The Jersey Shore has Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi to come to its aid. For Long Beach, N.Y., the go-to native is Billy Crystal, as a new set of tourism advertisements is about to remind TV viewers.
Mr. Crystal, born and raised in Long Beach, is the star of the first commercials that Long Island city has produced to try to attract more people to visit for a day or a weekend. In the ads unveiled on Thursday, he describes Long Beach as a “paradise” within a 50-minute train ride of Manhattan or Brooklyn.
The $700,000 campaign is intended to help Long Beach recover from the damage it suffered when Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, destroying the 2.2-mile Boardwalk that was the city’s main attraction. The first half-mile stretch of the rebuilt walk is scheduled to open in less than two weeks.
The city’s only emergency room was at Long Beach Medical Center, which has not reopened since the storm. The medical center’s board has resisted suggestions from the state’s health commissioner that it declare bankruptcy and merge with another hospital.
For the ad campaign, “this is the perfect time, after the storm,” said Eileen J. Goggin, a member of the Long Beach City Council.
“A lot of people’s perception is very different from what’s going on,” she continued.
It did not help that just as Long Beach officials and Mr. Crystal’s brother Joel gathered to announce the campaign, the office of the state comptroller released an audit critical of the city’s financial management. The audit concluded that Long Beach’s financial condition had deteriorated after years of overestimating revenue and underestimating expenses.
Gordon Tepper, a spokesman for the Long Beach government, said the two events were purely coincidental. “We weren’t trying to drown that out,” he said.
Mr. Tepper said that the audit, which was conducted just before the hurricane, illustrated “fiscal mismanagement of prior administrations” and that the city’s current administration had taken steps to fix many of the problems cited.
“We’re on the comeback trail both physically because of the storm and fiscally because of the inherited deficits,” he said.
Long Beach attracted a record number of visitors over the July 4 holiday weekend, Mr. Tepper said. Still, he said, the ads should help draw more people throughout the summer, which is the crucial season for many of the restaurants and shops there, as well as for the city’s two hotels.
The bulk of the cost of producing and broadcasting the ads was covered by state agencies: $500,000 came through a community development grant from Albany and $100,000 came from the Empire State Development Corporation, Mr. Tepper said. Two financial institutions, Citibank and the Bethpage Federal Credit Union, provided the rest, he said.
Mr. Crystal, 65, who has often reminisced about playing ball with his brothers in the street in front of their Long Beach home, donated his time to appear in and narrate the ads, Ms. Goggin said. He also helped raise $1 million for the city’s hurricane relief fund, matching the sum Mr. Bon Jovi recently pledged to his hometown, Sayreville, N.J. Late last year, Mr. Crystal appeared on a nationally televised benefit concert for Hurricane Sandy relief that was headlined by Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Bon Jovi.
But Ms. Goggin made clear which native son she thought deserved top billing. “It’s Billy Crystal, how much better can you get?” she said. “When you see that smile at the end of the ad, it makes you smile as well.”
