Downtown Boston is fighting a case of the Mondays.
That’s the sense you get walking around the city’s urban core at the outset of the workweek. Post Office Square benches that were once at a lunch-hour premium sit empty. In the Downtown Crossing Roche Bros., only a handful of cash registers are staffed — no long line of grocery store shoppers demanding their attention. Outside the Old South Meeting House, a T-shirt vendor with few customers to tend to is engrossed in a book.
“On a Monday, you’ll have maybe a couple of people in line. On a Tuesday, you could have a line that stretches almost to the door,” said Lucas Hausermann, an employee at the Financial District coffee shop Espresso Love. “You see [a] major, major difference.”
More than six years after COVID-19 decimated foot traffic to the city’s once-bustling hub of economic activity, downtown Boston is still in recovery — and not a symmetrical one. Mondays and Fridays have been slower to pick back up in the post-pandemic age, with many large companies requiring some in-person attendance, most often on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays. Employees often bookend their weeks with remote work.
While it might be easier to find a seat on the T or quicker to pick up your Sweetgreen salad on Mondays, the early-week sleepiness can be tough on local businesses. They once relied on five-days-a-week of steady foot traffic from the nearby offices, many of which now are empty. Friday at least has the buzz of nighttime revelry; Monday can feel like the week hitting the snooze alarm.
“It’s just a boring day,” said KK Pabon, who was working security at the Primark in Downtown Crossing on a recent Monday. ”Makes me want to just leave, honestly.”
But look closer, and talk to people out and about on a Monday — ideally, a warm one — and a more hopeful picture emerges. For a neighborhood that has had to be patient and get creative to come back to life after the pandemic sent commercial vacancies soaring, perhaps nothing better captures the current trajectory than a Monday.
“It certainly has room for sort of growth,” said Michael Nichols, president of the Downtown Boston Alliance. But from where he’s standing, Mondays are “holding their own, I think, in a lot of ways.”
Just look at the numbers: Yes, by the Downtown Boston Alliance’s count, about 30 percent fewer people passed through the area on Mondays in 2025 than in 2019 — about 4.2 million, down from 5.9 million. But like the other weekdays, that number has been steadily climbing every year since 2020. And remember, even before COVID, Monday was never quite as busy as the middle of the week. In 2019, Monday foot traffic clocked in at about 88 percent of the Tuesday-through-Thursday average. In 2025, that number stood at 84 percent.
“It’s getting pretty close to playing the same role it used to play,” Nichols said. “I don’t think you walk around downtown on a Monday and wonder where everybody is.”
So where, exactly, is everybody? They’re going to the new Uniqlo outpost on Washington Street — one of several new buzzy storefronts debuting on the main thoroughfare this year. They’re busy behind the counter at Al’s State Street Cafe, where an ezCater order for sandwiches for about 90 people helps make up for the lack of a lunch-hour line. They’re newly minted graduates, decked out in full regalia, schmoozing at Shake Shack.
Or they’re on Boston Common, like dog-walker Tara Serafini with Urban Paw Print, who spent a recent Monday minding a trio of pups — all owned by humans who live in Downtown Crossing.
“We’re down here five days a week,” said Serafini. “It’s busy here every single day.”
That’s particularly true this time of year, when tourists flood into the newly thawed city — on Mondays and beyond. As winter slowly and torturously gives way to spring, large groups cluster along the Freedom Trail for walking tours, and Duck Tours zip around the neighborhood. (Monday ridership on the Duck Tours so far this season is up 3 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the company.)
Several hotel managers, meanwhile, said bookings on Mondays are nothing to sneer at.
“Monday has come back a bit more,” said Michele Grosso, managing director of the 312-room Langham hotel on Franklin Street.
It’s still not at the levels of other weekdays — the hotel tends to sell out on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, mostly because of business travelers, said Grosso. Emerging from the pandemic, Monday occupancy sat around 70 percent. These days, it’s around 90 percent or above.
“It’s had to work its way back up there,” he said.
The WNDR Museum on Washington Street, which opened two years ago, is often closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, since those have tended to be the slowest days, said supervisor Elcie Merck. On a recent Monday, she said they started out with 30 tickets sold and said they might sell 30 to 50 more throughout the day. Compare that to the weekend, she said, when they can sell more than a thousand.
But occasionally, the famine can turn to feast. “Sometimes Mondays can be our busier days because of, like, a holiday.”
And Mondays might yet get a new lease on life. Kevin Treanor, an owner of The Merchant, a restaurant on Franklin Street, said he used to be able to count on more than 150 lunches on a Monday. “Now, it’s probably half that,” he said. But the recent news that financial services giant Fidelity Investments will require many headquarters employees to come back to the office five days a week later this year has given him a new optimism.
“I’m hoping that by September, it’s back to normal,” he said.
For now, the slower pace of Mondays downtown can have its own silver lining. Shaun Hamilton, who drives in from Carlisle for work, prefers the Monday commute. “Less people. Less traffic,” he said.
Alli Macina, meanwhile, wasn’t going to let the fact that her 25th birthday fell on a Monday stop her from celebrating. She decided to go out with friends to Versus, an arcade bar on Province Street. The bar advertises $1 wings on Mondays, and students play free on Monday and Tuesday nights.
“I wanted somewhere where all my friends could be and I didn’t have to rent out a room or reserve a table,” she said. Far from it: They had most of the games to themselves.
Before Versus, she had gone to dinner at Mast’, an Italian restaurant across the street. Would she go anywhere after this?
“Ooo,” she said, and paused. “Probably not.”
It is, after all, only Monday.
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her @danagerber6. Catherine Carlock can be reached at catherine.carlock@globe.com. Follow her @bycathcarlock.