There’s not much in New York that has staying power. Every other day, a new scandal outscandals whatever we were just scandalized by; every few years, a hotter, scarier downtown set emerges; the yoga studio up the block from your apartment that used to be a coffee shop has now become a hybrid drug front and yarn store. Sometimes it’s like living in whatever the opposite of Groundhog Day is, waking up each morning in a new and unfamiliar city. That makes it a little bit easier to spot the things that have stood the test of time. This year, Saturday Night Live entered its 50th season, still defiantly delirious, still doing sketches that shouldn’t resonate further than Hoboken, still helmed by the same guy who, 50 years ago, pitched what one executive called “the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.” Dia Art Foundation, a custodian of impossibly high-maintenance modernist art, has also been around for half a century, and so, by the way, has Eli Zabar, the Park Slope Food Coop, and the Hampton Jitney (it’s a bus). Maybe more than a city of constant turnover, we’re a city selective about what we decide to keep. Here, we’ve collected “39 Reasons to Love New York Right Now,” some of which only flared briefly, and a few that we, as a city, fought to preserve.

1.

The first episode of NBC’s Saturday Night aired live from New York on October 11, 1975, and looked like literal trash — gray, brown, muted, somehow both dusty and wet, with sets that appeared to have been left on the sidewalk for a few days. The center stage was paved in real brick, as if the show were being performed not just in New York but on it as well. “It’s what New York was at that time and still is,” creator Lorne Michaels told Rolling Stone in 1979. “Deteriorated, run-down, and loved because of it.” Continue reading …

2.

Politics is a funny business, especially in this city, where voter turnout is abysmally low and the local press corps dedicated to covering the machinations and maneuvers of the powerful has been whittled down to the size of a school-newspaper staff. Politicians can get away with a lot before the public finds out — then it can be years until the voters are able to render a judgment on their behavior.

For most of his three years in office, Mayor Eric Adams has acted like someone with little to lose. He could be out with the boys at the club until the wee hours of the morning, dine with convicted felons, and scold constituents, seemingly free of concern that he would pay a political price for any of it. He could treat his day job much the same way, hiring cronies like Tim Pearson (who is currently facing four separate sexual-harassment lawsuits) and Phil Banks (an unindicted co-conspirator in one of the biggest NYPD bribery scandals in a century) for vague and highly remunerative City Hall jobs — all while governing the city in as close an approximation of Republicanism as a Democratic mayor can (saying that migrants will destroy New York, for example, while making city streets more car and less pedestrian friendly).

Then the Southern District of New York charged Adams with bribery and soliciting illegal campaign contributions, making him the first New York City mayor to be indicted while in office. Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney, followed that up by announcing investigations into several other members of Adams’s inner circle.

Conveniently for us, those investigations turned Adams from an avatar of backroom Brooklyn clubhouse politics into his version of a good-government guy. Gone are Pearson and Banks. Gone too are Banks’s brother, schools chief David Banks, and sister-in-law Sheena Wright, now the former first deputy mayor, who are the subjects of a separate Williams-led investigation. Also: Winnie Greco, the mayor’s director of Asian affairs, who seems to have never met a shady fundraiser she didn’t like; police commissioner Edward Caban; and nightlife coordinator Ray Martin.

In their place have emerged the kind of steady, veteran leaders who ran City Hall through previous eras — and who, had anyone else won in 2021, would have likely continued to help manage the city.

The mayor no longer proudly boasts that he has to “test the product” of the city’s club scene. A long-stalled plan to curb traffic on deadly McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn has been reinvigorated. The MTA began to ticket cars blocking bus lanes. The city is moving forward with plans to build 40 miles of new protected paths for pedestrians and cyclists, including turning much of Fifth Avenue in the heart of midtown over to pedestrians. After a year of complaints from residents, Adams has directed his police department to address the illegal sex trade that has set up shop on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

This is not how government is supposed to work. If you’re a public servant, you shouldn’t need the threat of jail time for you and everyone you’ve ever met to do your jobs. Something had to prod Adams into a more competent state. It just took a vigorous prosecution to focus this mayor’s mind.

Sadly, this moment may be brief. Williams reportedly plans to step down before Donald Trump takes office, while Adams has been all but pleading for a presidential pardon. With an election on the horizon, Adams may not last much longer around here anyway. — David Freedlander

3.

✅ … Two Kremlin media shills, A Steve Bannon–allied Chinese billionaire,
✅ A polyamorous crypto scammer,
✅ A gold-bar-hoarding Jersey senator,
✅ And, within the same week, one of the music industry’s most notorious accused predators,
✅ Plus our nightlife-crusading, blissfully unchecked, unbalanced mayor,
✅ Along with multiple members of his administration.

4.

5.

The Real Estate Board of New York doesn’t lose very often. Last year, City Councilman Chi Ossé’s bill to end broker fees, which would simply have required whoever hires a broker to pay the fee, died without even coming to a vote. REBNY, it was reported, had coordinated with then-Councilwoman Marjorie Velázquez, chair of the Committee on Consumer and Worker Protection, to block it from coming up for a hearing. “The bill couldn’t move,” Ossé says. “It was so frustrating.” (Velázquez ended up losing her reelection bid in 2023. Ossé: “Karma is a bitch.”) But this year, when Ossé introduced it again, he chose to play a different game. On social media, his team made the fight public, forcing REBNY to respond in kind.

For once, REBNY seemed out of its depth. It attempted Instagram Reels, such as one misspelling Ossé’s name that got 136 likes. Brokers turned out in blazers and Douglas Elliman shirts at City Hall in an effort to gin up populist energy by yelling “Landlords just can’t pay fees!” (They have their margins to think about.) Ossé, meanwhile, churned out his own videos. “This guy wants your money,” he says in a viral TikTok from the spring in response to one grumbling broker. (The broker’s original video received 291 likes; Ossé’s received more than 84,000.) In another video on Instagram, with 16,000 likes, Ilana Glazer teams up with Ossé in a Broad City–esque romp around a park, encouraging people to come to a hearing for the bill. Hundreds attended.

Labor unions backed the bill, and the expanding coalition brought out some surprising characters: venture capitalist Bradley Tusk and StreetEasy. Even some brokers got onboard. In November, the legislation passed the City Council with a vetoproof majority. The day after the vote, Ossé calls to say he was “elated AF.” Meanwhile, REBNY wrote on Instagram that the fight was “far from over” and that it was preparing to take legal action. The post got 215 likes. — Clio Chang

6.

Until this summer, a post-pizza-with-friends-in-the-park cleanup took one of three forms: Crack the box in half to jam it in a bin; balance it on top, leaving it to blow into the street moments later; or ditch it behind a shrub. That last option turns out to be depressingly popular among picnickers, and park staff pick up more than 100 pizza boxes on any fair-weather day in Central Park alone. Earlier this year, the Conservancy and the Parks Department introduced a solution — a pilot program of rectangular, pizza-box-specific bins installed in green spaces across the five boroughs. Each (there are ten so far) can hold several dozen boxes, and they are emptied daily or even more often. The bins’ design is open in front almost down to the ground, which leaves us mildly skeptical of their anti-rodent effectiveness, but at least we finally have an invention that embodies the Middle American image of our city: a pile of trash that nonetheless has great pizza. — Christopher Bonanos

7.

Our most exciting cultural center opened in August as a bit among three guys sick of looking at a leaky fire hydrant at the corner of Hancock Street and Tompkins Avenue. “One of our friends said, ‘Well, what if we go and get some fish?’” says Hajj-Malik Lovick, a 48-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant native. Lovick, with friends Je-Quan Irving and Floyd Washington, cleaned out the muck and stocked the puddle with a 50-bag of goldfish from the neighborhood pet store. The unexpected sight of the little orange carp flittering around in a glorified puddle was everywhere, a social-media must-post, a Walden surrounded by concrete at a corner known as the Bed-Stuy Aquarium.

This fall, I went to see Lovick, who was drinking green tea from a paper cup on a cold morning, surveying the puddle’s recent additions: benches, kids’ books, and the many aquarium toys that joined the fish in their open-air tank. Some neighbors concerned about the health of the goldfish had stolen some away in the night; a camera stationed over the pond discouraged any future aquatic rescues. “I’m still surprised,” Lovick says of all the visitors. “This is out of this world.”

Roey Rozen, a 26-year-old stand-up comedian from New Jersey who moved to the neighborhood three years ago, came by. “In places where you see old and new Bed-Stuy, there’s an awkward silence where both feel each other there, but the new people aren’t really saying, ‘Hey, neighbor,’” Rozen says. “The pond provides a physical space, but it’s also something to talk about.”

Bed-Stuy City Councilman Chi Ossé has stopped by for pictures. “I really like how it’s, like, these hard guys who made this really cute attraction in the neighborhood,” he says. Jadakiss came out too. “This is a Black-man-made pond,” the rapper has growled on his Instagram.

Even as the caretakers were making winter preparations in late October, the FDNY said it would “shut the hydrant off,” warning that if it froze, it would become “inoperable and dangerous.” Two firefighters came shortly thereafter to replace the leaky hydrant caps. Then the city laid concrete around the hydrant, perhaps inadvertently giving some guidance on how far one has to go to obtain city services. This was just in time for lots of people to dress up as the aquarium for Halloween. The goldfish puddle was over.

Of course, a second aquarium soon hit the neighborhood, dug into the tree well just adjacent. When and how will it end? — Matt Stieb

8.

9.

Early one morning in May, Cortney Cassidy, a gardener on the High Line, was tending to a grove of trees near 16th Street when she noticed a pile of gray and tawny siltlike particles beneath a shrub. Not sure what to make of the pile, Cassidy asked a co-worker, who said that it was obviously cremated human remains.

As a High Line horticulturist, Cassidy occasionally comes across signs of the city’s untold heartaches. She has seen an anguished love letter scrawled on a shower curtain, the shredded pages of an erotic novel, and Paul Mescal out for a morning walk. Cremains seemed different.

Two weeks after she spotted the pile, Cassidy was in the same grove when she found another deposit of ashes. This one was much larger. Had the first pile been a smaller person? A pet? Or just a portion of one person’s remains?

New Yorkers — and maybe visitors to New York, perhaps on a pilgrimage — have, it seems, quietly decided that the High Line is a sacred final resting place.

For years, the Hindu community in Queens has used Jamaica Bay as a kind of Ganges, floating cremains into the water, much to the chagrin of park rangers; dispersing human ashes in New York’s waterways requires a permit. But anyone can scatter dust that was once a human in New York’s public parks as long as they follow a few simple rules (for instance, playgrounds and athletic fields are off-limits).

“I had no idea it was allowed!” says Richard Hayden, senior director of horticulture at the High Line. “We are touched that people feel their loved one, pet or human, wants to spend eternity with us. But, obviously, with somewhere around 7 million visitors annually, it could have a detrimental effect on our soil pH.”

At first, Cassidy tried watering the cremains into the soil. Some of the larger fragments didn’t dissolve. She has since decided that the regular appearance of human ashes is proof of the beauty and tranquillity of her portion of the High Line; she handles, roughly, the stretch from around 16th Street to 18th Street.

“I feel like this spot was chosen because it is a refuge. It’s shady on a hot day. People propose here all the time. There’s a direct view of the Statue of Liberty, and people always sit here and contemplate while looking out in that direction,” she says. “It’s very peaceful here.” — James D. Walsh

10.

James Mettham was scrolling on his phone at a PTA event one Saturday in May when he saw it: Something bad was happening at Portal. As president of Flatiron NoMad Partnership — a nonprofit Business Improvement District — he’d spent years planning the art installation, a livestream video connecting crowds here and in Dublin set into a concrete, disk-shaped sculpture in Madison Square Park. The team had high, honorably humanistic hopes, but it had prepared for trouble, keenly aware — as is anyone who has ever spent St. Patrick’s Day in New York — that our two cities share a debaucherous side.

What they were not anticipating was the troll that occurred a mere two days after Portal opened: After holding up a cell phone that said RIP POPSMOKE, a visitor on the Dublin end showed an image of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. New Yorkers gasped and booed. A day later, on the New York side, an OnlyFans model named Ava Louise (famous for licking an airplane toilet seat at the onset of COVID-19) flashed her considerable breasts to shocked Dubliners. The mayhem continued on their end, however, with at least one mooner and a person appearing to snort cocaine. Mettham went into crisis- management mode. “It was a lot of calls trying to figure out what to do,” he says. That week, his Apple Watch registered a “traumatic event” owing to his elevated heart rate.

When Portal was shut down for about a week — Mettham drops the article in front of Portal, like Burning Man or Fight Club — it was broadly taken as evidence that New York can’t have nice things. No wonder something that worked between cities in Lithuania and Poland (Benediktas Gylys, the artist behind the project, is Lithuanian) couldn’t work for us. But then Portal reopened on May 19 with limited hours. And this time it had a new mechanism that blurred the screen if anyone got too close to it as well as an on-site Portal “ambassador.”........

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