Businesses Mixed Over Nixed Surf Festival

Len Valenti, owner of Maritime Surf, was never sure how the festival portion of the Quiksilver Pro New York surf competition was going to affect his surf shop on West Park Avenue.

But he's certain it will keep some flow of business in Long Beach after Labor Day, when business usually dies down. “For sure there are going to be less people in town,” Valenti said after the festival was canceled Tuesday.

City officials and Quiksilver organizers said they agreed to eliminate it due to the damage caused by Hurricane Irene. The nixed events include concerts, autograph signings and demonstrations by BMX and motocross riders, as well as skateboarders. 

Valenti is one of the local merchants that have mixed feeling on the scaled-down, two-week long surf expo that was supposed to begin Sept. 1. It was expected to bring in many thousands of additional visitors to Long Beach, and now leaves local merchants in a limbo of unknowns.

Like Valenti, Pinup Clothing Boutique owner Andrea Shulman said she had “no clue how it was going to affect [business] in the first place.”

But Ben Freiser, owner of the popular West End restaurant-bar The Beach House, hired extra staff for the event, and the canceled festival will affect his business monumentally, he said, since he already invested a lot of personal energy, time and money in anticipation of it.

“The buzz is that there is a decline in people coming,” Freiser said. “Most people were coming down for the festival.” 

He added that he believes city officials “think that the businesses are not sympathizing with what happened to people," referring to residents who suffered damaging flooding and ongoing power outages after the hurricane.

“But they forget that the majority of the business owners are residents,” he said. “This event was going to cause some conflict in the town, whether Irene happened or not. Everybody has invested in this event already."

City Manager Charles Theofan said that Long Beach is going through a tough time this week after Sunday’s storm. The positive side, he said, is that the city is “still having the biggest surf competition that has ever taken place on the east coast.” He noted that he understands the businesses concerns.

“But you can’t lose sight of ” he said while discussing the damage Irene behind in town.

“The local businesses will probably get just as much business from the people attending the surfing event, who I think are going to be more apt to spend money in our community, as opposed to the teenagers who are coming down for the free concerts,” he added.

Michael Kerr, president of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce, said that the surfing competition alone will still bring people into town and plenty of visitors are already filtering in. But Kerr thinks that the city could have been more “resilient” in light of Irene. 

“I would have loved the entire festival, but unfortunately it is what it is,” he continued. “I keep fighting the city manager, emailing back and forth, that maybe something can be done.”