Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a potluck block party that’s about more than the food. We’ll also get details on two big infrastructure projects that appear to be caught in political crossfire from the federal government shutdown.
West 21st Street is 750 feet long from the crosswalk at the Ninth Avenue end to the one at the 10th Avenue end. On Sunday, 90 eight-foot-long tables will be set up and hundreds of chairs will be set out there.
If you did the math, multiplying 90 by 8 and getting 720, that extra 30 feet will let the organizers leave space every few tables so people can move around or squeeze in more chairs. More than 1,200 people have signed up to attend.
It’s an annual potluck block party, but the organizers say it’s more purposeful than that.
The organizers say it makes people feel less lonely, or at least more connected to each other.
“I’ve lived on this block for 26 years,” said Maryam Banikarim, a co-founder of the event, known as the Longest Table. “The table has changed my experience of the neighborhood. I now go to the coffee shop and I know the neighbors.”
Banikarim is a well-organized organizer and is well connected — she is a former chief marketing officer of Gannett, Hyatt, NBCUniversal and Univision. The Longest Table has a tool kit for people interested in starting similar gatherings in their neighborhoods. There will be Longest Table events on Sunday in Chicago, San Francisco and three other places, and others later in the month.
The one on West 21st Street will have “table captains” — people who have volunteered to act as hosts or hostesses and are responsible for decorations like flowers and candelabra. To keep the event from feeling like a throwback to a middle-school cafeteria, the table captains are told to leave a couple of seats for people who drop in unexpectedly.
The table captains are also responsible for plates, utensils and who brings what. That is, the food, which Banikarim did not mention when I talked with her. She mentioned the cleanup. She mentioned fliers that she put under car windshields on the block, along with signs that said parked cars were to be moved before the attendees gathered. “The first year the table was a bit of a zigzag because not everybody moved their cars,” she said.
But mostly she talked about a newfound sense of neighborhood and connectedness.
A casual event like the Longest Table “changes your outlook, which all the sociologists say,” she said. She mentioned Robert D. Putnam’s influential book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” It argued that Americans are much less involved with social institutions like churches and community groups (including bowling leagues) than past generations were.
“Bowling Alone” came out in 2000. In 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U. S. surgeon general, released a report called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” And, as my colleague John Leland wrote in 2022, “New York City, where one million people live alone, was for two years an experiment in loneliness” during the coronavirus pandemic: “nine million people siloed with smartphones and 24/7 home delivery, cut off from the places where they used to gather.”
The Longest Table began in 2022 after someone on Banikarim’s block took a table outside and had a dinner party on the street. “I walked over,” she said. “I think they thought, Who is this woman?”
Soon she was planning the first Longest Table event. Some 500 people showed up. Banikarim enlisted a survey researcher from Barnard College to question attendees in 2023 and 2024. The results: 79 percent reported feeling less lonely. Even more — 87 percent — said that they had connected with someone they had not known, and even more than that — 90 percent — told the researcher that they felt better about the neighborhood.
Banikarim seems happiest about the unexpected connections that have led to other Longest Table events. She said the person who organized one on his block in Harlem “was a guy who walked by” when the one on 21st Street was going on. The one in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, began with two women who visited a website that Banikarim had set up — “two strangers, and now they’re friends,” she said.
“Because it comes from the neighborhood, everyone does it in a way that’s authentic to them,” she said, “whatever way works for them.”
Weather
Expect mostly sunny skies with a high near 72. At night, temperatures will drop near 57.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Parking rules are in effect.
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Caught in the political crossfire of the shutdown
Today will be just another day of preliminary construction work for a $16 billion railroad tunnel under the Hudson River. On another major project about four miles away, the expansion of the Second Avenue subway line, it will also be just another day.
The two projects have been moving forward this week despite an old and familiar feeling, that they are under threat for political purposes. The Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would withhold $18 billion already committed to the two projects while the Transportation Department reviews their diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
President Trump said earlier that if Democrats in Congress did not vote for a funding bill to keep the government open, he would “do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them.” The announcement about the two projects made the pain of the shutdown personal for two of his adversaries, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.
The Transportation Department’s move wasn’t the only one that underscored how the Trump administration appeared to be using the shutdown as a pretext to punish political opponents. The Energy Department canceled $7.5 billion in Biden-era awards for hundreds of projects, mostly in states led by Democrats — among them New York.
It’s not clear how soon the suspension of federal funding on the two transit projects will affect the work that has been going on. But my colleague Matthew Haag writes that the move by the Transportation Department added another chapter to their long and difficult histories, especially for the tunnel. That project has been in the works for more than 30 years, as an ever-changing cast of federal officials has promised to deal with the congestion and aging infrastructure in perhaps the busiest part of the Northeast Corridor.
METROPOLITAN diary
Just enough
Dear Diary:
I grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn. My mother shopped at the corner grocery store, which sold lox by the pound.
She would often buy enough for one or two bagels, not unusual in our relatively poor neighborhood. She called it a half of a quarter of a pound.
Many years later, when I was an adult and living in Flatbush, I had the urge for a bagel with lox.
I stopped off at a nearby supermarket, went to the counter where the fish was sold and ordered an eighth of a pound of lox.
The gentleman cutting the lox paused and looked at me.
“Having company?” he asked.
— Howard Rubin
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post This Block Party Brings People Together. A Lot of People. appeared first on New York Times.
