After closing for more than a year due to the epidemic, the office of marriages on the island of Manhattan in New York has reopened its doors to those wishing to marry.
“We wanted a very simple and private ceremony,” says Cy Fuertado, a 32-year-old New York photographer who has just married her partner, Richard Casey. And we wanted to get married before the spread of Covid-19 started.”
The office of marriages has been closed since March 2020, and it did not reopen its doors until Friday. It had previously closed its doors "after the 9/11 attacks and after Hurricane Sandy" in 2012, according to civil affairs employee Michael McSweeney.
“It is really wonderful to meet people here again face to face,” he adds, even if only one witness is allowed at the moment and all other centers are closed.
The office, where more than 200 wedding ceremonies are celebrated on "good days," is located not in the heart of City Hall, but in another public building a few blocks away in southern Manhattan.
The municipality had launched a marriage service through the “Zoom” application during the closure period.
The epidemic cast heavy shadows on New York, the cultural capital of the United States, where the number of deaths exceeded 33,000. The return to normal life is an essential issue for reviving tourism in the city, after the number of visitors decreased due to the pandemic from 66.6 million in 2019 to 22.3 million in 2020.
