How Russians Count New York Crowds

How Russians Count New York Crowds - NYTimes.com

How Russians Count New York Crowds

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

How many people pass through Times Square each day? It is a critical question, not only for public policy but also for commerce, as retail rents and advertising rates depend on the foot and eyeball traffic that streams through the flashy juncture of Seventh Avenue and Broadway in the West 40s.

“It’s like, how do you count the number of jelly beans in the jar?” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, which spends up to $100,000 a year to answer this question. “It’s kind of an interesting scientific puzzle, to figure out a methodology, to figure out the total flow of people in and out.”

The latest gadgets have all been considered: vertical cameras, lasers, video recordings. Turns out, none of them are as effective as a Russian immigrant — at least not in Times Square.

The hundreds of thousands of people flooding into a six-square-block area each day simply overwhelm the machines, said Philip Habib, whose company has been hired to estimate Times Square traffic for the past decade. “The technology doesn’t exist right now,” he said.

So instead, tracking the river of humanity is tackled by dozens of Russian immigrants armed with clipboards, folding chairs and counters. And on Tuesday, as they do multiple times a year, they counted, with their eyes and their thumbs, two hours at a time, for $8 an hour for a 24-hour period.

Click. Click. Tourists. Click click. School groups. Theatergoers. Click. They count northbound, southbound, people on the sidewalk, even people in the street (ammunition to lobby the city government for wider sidewalks, as the pedestrian traffic).

“When people walk en masse, it’s useless,” said Alexander Turin, 66, who was counting in front of the Virgin Atlantic store around the peak traffic period, 5 p.m., before the theater and as people got off work.

Mr. Turin, a former French literature professor, left Russia in 1976. He said he counts to earn extra money. “Sometimes you just need to do the simplest jobs,” he said.

For whatever reason, in a city of niche immigrant occupations, even professional counting has become dominated by one demographic group.

“For a long time we were using a group of Nigerian guys that an intern of ours knew from City College, and at somehow some point we switched over to these Russians,” said Nick Casey, an engineer who oversees the counting in Times Square.

Chances are, if you have been counted as part of a moving crowd in Grand Central Terminal, the Time Warner Center or Times Square, the person who clicked the counter to note your presence was a Jewish, retirement-age refugee from Russia or Ukraine who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and may or may not speak English. Before they worked as counters, many worked as accountants, computer programmers or engineers in their home countries.

“Most of them have good education, but they can’t speak English well,” said Olga Klimenko, 47, a Russian immigrant who has become the organizer for counters because of her English skills.

Now, at the behest of numerous companies, she organizes dozens of Russians to count up to 10 times per month.

Originally, she recalled, a Russian immigrant who worked at Mr. Habib’s company organized Russian counters, and when that woman left, the responsibility ended up with Ms. Klimenko. Word of mouth is the best referral system for new counters, she has found.

As for the Times Square tally? In April, during Mr. Habib’s last count, there were about half a million people who passed through Times Square in a single day: 356,000 pedestrians, 15,000 bus passengers and 128,000 in other vehicles. December, he expects, should be even busier.