39 Reasons to Love New York Right Now

The Editors · 2025-12-15T07:00:16.818-05:00

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Because the World May Be a Runaway Train, But We’re All Still on the Uptown Local

My grandfather Sidney Lipsyte, the son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005, a good run I don’t expect to match. He witnessed, and sometimes experienced, a century of mayhem and invention: human flight, human spaceflight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic murder, peace treaties, civil rights, pacemakers, penicillin, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. I’ll stop before this becomes a Billy Joel song, which is no knock on Long Island’s favorite son, though I do worry we started the fire or, at least, enthusiastically tended it.

When my grandfather was 8, he and his brothers listened to distress calls from the Titanic on their homemade crystal-radio set. Sidney was 14 when his father died from the “Spanish” flu, and as a teenager he worked as a runner on Wall Street, shuttling paper certificates of stocks and bonds between brokerage houses. The whole area was blocked off, he once told me, patrolled by cops on horseback with shotguns. He wouldn’t blink at all the Jersey barriers and guards and spike strips down there since 9/11 and Occupy. But he would certainly blink at much else going on today. One of Sidney’s favorite sayings was famous in our family: “Nothing is ever as bad or as good as it seems.” A wise maxim, but does it still hold? This past year, it’s mostly the second part that rings true. Continue reading …

Reasons to Love New York 2025

Because We’re Sharing Headphones on the Subway Again

Hannah La Follette Ryan, the Brooklyn-based photographer known by @SubwayHands, one of her Instagram handles, has been documenting the intimate ways in which we clench, grip, clasp, and rest our hands while on public transit since 2014. She’s attuned to the slightest shifts in behavior; post-pandemic, she noticed more people reverting to wired headphones and, more recently, young couples (most of whom are under 21, she says) sharing them, each with a bud in one ear. “It’s like the couple have the car to themselves, absorbed in their own world,” she says, “and the wires bring their bodies into this tender contact.” (It’s in this spirit that we asked La Follette Ryan to photograph the four pairs of notable New Yorkers on our cover.) After La Follette Ryan takes each photo, she approaches the subjects and asks what they’re listening to. “I’ve been struck that most of it is not from the present day: Jefferson Airplane, ‘Psycho Killer.’ But then this one couple told me they were listening to an unreleased Madonna track — allegedly!” — Alexis Swerdloff

Because a Truck Driver Spent 21 Years Making an Obsessively Completist City Out of Balsa Wood

When he decided to make a scale model of 30 Rockefeller Plaza back in 2004, Joe Macken, a truck and limo-bus driver from Middle Village, didn’t mean to let it get this far. “I wasn’t even thinking about building the whole city,” he says. “I just wanted to build a building. And then I built another one and then another one. I just kept going out and out and out. There were a lot of times when I would fall asleep at my table at three o’clock in the morning.”

Now, 21 years later, he has a balsa-wood replica of nearly every last building in New York’s five boroughs. “It is close to a 2,500 scale, but it’s my own scale,” he tells me. “Every inch is 160 feet.” It’s as complete as it can be for a city that’s constantly under construction, with some flourishes; the Twin Towers nestle next to One World Trade Center. He made 100 planes for Kennedy and La Guardia airports because he couldn’t find any in the correct size at a hobby store. His favorite buildings are the skyscrapers, even the controversial supertalls: “I would live on the top floor of the tallest building in New York City if I could.”

The city, which Macken carved in separate chunks in the basement of his home upstate, is so large — 50 feet long and 30 feet wide — that he had never seen it assembled until August, when he was invited to display it at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds. It took him 11 and a half hours to set up. In February, he will take his model to the Museum of the City of New York — the chief curator there has described it as a “psychogeography of the city.” He will drive it over the George Washington Bridge himself in a U-Haul. None of it would have been possible if not for his daughter, who insisted he put his work on TikTok. “I didn’t even know how to download the app,” he says. “I can build a whole city out of wood, but I can’t send an email.” — Emma Alpern

Because an Architect Built Exact 1:160 Replicas of Graffiti-Covered Bushwick Box Trucks — for Fun

A self-described “train-obsessed child,” John McGill has been constructing models of the trucks in and around Newtown Creek storage lots — “the main characters of this strange backwater” — since the pandemic. Using 3-D-printed plastic and metal detail parts from model-railroad kits, he built about 30 trucks and finally got a chance to debut them this year at his company art show. But “almost immediately,” he says, “I started thinking about what to make next.”

Because Congestion Pricing Is Buying Us New Subway Elevators

As we disembark from the G train at the Smith–9th Street station, Matt Best issues a challenge: Think about how we’d get from here to the street without using the stairs. Best is the chief engineer of the construction-and-development division at the MTA, and he and Jamie Torres-Springer, who runs the division, are showing me how they plan to add an elevator to this station. Smith–9th Street is built on a trestle over the Gowanus Canal, and as we make our way down three levels, platform to crossover to mezzanine to turnstiles, he points out a roadblock at every turn: a girder that would make it impossible to put in an elevator shaft here, a stairwell that blocks it there, a platform that, if extended, would land in the middle of the street. Then we get to the exit, and it’s four extra steps down to the curb. “Probably on purpose, since we’re near the Gowanus Canal, to avoid flooding,” Best says. I’m a little dizzy from following the real-life Escher drawing, and I can’t see where you’d cut a hole to get from the tracks down to ground level. Basically, Best explains, you can’t. You’d need three separate elevators plus a rebuilt entrance, creating a lousy experience for the passenger and a hugely expensive one for the MTA. “We’re not touching any of that,” he says, and motions me across the street. Continue reading …

Because Say What You Will About Eric Adams, He Did Get the Garbage Under Control

All right, it’s not the Apollo missions to the moon. But as recently as a few years ago, getting a lift-and-dump containerization system onto our streets seemed about as likely as a new lunar landing. Since late 2024, we have been either using or testing big bins for big buildings, smaller wheeled bins for smaller buildings, and even smaller bins for compostable waste. (Those last ones help curb the rat population by choking off its food supply.) The chunky collective bins are the most polarizing because they require the sacrifice of a parking spot or two. Happily, the bin-haters are losing out to the rat-haters. — Christopher Bonanos

Because We’ve Been Hanging Around

Since the fall, teenagers (and some adults) around the city have been filming themselves dangling from crossing signals while singing along to the 2008 Kid Cudi song “Maui Wowie” for no reason other than, really, why not?

Because This Bronx Science History Teacher Helped This High-School Freshman Become Mayor

Marc Kagan was 43 when he decided to become a teacher. He’d been an MTA worker for 20 years, establishing himself as a prominent union organizer and helping to oust what he believed was corrupt union leadership. By 2004, he wanted a change. His first class at the Bronx High School of Science was ninth-grade social studies — “They didn’t trust me yet with the tenth-graders.” In it was an outspoken, curious boy named Zohran Mamdani. “He was completely engaged,” Kagan says. “My approach was always, ‘I want to hear your view on this. I want to actually hear what you have to say.’ And I think a student like Zohran, that’s right up his alley.” If Kagan was inexperienced, it apparently didn’t show. Mamdani has since (repeatedly) called him one of his favorite teachers. When, years later, they ran into each other at a book event, it was Mamdani who recognized him first: “Mr. Kagan!” he said, beaming.

Among a certain set of New York liberals, the name Kagan holds weight. Kagan’s father, Robert Kagan, was a tenant lawyer who once strapped himself to a tree to prevent it from being cut down. His mother, Gloria, was described as “a teacher we should all have once in our lives” by a former principal in a lengthy New York Times write-up, and their other son, Irving, is a teacher at Hunter College High School. Then there is their daughter, Elena, who is a Supreme Court justice. Marc Kagan was careful to wait until the last day of school every year to answer questions about his family and politics. “Of course, by that point, they were ready to burst,” he says.

Kagan often recalls the time Mamdani’s father came to see him, upset over his son’s grade — a 95. He assured him not to worry; “the wheels were spinning” in his son’s head. Some former students, including Mamdani, who signed up for Kagan’s 12th-grade AP World History class, have referred to themselves as Kaganites, a term Kagan literally recoils from. His most valuable skill as a teacher is simply knowing how to “create engagement,” he says. (Mamdani has recalled watching him hack into sugar-cane during a lesson on New World crops.) Kagan now teaches a class on the politics of the U.S. labor movement at Brooklyn College. On the day we meet, he tells me he’s reading a book about the English Civil War, though he’s dissatisfied with it. The author, he says, “never stops to say, ‘Well, why does this matter?’” His goal, still, is to ask his students, “Why does this matter? What are you going to do to make the world that you want to make?” — Paula Aceves

Because the Phones Are Locked Away and the Kids Are Playing Poker at Lunch

When New York State banned phones in public schools from bell to bell this past September, the goal — according to the ban’s champion, Governor Hochul — was undistracted learning. But within weeks of the Great Phone Lockup, teachers began to notice an incidental (and arguably even more compelling) benefit: The teens were talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie. Sure, there’s been grumbling and some burner phones and scrolling in the bathroom. At one high school, an entrepreneurial senior even bought a pouch-unlocking magnet on Amazon and tried to charge classmates a dollar per jailbreak. But generally, with phones off-limits, the atmosphere feels different. There’s a pleasant buzz in the lunchroom, chatter in the hallways, and an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere. “We’ve had a lot more school spirit,” says Rosalmi, a senior at New Heights Academy Charter School in Harlem. “People are more willing to do stuff.” Continue reading …

10.

Because Even Broadway Understudies Are Superstars

Instead of sitting around and just … waiting, Hannah Solow (Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary!), Dee Roscioli (Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her), and Daniel May and Steven Huynh (Maybe Happy Ending) used their hours of downtime to make content for TikTok and Instagram. Solow even got a full two-week run with her name above the marquee, and fans wearing “Oh, Hannah!” shirts lined up at the stage door asking her to repeat her catchphrases. We asked them to perform the big numbers they only get to sing if the lead actor calls in sick. — Zach Schiffman

11.

Because If Your Kitchen’s Getting Renovated, There Are Always the Grills at East River Park

When Shaquita Garcia’s Kitchen became unexpectedly unusable because of a six-month renovation delay, the 38-year-old designer and mother on the Lower East Side was at a loss. She deeply values cooking for her husband and children — Zoey, age 6, and Nelson, 8 — nearly every night. So after a brief and unsustainable stint ordering out, she prepped pork chops and baked beans and then walked her clan the ten-to-15 minutes to East River Park to grill. “It was so special because you have the lights of the city and you’re on the water, and it feels very luxurious,” she says. A Friday-night ritual began: Garcia cooked hot dogs for the kids and rotated between proteins like steak and salmon, plus vegetables, for the adults. On muggy evenings, her children wore their bathing suits and ran around in the splash pads; on cooler nights, the family played Uno. Soon, Garcia and her husband began inviting friends and bringing portable speakers, and impromptu line dancing ensued.

Garcia, who posts on Instagram as @theemodernhousewifeny, soon became an unofficial ambassador for New York’s public parks. Passersby snapped pictures of her barbecuing in tulle skirts and whimsical hats and inquired about whether the grills require reservations. (They don’t.)

Of course, it wasn’t all magic: There was an unfortunate porta-potty-related accident, and the ribs Garcia cooked one week didn’t turn out well. (“I should have called my granny,” she says.) But when the summer ended and the family transitioned back inside for Crock-Pot dinners (nope, the kitchen was still not repaired), Garcia looked back on the nearly three-month tradition as a special experience for her kids. “Every time, even though it was grilling, we were doing something different out there,” she says. “I feel like it was one of those summers that the kids will always remember — that one time we didn’t have a kitchen.” — Anna Medaris

12.

Because We Got Keith and Graydon to Make Up

You go to the trouble of arranging the rapprochement of the century, and the clouds open up. Four years after an Instagram-fueled contretemps threatened to founder their 40-year relationship, Keith McNally and Graydon Carter met, ostensibly, for a hatchet-burying déjeuner on a street corner near their respective restaurants Morandi and the Waverly Inn. At the appointed time, it poured. But you’d be hard put to find two men the heavens are less likely to cow.

McNally and Carter have already done more than most to refashion the city into their idealized image of it, as their best-selling memoirs reminded us this year. Having spent their early careers gatekeeping, they opened their own ersatz watering holes of old-new New York. One year, their families even spent Christmas Eve together. Then, a rift. Continue reading …

13.

Because Scores of Us Stopped What We Were Doing to Protect Our Neighbors …

Most New Yorkers are experts at tuning out the city’s chaos. But one weekend in November, people who would typically be hurrying by, staring down at their phones, stopped. They took out their AirPods and asked a crowd of activists near Chinatown what was going on. Word had spread — on social media, in activist networks, and now on the street — that federal agents seemed to be preparing for an immigration raid.

Masked officers, including some with the Department of Homeland Security, were huddled inside a downtown parking garage — near where a raid weeks earlier had led to the arrests of several Canal Street vendors — when dozens of protesters stepped forward and locked arms to block the exit. They were joined by passersby, including pedestrians carrying workbags and shopping bags. Before long, the crowd’s numbers appeared to double.

NYPD officers arrived on the scene and began arresting protesters. Police seemed to be protecting federal agents — despite New York’s designation as a sanctuary city. (The NYPD has denied involvement in the operation.) Julie DeLaurier, a 69-year-old who retired early because “fascism happened” and has been on the front lines of many protests this year, says she stared down a police officer holding a pepper-spray canister a foot from her nose. Some protesters picked up city trash cans and barricades from nearby construction sites and placed them in front of the garage. “It was remarkable,” says one protester. “Everywhere I turned, something different was happening.” The NYPD eventually cleared an exit path for agents; they left without detaining any immigrants. Resistance is in New Yorkers’ nature, says DeLaurier: “We are scrappy.” — Sanya Mansoor

14.

… And a Harlem Baseball Coach Stood Between ICE and His Players

For the past 21 years, at least four times a week, Youman Wilder could be found on a field in Harlem coaching up to a dozen boys in the art of good baseball. Wilder, along with his nonprofit, the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy, has trained multiple future Major League players, including one World Series champion, but his proudest accomplishment? Making sure all of those boys, and a couple hundred more, went to college. “I want to make great baseball players, but I really want to make great students,” he says. The academy doesn’t hold tryouts and has no minimum fee; the only requirement is that players maintain a 3.0 GPA. Like many of the kids he coaches, Wilder grew up in New York with a mom living paycheck to paycheck. “Those boys,” he says, “are me.”

That’s part of the reason, one warm July evening this past summer, he felt ready to go to war for them. He’d just finished practice in Riverside Park, his mind already on what he’d have for dinner, when, as he stepped away to retrieve a ball, he saw several armed ICE agents approaching his group of mostly Black and Latino players, all middle-schoolers. Initially, the agents sounded friendly. “So you guys play baseball?” he heard one agent ask. Then, “Where are you from?” Immediately, “a switch flipped,” Wilder says. He placed himself between them. “You want to be a part of this?” one of the agents asked bystanders. Wilder ushered his students into the batting cage and told them that if they needed to hop the fence to escape, they should.

For what felt like hours, he went back and forth with the agents. All of his boys were U.S. citizens; cornering them was unlawful, he told them. “Oh, another YouTube lawyer,” said one agent. Another said their questioning was in line with other police protocols, like “Terry stops” (stop and frisk). “I’m like, ‘You can’t Terry-stop 12-year-olds,’” Wilder recalls. Finally, the agents left.

In the months since, many of the boys who were there that day stopped showing up to practice, but Wilder says he still checks in with their families to see how they’re doing. On the day we speak, he is headed to a game one of them is playing in. “I just keep telling them that this is New York, and we look out for each other,” he says. “We have to hold on to that.” — Paula Aceves

15.

Because Trash Club Is the New Run Club

A little more than a year ago, Tom Aulenback, a 30-year-old consultant, started the Greenpoint Trash Club by asking on the neighborhood sub-Reddit if anyone wanted to meet to pick up trash together. “Ten people came to the first one, which was ten more people than I was expecting,” Aulenback says.

Since then, a tradition has developed: Every Wednesday, Aulenback hands out grabbers with flashlights attached to them — an upgrade he’s excited about — and, at the head of a group of about 40 people, rolls a granny cart lined with a trash bag as they snap up coffee cups and chip bags. Afterward, they all go to a bar.

Dean Foster, a first-time attendee, tells me he just moved to New York from Tennessee, taking a “leap of faith.” He met Aulenback at a farmers’ market and was formally invited to come pick up trash. “It’s not the first thing I would spend my Wednesday night doing,” Foster says. “But Tom was like, ‘We drink afterward,’ and I said, ‘That’s enough for me.’” — Clio Chang

16.

Because You Couldn’t Cross Fifth Avenue Without Bumping Into Dakota Johnson (or Jean Smart, Timothée Chalamet, Anne Hathaway …)

Some of the best movies of the year were also the best New York movies of the year. Just look at Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, which re-created a 1950s Lower East Side that pulses with the irrepressible self-belief of hustlers, schemers, and strivers. No surprise that Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest took off once Denzel Washington left his Dumbo penthouse and went down to the streets, where the people are. Celine Song’s Materialists got mileage out of soft-luxury voyeurism: There really are moneyed bachelors who live like this. And then there are the projects that haven’t yet been released: Jean Smart dodging traffic in the Flatiron District for Hacks, Dakota Johnson covered in (presumably fake) blood for the Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, Anne Hathaway twirling outside the Long Island Bar for The Devil Wears Prada 2 — Jane Jacobs’s “sidewalk ballet” made literal. —Nate Jones

17.

Because for More Than 50 Years, Joe Holtz Kept the Coop Running

When the Park Slope Food Coop was founded in 1973, it seemed destined to fail for all the usual reasons utopian endeavors fail — people are lazy, or selfish, or just plain disorganized. But the Coop had one thing that failed cooperatives didn’t: Joe Holtz, a gregarious 22-year-old from Sheepshead Bay with a mind for numbers and an incorrigible idealism. “I’d always been interested in business,” he says, “but I knew I would never be a businessman.”

After a few years of fitful growth, the Coop was having trouble keeping the store running. Plenty of people wanted to shop there, but filling all the (unpaid) work shifts was a struggle. So in June 1975, after a vote by its members, Holtz became the Coop’s first paid employee, tasked with enforcing a new work requirement: Everyone had to sign up for a shift every four weeks. If you didn’t work, you couldn’t shop. If you skipped a shift, you had to do two to atone for it. Holtz was the perfect man for the job: patient enough to endure endless complaints (“As a kid, I did a lot of listening to a very talkative family”) and stubborn enough to ignore them.

He remained a Coop employee for the next five decades, eventually becoming treasurer and general manager before retiring this year at 75. Why did he stay for so long? “It was interesting and challenging,” Holtz says. Also, “I didn’t have alternate plans.” He saw the Coop through years of rapid growth: By 1981, it had a waiting list to join, and the store later expanded to take over the two buildings next door. In terms of sales per square foot, it’s the most successful grocery store in the country. Holtz’s father was a budget expert for the city government, which may have influenced his own stewardship of the Coop’s finances: “I was always very, very, very good with numbers.”

Shortly after the Coop’s 50th anniversary, Holtz told the other paid employees — there are now more than 80 — that he intended to retire. So great was the amount of institutional knowledge vested in him he gave 18 months’ notice. Even so, he still gets weekly calls from his replacement as general manager. “I always say to him, ‘I’m here for you,’” says Holtz. ‘I’m completely here for you. Just let me know anytime.’” — Christopher Cox

18.

Because Sunset Park Now Has Its Own Trilingual Newspaper

A Sunset Park bodega worker complained to Lorenzo Tijerina that his boss couldn’t open a new bagel store across the street because the gas wasn’t working, even though he’d been paying rent on the space for nearly three years. “Oh, that’s a great story!” Tijerina recalls thinking; he immediately got a reporter on the case. Tijerina is the publisher (and editor, photographer, web manager, ad salesperson, graphic designer, and main delivery guy) of The Sunset Post, the Spanish-, English-, and Chinese-language community newspaper he runs from the one-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and young son. The 50-year-old, a tax preparer and web developer, once worked for regional papers and TV stations. The Post, which published its first edition in September, began as a venture to reconnect with journalism. He pays freelancers and covers the $1,600 cost for a monthly print run of 4,000 copies through ads, though the project is still not self-sustaining. Like everybody else in media, he’s struggling with traffic — the paper’s website averages 60 readers a day. Still, he puts in 100-hour weeks and hand-delivers issues to about 150 area businesses. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Tijerina says. “Every day I’m like, Why? It’s crazy. But I love doing it.” — Anne Kadet

19.

Because Bodega Cats Might Finally Be Out of Legal Limbo

Thanks to a bill introduced by City Councilmember Keith Powers that would also create free vaccination and spaying and neutering services. “I just thought, What’s a more universally New York idea than making sure the bodega cat is taken care of?” he says. Michelladonna (above), host of the viral video series Shop Cats, calls bodega cats “an extension of family.” Plus “the manager and the security.”

20.

Because Our Museums Hung the Work …

While the Smithsonian is busy memory-holing DEI, five New York museums gave Black artists major, career-defining retrospectives. At MoMA, “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” made technique — dragging acrylics and tessellating time — the vehicle to alchemize anger into beauty. At the Guggenheim, “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” turned the rotunda into a commons with mosaics of mirror, ceramic, glass, oyster shell, and black soap — fracture arranged toward repair. At the Whitney, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” restored the portrait to its rightful place in the public forum with grisaille flesh against saturated grounds. At the Met, “Lorna Simpson: Source Notes” treated painting and photography as an ecology, cool fronts moving through archives to widen the frame of history. And uptown, the Bronx Museum anointed a kitchen-table visionary with “Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald”: Her vernacular figures in air-dry clay, Wite-Out, and glitter are tough and tender, faith made visible. In a year of cancellations and euphemisms, the city mounted a counterprogram that was quietly insurrectionary, stubbornly joyous. The surprise was how ordinary it all felt: New Yorkers lined up, kids pointed, elders nodded — no special pleading required. Whitten’s time-thick surfaces, Johnson’s anxious healing, Sherald’s skies, Simpson’s cool weather, McDonald’s testimony — the visual relish was the point. — Jerry Saltz

21.

And the Frick and the Studio Museum in Harlem Got Big Makeovers

We asked the directors to pay their neighbor a visit. They gushed a lot and betrayed, perhaps, a hint of reno envy.

The Frick’s Axel Rüger on the Studio Museum:

The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Axel Rüger: “The higher you go up, the better view you get. Thelma built a roof terrace, which feels like it’s the size of half a football field. It’s enormous up there. And then the roof tower is to die for. You can just imagine on warm summer nights spending time up there surrounded by lower buildings and impressive views.”

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

Axel Rüger: “It’s cute. All these little chairs. Their education space is different from ours, more geared toward making and messing with materials. There’s a nice parallel between having that space for kids as well as space for the professional artists in residence.”

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

Axel Rüger: “The steps are a reference to the stoops in Harlem. It’s a flexible space for people to sit and, in modern parlance, ‘hang out.’ And, of course, there’s the suggestion that those steps then continue up into the street through the clear windows. There’s this constant connection with the outside world.”

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

The Studio Museum’s Thelma Golden on the Frick:

The Frick.

Photo: Nicholas Venezia

Thelma Golden: “I have a lot of admiration for architect Annabelle Selldorf and the way she blends the old and the new. There are now lots of different ways one can move through the museum, even new ways to experience the courtyard and other spaces.”

Photo: Nicholas Venezia

Thelma Golden: “The new staircase is a beautiful call-and-response to the grand staircase in the old building. Obviously, I love a staircase. We have a beautiful one too.”

Photo: Nicholas Venezia

Thelma Golden: “The new staircase is a beautiful call-and-response to the grand staircase in the old building. Obviously, I love a staircase. We have a beautiful one too.”

Thelma Golden: “I haven’t yet been to a concert in the auditorium but love the semi-circular nature of it, the sense of intimacy, the way the stage and the audience are connected. The shape of the space offers a very different experience in the building.”

Photo: Nicholas Venezia

— As told to Adriane Quinlan

22.

Because a Ukrainian Teenager Learned the Podolyanka By Astor Place

On the fourth story of a building in the East Village, there’s a school that teaches traditional Ukrainian dance. Olya Melnyk, 16, found her way there after her family was displaced in 2022 from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. There, school had been constantly interrupted; every day felt fractured. “People weren’t living life normally,” Olya says. “They were always afraid.” The air-raid sirens could last for 15 minutes, two hours, or six hours, and they went off almost daily. Her family found stability in New York, but she felt out of place. The Plast program she had joined, a Scouts-type Ukrainian organization, was mostly for kids who grew up in the city and featured grammar lessons she didn’t need. Olya had never danced before, and the classes became a way for her to safeguard her connection to the place she had left — and to encounter a completely new side of it. At least that’s how it began: Now she’s in love with dance itself. There’s the breadth of styles, the ultraprecise footwork. “Dance is interesting,” Olya says. “I go there for dancing — not only to socialize. I just want to dance.” — Emma Alpern

23.

Because I Listed 24 Vibrators on Facebook and Met So Many of My Horny Neighbors

A few years ago, two boxes filled with Maude vibrators showed up at my door. (I am The Cut’s “Sex Diaries” columnist, and things like this happen to me.) They sat on the floor of my closet until one morning I decided they had to go. So I whipped up a post in my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook: Anyone interested could meet me in my apartment building that day. I had no idea if my neighbors would be delighted or revolted. Then the responses poured in.

A cheerful, high-energy woman who reminded me of Allison Janney DM’d, “A lot of my friends turning 60 this year! This would be a great gift to keep the juices flowing.” When she showed up at my door, I was on a work call, so the interaction was quick and efficient. She gave me a thumbs-up, then motioned for a few more. I handed over a box, as if she were a trick-or-treater, and she pocketed about five. She made a bowlike gesture and off she went.

A nonbinary bartender knocked on my door and treated the exchange as if I were handing them a vintage ceramic ashtray from an upstate art fair. They told me they worked at a restaurant in Red Hook and suggested I stop by for a spicy margarita sometime. A silver-haired woman in her 70s, an old-money-type Brooklyn Heights Wasp, told me, “This will be such a wonderful gift for my niece; she’s engaged!” I didn’t buy it. The exchange was quick, from my hands straight into her L.L.Bean Boat and Tote.

One woman DM’d, “My best friend’s bachelorette is next weekend! Can pick it up tonight!” (She was one of three people who used the bachelorette-party cover.) I left her about six vibes in a TJ Maxx bag downstairs. She later texted, “That felt like an episode of Sex and the City!”

Next was a bashful grad student from Columbia’s engineering school who could not make eye contact. After a total interaction of ten seconds, I gave him the vibe and he zipped it into his backpack, then ran to the elevator. By the looks of his Facebook profile, the next guy presented like another nerdy virgin. But when I met him downstairs, he sat down on the lobby couch and got comfy. He must have done a deep dive on my column as he went on to tell me that he and his girlfriend were starting to experiment more but didn’t know where to start. “Any advice?” I didn’t have the time or the strength to fully engage with him.

After that, I had only a few left and couldn’t keep up with DMs, so I deleted the post and shifted my bedtime focus to Mo Willems.

A few days later, a reserved mom from my kids’ school whom I didn’t know that well DM’d, “Your Buy Nothing post literally made my week.” I had a feeling she wanted one but was too nervous to ask, so I offered to put a vibrator aside for her, to which she gave an exclamation point and a thumbs-up. About a week later, we met at our local library, where I handed off the vibrator with so much discretion you’d think it was a drug deal. We never discussed it again. But after that day, we started hugging hello at drop-off and sending each other funny late-night Reels on motherhood and marriage. She’s one of my favorite new friends. — Alyssa Shelasky

24.

Because Our Next Great Rock Band Was Formed in a Fort Greene Basement

Geese is that rare thing: a great New York band composed of only native New Yorkers. Its third album, Getting Killed, a feral, clanging animal of a record, propelled the group into the stratosphere this year, but its members have been making noise underground — literally, in some cases — since childhood.

They formed the band as precocious teenagers growing up in de Blasio–era Brooklyn with the kind of artsy liberal parents who endowed their children with the freedom to become total weirdos. Front man Cameron Winter, a talented songwriter with an odd, trembling voice and a knack for bleak one-liners — “Today I met who I’m gonna be from now on / And he’s a piece of shit,” he croons on his breakout solo album, Heavy Metal — grew up in Park Slope. His father is a composer; his mother recently wrote a best-selling memoir about polyamory.

Cameron met two of his fellow Geese, drummer Max Bassin and guitarist Emily Green, while attending Brooklyn Friends, the Quaker school in Downtown Brooklyn. Max’s late father, a music executive, left behind walls filled with gold records, while his mother, Annie Bassin, remembers strapping headphones to her belly while pregnant. “Around the age of 10, I saw that Max was very musical,” she says. “And I just said, ‘Your job is to save rock and roll.’”

The three were all enrolled at the Park Slope Rock School. “They had a natural level where they heard something and could play it almost immediately,” says Jason Domnarski, the program’s founder. Cameron, he adds, “had great skills on the piano, and man, his voice! Super-unique, crazy range — he walked in with that. And he would come in with pages of lyrics.” (Bassist Dominic DiGesu, Geese’s sole Manhattanite, attended a different rock school on the Upper West Side.)

When, in high school, Emily, Max, and Cameron built a music studio in the basement of Max’s Fort Greene brownstone, Annie put up heavy drapes for sound-proofing and wasn’t fazed. It was there that the band put together what is technically its first album, A Beautiful Memory, which includes “Cherry Skies,” a song previously recorded with the Park Slope Rock School. They were “like 13,” says Domnarski, “and singing about some crazy drug trip.” — Zach Schonfeld

25.

Because a Location Scout Has Taken 1.3 Million Photos of New York Interiors

Kendall Waldman has worked for more than a decade as a location scout, door-knocking her way into mansions in Forest Hills or buzzing up to Soho lofts and delivering her spiel from the stoop. Those who let her in for a few minutes could see a big payday — make the cut and a beloved home might find its way onscreen. Other days, she’s a researcher poring over Google Maps and Zillow. On the street, she works like an investigator, looking for tells: A single townhouse buzzer may mean a place with a single owner, more likely to have been decorated uniquely. Old glass could mean period rooms. Once inside, Waldman operates like a documentary photographer; that’s what she studied in art school. And she got into film as a way to “Trojan horse my own art into the dreamiest day job.” Most scouts shoot for directors and producers then protect their images on private sites, but, this year, Waldman started publishing some of the 1.3 million shots she has taken as a scout — images she has always seen as part of her art practice. She found time to organize them during the Hollywood strikes and published a website that resembles the sites other scouts in the industry use to share their portfolios, except she arranges the images by type of space, from entryway to attic, closet to playhouse, inviting observations about how New Yorkers choose to live. As she puts it, “They’re data points on the spectrum of possible ways to be.” — Adriane Quinlan

“For the show Elementary, I always needed houses for villains. The lot sizes are big in Kew Gardens, and I knocked on the door of this really grand house. It was owned by Orthodox Jews who ran a day care in the basement and told me right away that it was Charlie Chaplin’s old house. When I walked into the living room, the owner’s mother was standing to watch TV, even though there were these two heavy sofas along the perimeter.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

“I was on a Woody Allen movie looking for an apartment in Soho that was supposed to belong to a young person. It was a funny assignment because young people don’t live in Soho anymore. All the geographic orientations were outdated. They were from Woody Allen’s era, but young actors had been plugged in. I found this by ringing buzzers, and I walked into this totally insane duplex. The owners said Lenny Kravitz used to live in it.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

“I was supposed to find some sort of flophouse or brothel. This is the Hotel Wolcott — a hotel they once turned into long-term-stay apartments. The two managers were showing me the different rooms. It’s tiny, a little jewel box. It was perfect, but we ended up using a house in Midwood.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

“For Girls, there was a character modeled on Anderson Cooper who dates Elijah, and I was looking for his apartment. I was in the East Village and saw a single buzzer. I love places where someone had money but didn’t hire a designer.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

“My ex-boyfriend’s new stepfather had bought Frank Sinatra’s former Upper East Side penthouse, his ‘glittering grotto in the sky.’ I love the power-clashing of every design decision: Apple Store Lucite stairs, parquet floors, and there was shag carpeting and this absolutely epic terrace.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

“A design firm in Greenpoint made their office the front room and lived above it. I was surprised by this liminal space they had made into a kids’ playroom.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

“A design firm in Greenpoint made their office the front room and lived above it. I was surprised by this liminal space they had made into a kids’ playroom.”

“On East 13th Street, there’s a building made of block concrete, and I could see the roof had skylights. I knocked, and this older man, Robin Middleton, let me in. The downstairs was the studio, and it had all-black walls. Art was on little pedestals in every corner of the house, these deeply personal antique toys made with found material.”

Photo: Kendall Waldman

26.

Because John Wilson Actually Built a Movie Theater

When news spread that the filmmaker John Wilson was swinging a hammer in Ridgewood this past spring to build a movie theater, it seemed possible that it was a bit for HBO’s How To With John Wilson. But Wilson had been living in the neighborhood for more than a decade and knew there was a hunger for non-lame, noncorporate spaces. “I could just sense that,” he says. Wilson partnered with friends Davis Fowlkes, a film-business veteran, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, a critic. Low Cinema opened in May with two Hugh Grant films; a 4K restoration of Billy Madison played over the summer. The space is equally unpretentious: Carpet printed with swirling film reels fronts a concession stand that sells Sno-Caps and $5 popcorn. Look past the candy on sale, and there’s a stack of the parody zine Cashiers du Cinéma ($15). Stay after the movie to see the popcorn cleared out via leaf blower.

As intended, Low Cinema has become just another neighborhood spot, “almost as if we were a butcher,” says Wilson. An artsy crowd comes for the 16-mm. rarities; families turn out for Jackie Chan’s Police Story. The founders have been able to hire three part-time employees, start paying down the $150,000 they borrowed, and show films from distributors who may not have known — or believed — they existed in the spring, says Fowlkes, who does the outreach. “Now they say, ‘Oh, I guess you are real,’ and it spreads from there.” — Adriane Quinlan

27.

Because a Retired High-School English Teacher Could Be Hiding in Every Frame

In 2016, after nearly 30 years teaching high-school English in Queens, Robert Gold retired and set three goals for his new life. “I wanted to go to the gym more often and work in an animal shelter, but those things never happened,” he says. “And then I wanted to do background work.” As a child, he’d dreamed of being an actor but never pursued it. This time around, he registered with Central Casting and Grant Wilfley Casting, the two main clearinghouses for movie and TV extras in New York, and crossed his fingers.

He picked a good time to launch a second act in show business. The streaming boom was in full swing, fueling a surge in TV shoots across the city and the demand for background extras. Many are local retirees like Gold, happy to collect the modest pay, enjoy the free lunch, and have somewhere to be before noon.

Gold landed his first gig in 2018, at 57, on a movie shooting under the code name Romeo. When he arrived at Steiner Studios the first morning, a production assistant was corralling extras into different groups and handed him a sticker that said JP. “I was like, ‘What is this?’” he recalls. “And the PA said, ‘You’ll find out.’” Gold was seated in the audience of a talk-show set. “There was a really good-looking guy in the row behind me, and suddenly, he disappeared and this scrawny, weird-looking guy took his place,” Gold says. It was Joaquin Phoenix, in character as Arthur Fleck. Romeo, he later learned, was Joker. Continue reading …

28.

Because Midtown Had a Cotton-Ball Palace

Thousands of people became momentarily obsessed with a 52nd Street Duane Reade after comic and TikToker Tina Hand discovered that, for some reason, it sold (pretty much) only cotton balls.

29.

Because the Deaf Community Basketball Team Faced Off Against the NYPD — And Won

In a year of electric (if ultimately disappointing) New York basketball, one squad had an undefeated season: the Deaf Community Basketball Team, led by David Perez and Heriberto Almonte, which went 5-0 in the police department’s first citywide summer tournament, beating teams of cops representing each borough.

Detective Angel Familia, the department’s disability liaison, had been trying to build ways of connecting the NYPD with Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, so last year, he reached out to Perez and Almonte, both former interns at the NYPD. The two played basketball at Lexington School for the Deaf and were tasked with coaching and putting together a team to face off against the department. They succeeded, but no one expected them to win.

The tournament “was very competitive,” says Assistant Commissioner Alden Foster. Last summer, the Bronx NYPD team, led by Assistant Chief Benjamin Gurley, beat the Deaf team during a scrimmage. But in the first game of this year’s tournament, the Deaf team flipped the script and handed them a convincing loss. After that, Foster got calls from police chiefs in Manhattan asking for tips on how to strategize against them. “I don’t think most boroughs took it seriously until the word got out that they were really good,” Familia says. Then the team won against Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

By the final match, at which Perez and Almonte’s squad tipped off against Staten Island, the hype about their success was at its peak. Family members of the Deaf team and police from all the boroughs came to watch. “Many of the cops learned sign language before, during, and after the games,” Foster says. Next year, the team will defend their title. “We’re definitely going to run it back,” says Familia. “I’m sure the cops would like another chance at this.”— Jeremy Rellosa

30.

Because 1996’s Raunchiest Lesbian Bar Came Back for a Weekend

Meow Mix was a lesbian bar on Houston that closed in 2004 after a near-decadelong run as one of the tentpoles of the ’90s downtown queer-music scene. There was the Cock and nights like Squeeze-Box at Don Hill’s, but Meow Mix was where the girls got down and dirty — in the basement, at someone’s walk-up nearby, or in the bathroom on top of the sink. “It was drinking, drugs, and rock and roll,” says Alice Eisenberg, a co-producer, along with former owner Brooke Webster, of the bar’s 30th-anniversary reunion in October at Parkside Lounge. Over four days, writer-filmmaker Guinevere Turner and archivist Cassandra Gillig screened ’90s and aughts deep cuts of Jenny Shimizu, Olivia Travel ads, and Jodie Foster in Nell. JD Samson DJ-ed. The bar’s house band, Fragglerock, reunited. Cynthia Nixon and Justin Vivian Bond introduced Zohran Mamdani, there to kick off early voting. “The only man we wanted at a historic-dyke-bar reunion” was the night’s running joke. The crowd of some 900 was made up of now middle-aged Meow Mixers rocking out. But there were also zoomers who had heard about the reunion from a new wave of queer-event calendars on Instagram such as @dykesanddolls. “When Meow Mix reached out, they said, ‘What you are doing is the spirit of what we were doing then,’” says Anna Campbell, co-founder of the account. “How incredible we get to bridge the age gap. Some of these young lesbians were like, ‘Yeah, I love dating older women.’” — Mike Albo

31.

Because the 50th Street Subway Station Is a Destination

It was a nippy Wednesday night in October, and inside See No Evil Pizza, families were practically bumping elbows at neighboring tables as they reached for pies topped with soppressata or hot peppers. Next door, at the nearly pitch-black bar Nothing Really Matters, a pair of court officers knocked back tomato martinis as a couple got handsy over pilsners a few seats down. After settling their bills, many walked a few steps out the door and right to the turnstiles to catch a downtown 1 train at the 50th Street station. “When I tell people it’s in the subway, they’re like, ‘Really?’” says Alan Feigenbaum, an attorney who was celebrating his client’s prenup agreement at the bar. “I’m like, ‘Trust me.’”

Both storefronts are the work of their owner, Adrien Gallo, who also runs the coffee shop Tiny Dancer across the hall. More than a decade ago, Gallo opened the Grand Banks oyster bar at Pier 25. “When you build stuff on boats with no right angles, you can pretty much build anything anywhere,” he tells me. Running an 1,100-square-foot restaurant in the subway station comes with its own unique challenges: No gas line has meant cooking with all-electric ovens; the New York Post decrying the subway system as a crime-ridden hellscape isn’t helping with marketing; and the MTA can shutter the station out of the blue for, say, maintenance work, which is exactly what happened around the time See No Evil opened.

Gallo persisted, though, and eventually word got around, thanks in part to the Michelin inspectors giving See No Evil a shout-out late last year and to commuter foot traffic. Which is how Jaya Bala found himself seated at the chef’s counter, enjoying one of his rare nights out as a new father, before catching a showing of The Queen of Versailles. He is a fan of his pie but even more so the setting. When eating out, “how often do you look over and see a clearly neglected MTA beam?” he says. “It’s a vibe.” — Matthew Sedacca

32.

Elsbeth Is the New Law & Order

Network TV has long provided the income streams that not so secretly float New York actors. Everyone on Broadway has Law & Order somewhere in their Playbill bios and, with the ascendancy of The Gilded Age, maybe a prestige HBO credit, too. But recently no show has done more for this cohort than Elsbeth. A spinoff of The Good Wife, it follows Carrie Preston’s daffy lawyer to various local subcultures as she solves each week’s mystery, often with a delightfully on-the-nose guest star. Amy Sedaris was a resentful comedy writer, Stephen Colbert a vain talk-show host, Julia Fox an influencer mourning a husband who wasn’t actually dead (until she murdered him), William Jackson Harper killed to save his poetry journal, Nathan Lane committed a crime for the love of opera, and Jane Krakowski was a pushy Realtor with an ulterior motive. Some actors who were on The Good Wife and its other spinoff have been reborn on Elsbeth in new roles — the late Linda Lavin as the head of a co-op board, Annaleigh Ashford as a Sleepy Hollow housewife — and stars have returned as their Chicago selves, such as Sarah Steele, who played an assistant, then turned up as a campaign manager. Then there are the regulars: Elsbeth’s son, Ben Levi Ross, is on Ragtime, and her colleagues Ethan Slater and Lindsay Mendez starred in SpongeBob and Merrily We Roll Along. The show even found actors to portray characters inspired by real life: Jesse Tyler Ferguson played an ersatz Andy Cohen who offed a Real Housewife. Well, Elsbeth calls them “Lavish Ladies.” — Jackson McHenry

33.

Because Sasha Gordon Finished Her Paintings Just in Time

In the days leading up to her first show at the David Zwirner gallery, the artist Sasha Gordon was painting 17 hours at a clip, starting late in the afternoon and continuing until 11 the next morning. She was relentless. When she’d finish one section of a painting, she’d take a quick nap to clean her mind, then go at it again. “When I am painting,” Gordon said, “I usually get fast toward the end. I’m excited, but I’m also really nervous and stressed. This time I was really hard on myself. I had gotten better at painting, but I had higher standards.” Her ascendancy in the art world had been swift. This show was highly anticipated. “And then it sucked because I was running out of time … So usually I can sacrifice things, but I had such ambitious ideas for the painting …”

The day came when the paintings were scheduled to be moved from her studio to the gallery. But she still wasn’t finished. So she followed the paintings to Zwirner and camped there, painting in a secluded corner while the gallery did its business, then, after everyone left, working all through the night, and sleeping and painting in the shuttered space until there was no time left. Continue reading …

34.

Because the Maître D’s Took the Power Back From Resy

“I’ve realized that I’m pretty good at recognizing faces. And so if people come in a second, third time, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, nice to see you again. Weren’t you here the other day?’ I feel like people are always surprised by that.”

Make the reservation IRL: “All of our tables are for reservations, but we try to keep the entire 12-seat bar for walk-ins. When people come in and are like, ‘I’ve been really wanting to eat here, but I can’t make a reservation,’ we’ll always find a way to book them in — if we can’t do that night, we’ll offer other times.”

“I think of myself like a duck: You can’t really see how fast their feet are moving under the water. You look really graceful on top, but underneath there’s a lot going on.”

Ask for an email: “I love to give my email to guests who have a good sense of humor. And guests who are kind, guests who love wine. By all means, come up to the door before you leave and I’ll happily give it to you. Also: Lunch is back. There’s often more availability, and oftentimes the price point is just a little bit lower. I wouldn’t pooh-pooh lunch.”

Derek Summerlin, Le Veau d’Or

“I’m a little bit of a psychopath about the room. I’m paying attention to the guests who might be on the older end of the crowd and trying to seat them in our quieter sections. And then maybe putting some industry people close together so they can yap. Being very mindful of all that.”

Start with dinner at 5 p.m.: “The reality is we all work in this business because we love people. The trick is we sort of have to get to know you. That takes commitment. And it probably takes some dinners at an inconvenient time.”

Timmy Tran, I Cavallini

“I feel like every week I’m dealing with the longest line I’ve ever dealt with in my life. I try to be present and to give each individual who wants to dine in our establishment my full attention. A lot of times, people will wait an hour and a half before we even open.”

Be nice about it all: “There are definitely fewer people I’m turning away on Tuesday and Wednesday. For those who are exceptionally patient and kind, I might offer to personally book them a reservation a month out.”

35.

Because the Funky New York Store Lives On

When Ruby McCollister, Arabella Aldrich, and Leah Hennessey first painted the walls of their new Flatiron store, Surrender Dorothy, emerald green, set up a TV playing videos of tornadoes, and filled a room with dollhouses that look like miniatures of Auntie Em’s house, it wasn’t just that they were referencing The Wizard of Oz. “We were vaguely inspired by Princess Ozma from the Wizard of Oz books — she spies on Dorothy before she comes to Oz — and her boudoir,” says McCollister. Surrender Dorothy does feel like a bizarre boudoir, a freaky, chic-y one where copies of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and Mark Booth’s Camp are strewn on the floor and the owners offer you tea when you arrive. It’s undoubtedly the only place on lower Fifth where you can buy a pair of big black underpants that say ALL I WANT TO DO IS SIN AND SUFFER BUT ALL I DO SUFFER! on the behind or a $650 hand-painted mermaid tail from a 1930s theater production. We’re not in the SoulCycle’d, Aritzia’d Flatiron District anymore, Toto.

The shop space (13 W. 17th St.) is rented to Surrender Dorothy’s partners by the 95-year-old Broadway actor John Cullum, who bought the building with his late wife, the dancer Emily Frankel. On the third floor is Studio 17, a theater that Cullum and Frankel started to host and perform with their artist friends and that still houses Off Broadway productions. “Our quest was to bring New York another funky store — to resurrect New York as the funky-shop center of the world,” says McCollister. “We need funky stores to live a proper life.” — Hilary Reid

36.

Because Night Club 101 Is Keeping Billy Jones’s Legacy Alive

When Billy Jones, co-owner of the Williamsburg venue Baby’s All Right, died at 45 in June, the nightlife scene lost a kind of godfather. For more than ten years, Baby’s has defined an era of indie music and hosted early shows by the likes of Billie Eilish, SZA, and Dua Lipa. Tom Moore, Jones’s friend and business partner, says Jones possessed a prodigious curatorial skill for creating rooms that people wanted to hang out in — a “genius that was difficult for people to understand.”

Today, there’s nowhere Jones’s legacy is more strongly felt than in his final creation, Night Club 101, a 150-capacity concert hall in the East Village, which he opened in January with Moore. Running in the former Pyramid Club space (imagine a small sweaty party in the 1980s where celebrities slummed it with art kids), Night Club 101 has become the room every independent musician wants to play. It’s rare that a club looks great on social media — particularly with Mondrianesque soundproofing in the live room — and actually feels great to be in, but since opening, Night Club 101 has had a packed schedule. A party thrown by the owners’ indie-sleaze pal the Dare helped christen the space; underplays from hardcore punks Show Me the Body and Idles were described as “unmitigated chaos” and a “limbs-flailing, sweat-drenched pit,” respectively.

Moore says he and Jones were brought together by a willingness to buck conventional business sense and platform unknown artists they believed in. At Baby’s, and now at Night Club 101, Jones built a stage where underground artists could appear as he saw them: headliners. That applies even to the backstage perks. Bands that sell out 101 get a free steak dinner at nearby Funny Bar, which Moore and Jones also founded. “Where else,” Moore says, “can you feel like this much of a rock star for selling 150 tickets?” — Adlan Jackson

37.

Because They Took Back Downtown From West Village Girls

For a solid stretch between summer and early fall, two experimental, grimy-gay shows directed by Sam Pinkleton — Josh Sharp’s ta-da! and Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? — played to packed houses downtown. “We yanked the Village back from these white girls,” says Sharp. “You would walk past bars and be like, That one’s for the Lululemon set, and this is for us.” The double bill became the queer Barbenheimer with fans of one buying tickets to both. “I could feel our audiences getting to know one another,” says Bassichis.

Playing an extended run at the Greenwich House Theater, ta-da! was a lewd PowerPoint presentation about Sharp’s relationship with his dead mother. Can I Be Frank?, at Soho Playhouse, was a manic testimonial about creative ambition and political activism filtered through the stand-up of the comedian Frank Maya. The connective creative force was Pinkleton, who won a Tony this year for Oh, Mary! — the Cole Escola phenomenon that began nearby at the Lucille Lortel before transferring to Broadway. Pinkleton’s sensibility, which he describes as “sticky floors in a scuzzy room,” is in part a response to mainstream theater’s neatly packaged commercial slickness. “Everything looks like a fucking West Elm, and these two shows and spaces defied that,” he says. That was the point. “They felt like actual New York.” — Jason P. Frank

38.

Because Ruben Toledo Relived His Cuban Childhood on Broadway

The artist recalled, and painted, Old Havana after seeing Buena Vista Social Club.

“I left Cuba in 1967, when I was 5, and the show reminded me how vibrant street life was in those days. There was live music everywhere. Everyone dressed up. I had an aunt who was a loan shark, and her clients worked at fancy department stores and wore Dior and Balenciaga. The afternoons in Old Havana were a glorious thing because all these shopgirls would leave the store for a snack or lunch and everyone would come out to watch them go by. It was a fashion parade. I had the sense as a kid that everyone was a performer, everyone was a singer, everyone had this double life. There was a lady in our neighborhood who was a singer at Tropicana, which was bigger than the Buena Vista. She’d be in her curlers by day, and by night she’d be in a black dress, nice jewelry, and clickety-clack her heels over those cobblestone streets to the club. Walking anywhere in Old Havana, the music is just spilling out of everywhere, and in Cuba it’s not like you just hear music. You participate in it. You perform in it. That was true of the Broadway show, too. People were so involved. Those musicians are so damn good that the audience was losing it.” — As told to Erik Maza

39.

And Because Their Parents May Think This City Is an Overpriced Hellscape and That They’re Better Off in Med School, But Young Artists Are Still Moving Here — in Droves

This year marked a high point in art-school enrollment across New York City. At Parsons School of Design, first-year enrollment is up 22 percent from 2024. Over the past decade, the Fashion Institute of Technology’s fine-arts program has seen a 35 percent uptick, and last year, Pratt Institute’s drawing and painting programs reached their highest enrollment levels in almost 15 years. We found a smattering of freshly minted members of the class of 2029 and asked about their first semesters, the state of the industry, and why, despite the fact that they may never be able to afford a studio here, they chose to become artists. — Eloise King-Clements

↑ Genesis “GiGi” Galloway, Parsons, Fine Arts

What first put the idea of art school in your head? It started in my middle-school years. All of the games and media that I consumed.

What do you mean by “games”?Have you ever heard of the game Life Is Strange? It’s a kind of visual-novel type game. The game is like a work of art. It’s very, very beautiful. Nothing inherently throughout my life told me, “Art school is a path you can choose.” But there were all of these aesthetics that I picked up around me that exuded “art school” without me even knowing it.

How does art school measure up to your expectations?It’s a mix of deep disappointment and the same wide-eyed feeling I always had as a kid. There are so many wealthy people — people who don’t give a fuck. And I have always given a fuck. But then sometimes I take a breath and go, Wow, this really is what I wanted to do my whole life.

↑ Gina Lim, Parsons, Fashion Design

Does the job market ever make you nervous?A “stable” career is no longer as stable as it was ten years ago. If the job market is shaky anyway, I’d rather just do what I want to do. I’m the only one in my family who has ever gone to art school. When I was in middle school, I was like, I’m gonna become a doctor. It’s a common thing in Asian households, and both of my siblings aren’t doctors, so I was my parents’ last hope. But eventually I was like, Whoa, actually, dude, being a doctor is really difficult. And I have shaky hands. Sorry, guys.

Is there anything that does make you nervous? Your presence on social media kind of dictates how cool people think you are, and how cool people think you are validates or invalidates your work. That’s, like, terrifying. It’s so stupid. Every single time you walk into Parsons you’re gonna see five groups of people all wearing black, and at least one of them is wearing a Rick Owens boot. There’s this weird superiority complex in fashion right now, where a lot of people think you have to dim down all the passion that you would put into your art and take out all emotion. You have to make it a lot more abstract in order for it to be valid. Your work has to be kind of hard.

What does coolness mean right now?It’s horrible to say, but in the context of being able to thrive inside of the community, which also means thriving on social media, it’s to be as niche as possible. God forbid you and somebody else likes the same fucking thing.

↑ Agdel Julian Josue Hernandez Anaya, Parsons, Fine Arts

So you did a year in premed at UMass Amherst?My parents are immigrants. My father is very traditional. He forced — I mean, heavily persuaded — me to apply to UMass Amherst, and just to please him, I was like, Fuck it. I spent the entire year plotting and applying to scholarships. This semester has been humbling, though. I need to not do so much socializing.

You like to party?Insufferably.

↑ Jamie Shoemake, Pratt, Printmaking

What do you think about New York?I love it. It’s so much better than L.A. It’s just, like, constantly alive. We didn’t have the money to visit a bunch of schools, so when my dad found out Pratt had a volleyball team, I applied for painting and then switched to printmaking. It’s literally a miracle that I’m here. I don’t know how we scraped it all together. My word of the year is Why me? Why me?!

What do you love about it?My family lived on the other side of the hill in L.A. I definitely didn’t feel accepted in L.A., and I didn’t feel like people actually saw me for who I was. Now, I walk outside, and I can wear whatever the fuck I want. I’m on the subway in, like, mini-shorts and a tank top and a fur coat and shit. Nobody gives a fuck.

Do you think being an artist is political?I do think about politics a lot. There was a part of me that thought I wanted to make a change with my art, but I’m a white-girl transplant. Like, I’m not the voice that they need to hear, and that’s … I have to accept that. I want to contribute, but I don’t really know how. I’m not gay or anything.

↑ Eros Hanif, FIT, Textile and Surface Design

What made you want to go to art school?I knew I wanted to go into art from a very young age. I thought I wanted to go to Pratt, but I learned that a lot of its programs are more computer-based, and I just didn’t feel like I could be proud of my work if I never had the chance to make it myself. I never took physics or chem — I was all in on art. All my other friends went into nursing, finance, business. And I’m making this, like, stupid video about squirrels or something.

What’s your dream career when you graduate?I want to design for commercial stores, like Pacsun or Tillys. I walk in there, and I don’t see anything on the racks that I like.

↑ Rachel Alexandre, Pratt, Film

So your mom was an actress, but she put you in a STEM high school?I think she kind of did that on purpose. I haven’t really spoken about this with her, but I do think that she was kind of scared for me. My mom’s a teacher now. She definitely had a lot of trouble finding jobs. It was a struggle for her. It made me a lot more nervous in high school. When I told people I was going to study film, I would kind of see a look on their face, like, I’m not really sure about that.

How’s your first semester been?A lot of people came from art high schools, so they know exactly what the professor’s talking about. They know how to use the equipment. And it’s very intimidating. I have that impostor-syndrome type vibe.

↑ Tilley Aga Thom, Cooper Union, Film

So you worked in film for a year and then came to the States? In Denmark, it’s expected that you take at least one or two gap years working or traveling or just figuring your shit out. I worked on film sets in Toronto, where I attended high school. There was good money in that, and it made this year more feasible. The U.S. election was a big day for me. I thought, Okay, do I really want to head into this crazy world? I was getting calls from Canadian friends, from even my European friends, saying, “What the fuck are you thinking — going over there and spending all your savings?” It’s inside out. But everywhere’s inside out!

Why do you think more people are applying to art school now?I was talking with a friend about the lack of friction in the world. Your creative decisions on a day-to-day basis are narrowing down. People want to create, not just for the sake of making art, but even just to be able to knit a sweater. There’s this desire to be responsible for something in a world where so much of what you buy and participate in is just not up to you.

Did you ever think, Forget it — I’m just gonna study economics?I always say, “I’ll just become a chef if things don’t work out.” My mom is like, “Do you know how much more unstable that is?”

Source: https://www.curbed.com/article/reasons-to-love-new-york-2025.html