Reasons to Love New York
A batch of irreplaceable eccentrics who roam our streets.
Since 2005, this magazine has ended the year with a love letter to its hometown. This year, we pay tribute to those inspiringly singular New Yorkers who wouldn’t— probably couldn’t—live anywhere else. Fitting in is for the rest of America.
Being a New Yorker, probably more than being a resident of any other place on Earth, is a choice. Even if you are born here, you choose to stay—certainly, there are easier places to live. The rest of us have sought this place out, have moved across the Hudson or the world, for the opportunity to lose ourselves and become ourselves and, in the process, to take pleasure in the jostle of other people’s dreams. This is a portfolio of people-watching: a collection of 24 New Yorkers who stand out from the sidewalk menagerie like apparitions, courageous members of the resistance fighting the forces of placelessness that gave us Hudson Yards. Daniel Featherstone has been documenting New York’s characters for years, shooting on some of the same street corners as fellow photographer Bill Cunningham. After Cunningham’s death, he has continued the tradition, searching for people who are “always dressed for the day, and you can see them dressing like that every day.” Few of them are young anymore. “I’ve always been attracted to the older generation because they seem to be more individuals than the younger generation,” Featherstone says. And then we asked six novelists, also New Yorkers, to go further and find out who a few of these remarkable individuals are. Of course, we could have assigned enough novelists to write 8 million more biographies—this is another reason to love New York. We are all, always, both urban anthropologist and subject of another stranger’s fascination; the people-watcher and someone worth watching. This city wouldn’t be the same without us.
On west 126th street, a reverend stops us on the corner and asks if I’m aware that I’m in the presence of legends. Eleanor Kennedy, 78, demurs. “You’re only calling me a legend because I’m old,” she teases him. But moments before, an Australian man waiting at a nearby stoplight announced that he just had to introduce himself to Kennedy and Laura Sands, also 78, gravitating toward the charming pair; he left after kissing the ladies’ hands. Later, in the restaurant Lenox Saphire, the owner saw me taking a picture of Kennedy and asked if he could snap one of her as well.
Kennedy and Sands call themselves sister-friends, and their overlapping conversations reflect the intimacy of their 30-yearlong friendship. The pair met at Canaan Baptist Church on West 116th Street in 1989 and have since traveled the world, venturing to France, Australia, and even New Zealand. On the docket this year are trips to Vienna and Budapest. But Harlem is always home.
Kennedy was born in Harlem Hospital. She was raised by her grandmother Eleanora, who arrived in Harlem in the 1930s. Kennedy traveled frequently during her 30-year-long career at American Express and later created a travel company that has helped support her wanderlust. When she was in her early 20s, Kennedy sang in a gospel quartet called the Harlem Beggars that toured Europe, sharing a bill with Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan. In 1964, she performed in Langston Hughes’s play Jerico-Jim Crow and has kept the playbill in a memory book alongside a Christmas card signed by the poet himself.
Sands arrived in Harlem when she was 17 to attend Adelphi University. She was eager to escape South Carolina. One time when she was a girl, out picking cotton, she’d seen a plane fly overhead and wondered why her relatives only visited by train. She vowed that she would fly on a plane someday, a promise she has fulfilled many times over—currently, Sands has traveled to every continent except Antarctica. She collects a bracelet for each new country she visits, and her wrist glitters with gold reminders of Italy, Ghana, and Egypt. In New York, she worked as a special-needs teacher for 30 years, and whenever the Department of Education tried to reassign her to a school downtown, she would refuse to abandon the children in Harlem. She would later win Teacher of the Year twice.
Harlem has never received the respect it deserves, says Kennedy. She points to the neighborhood’s innumerable artistic contributions; in spite of increasing gentrification, Harlem remains a bastion of black culture. Sands mentions the bustling nightlife, the friendliness, the sense of community. A stranger on the street recently pointed out that her shoe was untied and bent herself to tie it. Sands and Kennedy served together on the board of the Harlem Hospital and would hear other black people say they assumed the hospital provided a low level of care because it was in a black neighborhood. These skeptics do not consider that Harlem Hospital would treat gangsters wheeled into the trauma ward with dignity. Or that Harlem Hospital would hire black nurses for internships they could not obtain at hospitals downtown. All four of Sands’s children were born there, and when Kennedy’s water broke suddenly in a movie theater, she begged the ambulance driver to bring her to Harlem Hospital. She wanted to birth her daughter in the same place where she’d been born, the same hospital where the grandmother who raised her died.
“Harlem is the mecca of the world,” Kennedy says. “You haven’t been anywhere until you’ve visited Harlem.”