operas to Marie’s Crisis bringing the piano bar online. We’ll be not too far away from the artists and comedians who performed brilliant shows on rooftops and in parks— not to mention the millions of New Yorkers continuing to support local restaurants and bars through delivery and takeout, crowd-sourced cookbooks and more.

So here’s a heartfelt thank you to all of the local business owners, artists, chefs, performers and everyday heroes that managed to bring beauty and hope into our city this year. As we enter 2021, we feel hopeful about the future of everything we love: art, culture, travel, food, hospitality and more. You can bet that as that happens, we’ll be right here every step of the way.  

Meanwhile, when the clock strikes midnight this year, we’ll be cheering for the year ahead, the one we’re leaving behind and the people that make up this strong and hopeful city of the present.