Celebrants Flood Times Square

Hundreds of thousands of partiers poured into Times Square on Thursday night, despite the cold and rain. It was a cap to an otherwise bad year for tourism in New York City: In 2009, the number of tourists visiting New York fell for the first time in eight years. Passengers traveling through the city’s three major airports fell to roughly 100 million in 2009, while Broadway-show attendance was down 5.2 percent. Last summer, tourism was so hot that Mayor Bloomberg moved forward a deadline to draw 50 million tourists to New York by 2015 to 2013.