Photo via Wally G. Forget about living there for a second, right now Mayor Bloomberg just wants you to think of Staten Island as a nice place to visit (baby steps). With all the sudden hype around the borough (a music festival, anti-gentrification graffiti), could 2008 be the year it sheds the bad stigma (and stench) it's known for? The NY Sun reports on the Mayor's initiative to encourage New Yorkers to take a......

Mayor Bloomberg came out strongly against a proposed 8% hotel tax, saying that tourism was NYC's proverbial golden goose and that taxing it to death would be the wrong move. The additional tourist tax was proposed in the City Council by members who are trying to figure out how to avoid slashing $450 million from the Dept. of Education's budget next year. Bloomberg pointed out that with rising fuel costs and a slowing economy, tourism......

The elegant 7th floor roof garden at Rockefeller Plaza is usually off limits, but for the next two evenings the general public is invited up to sip cocktails while savoring the twilight view. The only catch is that you have to absorb a lot of information about Canada, because our northern neighbor's tourism board is the one footing the bill. But since their national sales pitch comes with free food, music, drinks and hand massages,......

Photograph of Mayor Bloomberg during a visit to Walworth Academy school in London by Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Though a huge development project near and dear to his heart suffered a major blow, Mayor Bloomberg is rallying the city's fortunes by visiting Europe. Yesterday, the mayor was in Belfast, visiting the Titantic Quarter and mixing up City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's family history (he said her mother--when it was actually her grandmother--who survived the Titanic, which......

Chashama and Chris Rubino team up to present, "The Center of Something," an exhibit centered around the artist's "take on New York as a destination for both visiting and living." Since Chashama is in Times Square, the exhibit itself will become a temporary tourist attraction itself. But will the locals or the tourists be the ones flocking to it?The exhibit is modeled after the dozens of stores in the neighborhood selling the same inane......

The relentless eradication of everything that gives New York character got you down? The Tourism Board of Colorado is here to sweep you off your feet with a hard sell for the Rocky Mountain state at their “Lets Talk Colorado” gallery near Grand Central [317 Madison Ave]. As this photo suggests, here you can marvel at videos of men wandering through desolate landscapes without an abusive cabbie or $81 hamburger in sight. Open for the......

If you're a 67-year-old retired math professor from Montreal and your wife (in Canada) finds out about your near-death S&M-related experience in New York City from a NY Post reporter, what do you do? Well, if you're Richard Benjamin, you give the Post an exclusive interview, landing on the front page and earning the headline "They Beat it Out of Me." Benjamin, who used to teach at Vanier College, said that he's been secretly involved......

With the writers' strike looking like it'll wrap up this week, Crain's points us towards another problem for New York's entertainment industry. Seems our neighbor Connecticut has started to offer up a deal no self-respecting Hollywood suit can refuse -- a 30% tax rebate on all production costs. The incentive program started in 2006 and in 2007 alone we've lost approximately $400 million in production revenue to the Constitution State. The problem has spread to......

Last year Bloomberg announced the "first-ever global multimedia communications campaign to promote New York City," with efforts to bring in more tourism through television, outdoor advertising, internet and everything in between. The mayor is now getting some unsolicited help from some New York comedians. The troupe got together to film their own NYC Tourism ad, which includes a unique explanation of the city's homeless problem. Their version of our history explains that NYC was founded......

Hey, tourists, NYC may want you to spend lots of money when you visit the Big Apple, but just don't get really sick or else the Administration for Children's Services will take your kids in! Because that's what happened to one British family last month! Yvonne Bray and daughters Gemma and Katie, who live in Devon, England, were visiting New York for four days, staying at the LaGuardia Courtyard Marriott. The mother fell ill with......

The upside to the weak U.S. dollar? NYC made $28 billion from tourists last year. The Mayor announced that tourism to NYC was at record highs, with 46 million people visiting the Big Apple. Of the 46 million tourists, 8.5 million were from other countries, which is another high. From Mayor Bloomberg's speech:This incredible surge puts us well on our way to reaching our goal of drawing 50 million annual visitors by the year......

It's been snowing out lately, and thanks to The World's Largest Snow Globe, it's going to be snowing indoors soon as well. Standing at over twenty feet tall, the monstrosity of holiday cheer will be arriving at The Pond at Bryant Park next week (December 14th to 18th). Throughout the week, the snow globe will feature live models in cheery winter scenes, not unlike an Old Navy ad. Why? Good question. In typical holiday fashion,......

Last month, New York City kicked off a big global advertising campaign to attract more tourists to the Big Apple. The ads appear in a number of venues, and the Post notes that media space has been bought in Out magazine and on the LOGO network, as well as LGBT websites. A Bloomberg administration official explains that gay and lesbians have more disposable income, as they are usually dual-income without kids, "What we're saying......

The Critical Mass Halloween Ride is tonight! If you go, get some good pictures! THEATER: Sam Marks’s new play The Joke peels back the thin gauze separating comedy from an open wound. Set in the last throws of the Catskills comedy circuit circa 1965, the story concerns the disintegrating comedy duo of Steady Eddie and Doug the Mug. Doug has let his envy of Eddie get the better of him and begins adding more of......

Gothamist would expect Chicago area sports teams to wear special green uniforms just because it's a city that dumps green dye into their river (our rivers can be greenish, thanks to other factors). But when we were checking out the Knicks' website, we learned that the Knicks will wear green uniforms for the first time, thanks to special sponsor, Tourism Island. And while Gothamist thinks this is lame, we understand why the Knicks undertook the......

Watch it when you love NY! NY State is trying to enforce its claim to the love by setting its lawyers on people who use the logo without the permission of the Empire State Development Development Corporation. The latest incident seems to be a NJ man's use of the logo on various tchotchkes (he's sold 15,000 of them); Ray Maniaci tells the Post NY State should be flattered people love the logo so much. Gothamist......

Two weeks after we wondered about the Bahamas Tourism Board's subway advertising, the NY Times takes up the task. It turns out that CBS Outdoor will remove two of the ads, because they are bad for subway behavior: The "How to turn a seat into a hammock" ad and the "Flyflish with a cellphone on subway tracks" ad (the "Subway snorkeling" and "Use your umbrella as a golf club" ads are safe). Well, duh. As......

So, with Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's dream of finding a perfect slogan for Brooklyn comes the reailty that there's no one slogan that's good enough for the borough. Instead, the borough will use a variety of civilian-suggested slogans for different campaigns. According to the Daily News, "the Brooklyn Tourism Partnership will use several slogans - which range from the classy ('Brooklyn: Bridge to the World') to the wacky ('Brooklyn: The Tenth Planet') and possibly......

The city is cheering about the week without gunshoots in the Bronx that ended on Tuesday. For nine days, there were no shootings in the northernmost borough. Mayor Bloomberg said, "Ten years ago, in the same week, there were 30 [shootings]. Last year, there were five. This year, zero. It is an amazing number." Plus, there hasn't been a murder there since March 12. Police Commissioner Kelley says that clustering police in high crime areas......