"A lot of people are skedaddling, trust me," said David Barton, who plans to open a new gym in Chelsea that week. "I'll be here, but I really wish they'd chosen another borough."
Omar Wasow, executive director of BlackPlanet.com, said he's going to pass the week at a wedding in Sonoma Valley, Calif. Most of his buddies are steering clear of the city, too, but he's a bit blue at missing the action. "It's going to be the same war zone . . . I've grown to love," he said. "I actually would have enjoyed the spectacle of it."
Jason Croy waves at a visitor through the window of his West Village hair salon. He has red-rimmed glasses, a red bandanna and a que sera, sera take on the Republican convention. "Every client is leaving and everyone else is trying to," he said, adding that his partner does expensive floral arrangements and is a whirling dervish as the convention approaches.
He leads a visitor to his small kitchen, where he cracks open a beer. "I'm going to play it by ear. I'm opening for business, but the only people I can see making money, I guess, is the hookers."
Politics will keep some from fleeing. Manhattan is one of the more liberal stretches of real estate in the Western world (435,000 Manhattanites voted for Al Gore, while 79,000 voted for George W. Bush), and many New Yorkers regard it as their civic obligation to shake a placard and chant at those Republicans in Madison Square Garden. Paul Ricciardi, an actor, summers in Provincetown, Mass. But duty calls.
"I'm coming home early on Sunday to protest," he said. "I don't like the way the president is running the country."
Then there's Bernice Sacks, the red-tressed jazz coach of many decades vintage. She's sort of looking forward to all of these delegates in town, if only for the frisson of the unusual.
"Actually, I've never run into a Republican in New York," she said. "I hope that some come sightseeing on the Upper West Side and see me and say: 'Look at that weird-looking lady. She must be a Democrat.' "
