Love City
Love City: 24 Hours of Romance, Lust and Heartache in New York
This special issue of The New York Times Magazine is dedicated entirely to love in New York City over the course of a single day: Saturday, May 19, 2018. All the photography was shot on that date between 12 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. By choosing this theme and so tightly limiting the time frame, we hoped to convey the city’s magical density of intimacies, the way it juxtaposes (especially as the weather begins to warm) the private communion of one pair of lovers with the rollicking public energy of the bustling crowd — itself composed of numberless lovers communing privately amid the noise, all the center of their own universe.
Love City
New York City
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▲ 1970s
Washington Square Park. Photograph by Jill Freedman/Getty ImagesThe Hearts of New York
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Ryan McGinley for The New York Times
Editor’s Letter
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On the roof deck at Chemistry, a members-only sex party, J., 43, grinned as A., 32, climbed on top of him. Both were naked. In front of a small, appreciative crowd, they had sex.
They and their audience had, until recently, been dressed for the nautical theme (“SexSea”). Inside, the party’s rules about consent were articulated both by a husband-and-wife vaudeville act (complete with plate-spinning) and by laminated signs resembling those in office break rooms: “ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT IS KEY,” “ARTICULATE YOUR BOUNDARIES CLEARLY.” At its busiest, the main “play room,” designated for group sex, was carpeted with mattresses, bodies, clothes, baseball caps and enough used condoms to make the floor look tentacular. There were couples, single women, complex permutations of friends, benefiting. A half-shod young woman in a maxidress searched for a lost red sandal between two packed beds. A tent built from zebra-print sheets housed a saddle-style vibrator as loud as a lawn mower, which one guest, a woman in a fishnet body stocking, had chosen as her preferred partner. The first time she used it, she said, “I felt like Dorothy in Oz, when it goes from black and white to Technicolor.”
Mimi, 43, was there for the first time, with David, 44, her husband of 14 years. “When we have sex,” she said, “David always brought up other people — sometimes a neighbor, sometimes someone at work.” This didn’t make her jealous. Being with different partners can be a way of making yourself different; Mimi understood wanting to try on new personalities, and not just sexually. “I change a lot. David likes the way I change.” Photograph by Matthew Pillsbury Text by Amy Rose Spiegel -
▲ 1:52 A.M.
Marguerite Van Cook, 63, and James Romberger, 59, met in 1983 and live in a one-bedroom in the East Village. She teaches French at Hunter College; he teaches art at Parsons.
Bedtime routine: “James reads and then just conks right out, but he always kisses me good night first and kicks crazily for a while to get his feet free of the duvet. I play bedtime stories from my app to fall to sleep.”
Sleep positions: “James sleeps on the inside, because he flops around and mutters in his dreams and wakes himself up. He dreams every night.” Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York TimesHome Bases
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Photograph by Philip Montgomery
Shower Style
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▲ 2:17 A.M.
Jaylene Ortiz and Miguel Santiago
“I love her opinions and the way she points things out.” — Miguel Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesHarbor Romance
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El Patron, Mount Eden, the Bronx
Juan Carlos Sanchez and Fabiola Campos, both 35, met while dancing 12 years ago. Going out, Sanchez said, is a way “to keep our love alive.” Photograph by Dina Litovsky -
Times Square
Ricky Konerza (foreground), 28, and Rickey Logan, 29, met two months ago on Tinder. “We’re just resting before we walked home,” Logan said. “My boots are a little too short.” Photograph by Philip Montgomery -
Astoria, Queens
Sofia Baig, 30, and Jordan Robinson, 33, are celebrating their first Ramadan together as a married couple. “I remember we would wake to pray at dawn while on our honeymoon,” Sofia said. “Now at home together, we always pray side by side.” Photograph by Peter van Agtmael -
Olivia McDonnell (left) and her friend Maruschka Valentin. Dolly Faibyshev/Redux, for The New York Times
Oh, Happy Day
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▲8:20 A.M.
Nostrand Avenue and Herkimer Street
Kai Gibson, 15, and Kimberly Moncada, 14, were on the way from their homes in Bushwick to Saturday exam-prep sessions in Flatbush. Moncada had been up since 5:30 in the morning. “I got up at 7:20,” said Gibson. “I was still in bed when she texted me telling me she was ready.” This isn’t the first serious relationship for either of them, but with Gibson, Moncada said, there is “more of a connection than in my past relationships.” Wayne Lawrence for The New York TimesBrooklyn Stroll
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▲ 10:02 A.M.
The proposal planners Tatiana Caicedo and Vlad Leto of Proposal007 with their client Omar Barrero Peralta, 30, and his girlfriend, Katelynn Collins-Hall, 25.
Gillian Laub for The New York TimesHelp Asking
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The Finery, Nomad, Manhattan
Just before noon, Maya Alva settled into a chair at the Finery, a tattoo-removal and skin-care studio on Park Avenue, and pulled down the waist of her hip-hugging pants, fully revealing the “David” tattooed in cursive on her torso. David is her ex-boyfriend. This was Maya’s second removal session, but the first with her current boyfriend of two years, Mike Zarra, by her side. Maya, a 26-year-old medical receptionist originally from Peru, lives in Manhattan; Mike, a 29-year-old electrical worker, is from Staten Island. Even in the waiting area, amid soft music and potted plants, she had seemed anxious. “Just imagine we’re on vacation,” he told her.
A rhythmic clicking filled the treatment room as a technician aimed a powerful laser above the capital D. The sound came from the ink particles, which were shattering into pieces small enough for Maya’s lymphatic system to cast out. Maya grimaced and writhed. To her, this felt worse than being tattooed; it was like being cut by a knife. Molecules in her skin vaporized, puffing its surface into a bubbly yellow. Mike retrieved a stress ball for her to squeeze. Finally, after several minutes, Maya lay there flushed and glistening. “Even though it’s a little painful, it’s worth it,” she said afterward. “I feel happy, because I don’t want his name on my body.”
The tattoos were David’s idea: She got his name above her hip, and he got her lips next to “Maya” on his chest. It was as if nobody could take her away from David, and nobody could take David away from her. “But it didn’t work out that way,” she said. “He cheated on me, he did this, he did that — and I was still with him. But then I got tired. I kept thinking, I have a tattoo, I don’t want to leave him. But then I couldn’t take it anymore.” Eventually, her tattoo didn’t feel like a symbol of love. She felt like an object for him to put his name on.
After the procedure, Maya and Mike sat on a couch as she fanned the tattoo with her hand. It had begun to sting, but now the skin was merely pink and swollen. “It just feels like I’m moving forward,” Maya said. She wanted a new tattoo of her own design. “Here I want to put a big flower,” she said, her hands hovering over her ex’s name, “and then another flower and another flower like that, going down my thigh.”
“I’m trying to talk her out of it,” Mike said.
Maya hardly seemed to hear him. “Not flowers,” she said. “Roses.” Photograph by Elinor Carucci Text by Daniel Fromson -
▲ 1:04 P.M.
Downtown 1 train at 103rd Street. Hannah La Follette Ryan for The New York TimesHolding On
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Naked in Motion, Chelsea
The 29-year-old owner of Naked in Motion, who goes by the name Willow Merveille, teaching a yoga class in which she and the participants are nude. “When people go through a fearful experience together, it bonds them,” Merveille said. “If you’re coming to this class and you’re both very nervous, well, we’re in this together.” Photograph by Damon Winter -
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Getting Hitched
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Hanna (right) with her boyfriend, Harry, and her girlfriend, Beaux, at Hanna’s house in Brooklyn. Isadora Kosofsky for The New York Times
Three Kids
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▲ 3:25 P.M.
Arthur Seftel, 90, and Rita Seftel, 89, East Elmhurst, Queens
Jack Davison for The New York TimesTime Stood Still
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Marcus Garvey Blvd. and Quincy St., Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
Drianna Styles and Timothy O’Neal, both 24, are recording artists who stay at a friend’s brownstone when in New York. “We talk about marriage, and we know we want to get married,” Styles said, “but it’s timing.” Photograph by Ruddy Roye -
Gramercy Tavern, Manhattan
According to Tom Kretchmar, a Manhattan divorce lawyer with Chemtob, Moss, Forman & Beyda, most people enter marriages fully aware of certain nagging problems — like, say, a bad temper — but choose to overlook them. “They think, how bad is it really to get yelled at because you didn’t put the toothbrush back where it belongs?” he said. “But then over five, 10, 20 years or even just six months, it’s like, ‘How much more of this can I take?’ Forget cheating or the business failing. Often, it’s just like, ‘You’re not a very good person.’”
Kretchmar had spent the morning in his Midtown office, surrounded by art that referenced his profession. Near his desk there was a framed cover of “Brides in Love,” a 1963 comic book, the issue titled “Day of Divorce.” On the windowsill there was an ashtray with a William Steig cartoon of a wife telling her husband: “You know something, George? You’re not happy.” Near a Joey Ramone figurine (the Ramones are his “favorite band of all time”) was a gold-plated hand grenade — because, Kretchmar told me, “a divorce lawyer should be aggressive without being ugly or coarse.”
Kretchmar, 40, wore jeans, a gingham shirt and a fleece vest. His wavy hair was slicked back, his mood cheerful. The movie version of him would be played by Jonah Hill. Kretchmar likened his job to that of an oncologist. “Nobody loves oncologists,” he said. “Even if they got through the cancer, all they hear when they hear ‘oncologist’ is this traumatic phase of their life. People say, ‘How can someone surrounded by this great sadness and trauma love what they do?’ But I do. I love it. And I’m sure there are oncologists who love what they do.”
That morning, Kretchmar woke up to a 3 a.m. email from a client about a spouse’s violating a custody agreement. “There’s not much I can do other than ask the lawyer on the other side to tell their client not to do that,” he said, sounding like a parent who must phone another kid’s parent. Next he arranged for the spouse of another client to be served with divorce papers.
Like medicine, divorce law is full of euphemisms for unpleasantries. Kretchmar is a “matrimonial practitioner.” Alimony is “spousal maintenance.” Before New York State allowed no-fault divorce, divorce on the grounds that one spouse refused the other sex was “constructive abandonment.” A “four-way” is a meeting of the divorcing spouses and their lawyers.
Nancy Chemtob and Susan Moss, the female partners of the firm, popped by. Moss had been watching the royal wedding on the TV in her office. “As divorce attorneys, it’s life-affirming to watch weddings,” Moss said. “Because, you know ... it never lasts.”
“Thanks,” said Chemtob, who is getting married for the second time this summer. (Moss is handling her prenup.)
Kretchmar left the office and headed south to the Ronin Gallery, where a show of prints by Hiroshige, the Japanese woodblock-print artist, had just gone up. In his free time, he likes to drop by galleries so that he is better versed in his clients’ assets, which can range from children’s doodles to million-dollar artworks. “You’re kind of useless if your client says I have a collection of 20th-century decorative art and you don’t know what that is,” he said.
The gallery’s director, Tomomi Seki, introduced herself. “Do you have any of Hiroshige’s fish?” Kretchmar asked.
Seki disappeared into a back office and returned with several prints of fish. “Beautiful,” Kretchmar said, identifying the fish as sayori and amadai. His other hobby is “Japanese culinary arts,” both cooking and consuming, and he takes pride in being able to identify breeds of fish. The prints were priced at $4,200 each. Kretchmar snapped a few photos. “No impulse buys today, but I’m glad to see what you’ve got,” he said.
Kretchmar took a cab uptown. At Gagosian, he browsed an Ed Ruscha catalog that included a print that read, “I Can’t Not.” He threw his head back and laughed heartily. This is something his clients say, he said, especially when asked not to text or email their exes during divorce proceedings. “I don’t look at everything as a piece of client-management art, but part of my job is corralling clients,” he said, purchasing the Ruscha catalog. “Even if I can’t hang it, I can point to it.”
After gallery hopping, Kretchmar headed to Gramercy Tavern, where he’s a regular. At the bar, he sometimes finds himself chatting with the other diners. Some ask for his business card. Others ask about high-profile marriages, like how President Donald Trump has kept Melania from divorcing him. Kretchmar speculates the cleanest way would have been with a postnuptial agreement promising a monetary incentive after four or eight more years of marriage. “You can’t keep her from divorcing you,” he said, “but you can pay her more to stick around.”
Kretchmar ran into a law-school classmate from Emory, who told him that she was pregnant. “Mazel tov!” he said.
Kretchmar isn’t married. Despite spending his days dissolving marriages, he still believes in love. He hopes that by 45 he’ll be married with children. “But I can’t tell you if it hasn’t happened by then, if all of a sudden I’ll be like, ‘Something has gone wrong here.’” For now Kretchmar lives alone in a Manhattan high-rise. He asked that, out of respect for his privacy, the apartment not be described further. “You can say I’m risk-averse,” he said. “I know divorce attorneys who get death threats.”
In the evening, he headed off to a birthday party of a financial consultant in the East Village. A whole roasted pig was served. Kretchmar chatted with a friend who told him about superbiking, a genre of motorcycle racing. “And how are you?” asked the superbiker. “Seems like you’ve been busy?”
“Yeah, man,” Kretchmar said. “People keep getting divorced!” Photograph by Sasha Rudensky Text by Irina Aleksander -
Philip Montgomery for The New York Times
Doing Time
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Ikea, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Tom Zoeckler, a 24-year-old college adviser for low-income public schools, and Dagny Crepeau, a 23-year-old paralegal, have been together since September. They spent the day moving into a third-floor walk-up in Park Slope, complete with a trip to buy furnishings. “Ikea gets such the rep of: ‘Oh, my God, you’re going to go in there? It’s going to tear your family apart,’ ” Zoeckler said. “It wasn’t that bad. I think we handled it very well.”
They had taken an advance trip to map out their purchases — “because once you get into the sixth-hour territory of being in Ikea and not agreeing and being angry,” Zoeckler said, “that’s when it gets nasty” — but nevertheless found themselves in a self-service warehouse area, unable to locate the cushions that went with their new couch. “I wasn’t superdevastated about the cushions,” Crepeau said. “I was just ready to go.”
“We get frustrated,” Zoeckler said, “but we get frustrated together, not at each other.”
Is there, perhaps, anything romantic about shopping at Ikea together?“
That’s a hard no from me,” Crepeau said. “There is nothing romantic about Ikea.”
Zoeckler laughed. “I think that looking at a piece of furniture, and then picturing it in your new apartment, with the person that you’re with — and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re gonna cook on this!’ — I think that’s a little romantic.”
“O.K.,” Crepeau said. “That’s fine. I think I was just having a bad day.”
“She was having a bad day,” Zoeckler said.
They left without the cushions. Photograph by Mark Peterson Text by Nitsuh Abebe -
Maher el-Rowmeim’s wife, Ghadeer al-Howthi, lives in Jordan. Current immigration policy keeps her from joining him in Queens. Danna Singer for The New York Times
Worlds Apart
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Doris, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
On a particularly unsexy stretch of Fulton Street — a block bookended by a screechy A/C station and a church marquee screaming ‘‘Jesus Christ Is The Lord’’ — sits Doris, a bar that, for one reason or another, has become one of the city’s most famed first-date bars. ‘‘It is well known,’’ Casey Farnum, a barback and D.J., said about Doris’s reputation while he chugged through a quick cigarette. He ticked off the possible reasons: ‘‘There’s the backyard. It’s cute. Not too expensive, not too cheap.’’ The bar also has auspicious origins for romance: The principal owners, Jessica Warner and Jason Andrews, themselves met at a bar.
That Saturday evening, the bartender, Jim McHugh, a tall man with tattoos and a rattailesque haircut, wore a cutoff tie-dye shirt and a sleeveless Screwed Up Click tee — a classic, imposingly cool bar-pro look. McHugh has a unique perch: He may very well be eyewitness to more first dates than any other bartender in the city. He poured me a shot of whiskey and told me a story about a woman he used to call the “Doris Black Widow.”
“She’d be here every Monday with a different date,” he said. “And she’d be deeply disinterested in anything other than the person she was there with. Like she probably couldn’t have picked me or any of the other staff out of a lineup. I thought it was pretty cool. I was impressed by her efficiency.” One night he spotted her out at a D.I.Y. venue elsewhere in the borough and blurted out, “It’s the Black Widow!” “And she said, ‘Who are you?’ And I was just like, ‘Um, nevermind, sorry.’”
As he stirred mezcal cocktails and slid cool bottles of Lone Star down the bar, McHugh explained that there are ways to tell if people are there on a first date. “They come up and go, you know, ‘You must be Richard,’ or whatever,” he said. “Because the woman only has the outdated photo where the guy looks like Robert De Niro. Then they start making small talk about the apps. ‘Oh, I totally prefer Tinder to OKCupid.’ Also people get smoker’s anxiety: They can’t tell right away if it’s O.K., and they don’t want to blow it by being a smoker. And sometimes it’s two people that can’t talk their way out of a wet paper bag. So as a bartender, you’re compelled to throw them a bone. Like, ‘Oh, let me tell you a story about this record.’” (That night it was “Country Funk II 1967-1974.” “It features the only good Kenny Rogers song besides ‘The Gambler,’” McHugh declared — “Tulsa Turnaround.”)
I asked if he has noticed any patterns, like if the app-arranged dates work out better than the other ones. He pondered it seriously. “I don’t know about success rates, but the crash-and-burns? It’s definitely 90 percent Tinder.” Do people drink a lot more on dates? “People drink themselves into a perceived invisibility,” he said. “And then they just start sucking face voraciously at the bar. I think people are just so psyched ’cause it’s like, ‘I’m going to get laid tonight! And I haven’t been laid in three years!’ So it’s forgivable."
He paused and gave me a look. “Have you been downstairs?”
I went. It’s a cavernous basement — a secluded chamber lit beautifully and surreally. “I honestly think it’s the secret to Doris’s success as a first-date bar,” McHugh said when I resurfaced. “It’s a tunnel of love. An S&M dungeon.” Another pause. “I mean, it’s a pink hallway with individual bathrooms that lock. Use your imagination.” Text by Amos Barshad Photograph by Landon Nordeman -
Flatiron District, Manhattan
Men and women between their late 20s and their 40s began trickling into a private space for ‘‘Night of 100 Singles’’ at the Sir Henri Penthouse Rooftop and Lounge. Upon arrival, they were given name tags and numbers to be used in the making of mutual matches. By 8 p.m., the room was full, with roughly 100 people circulating in the dimly lit, cozy setting. Some of them seemed to converse easily; others couldn’t get anyone to talk to them at all; some watched a basketball game on TV. Every 45 minutes, they were interrupted and made to play games to break the ice. They were told to hold up a card with an animal or a shape on it and ask others, ‘‘Does your card match my card?’’
“People are generally antisocial,” said Maha Osman, who organized the event for New York Social Network. “They want instructions, and they want to know that everyone’s following the same rules.” The first rule is to get out there, she said. “You’re never going to meet someone on your sofa.”
According to Osman, there’s “nothing more gratifying than seeing people who just met get into an elevator to leave together.” But on this night, it seemed, no one went home together. Photograph by Philip Montgomery Text by Astha Rajvanshi -
Grand Concourse and East 161st Street, The Bronx
Kat Torres, 31, and Jesus Reyes, 40, with their daughter, Kylie, 4. “Everything we do now, it’s all for her,” Kat said. “Before it was for us; now it’s for her.” Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya -
House of Yes, Bushwick, Brooklyn
Callie Brennan, 29, and Sean Brennan, 32, at the eclectic dance space. They’ve been in an open marriage for about two years. “We are designing our relationship as we go,” Callie said. Photograph by Dina Litovsky -
▲ 3:09 P.M.
Toothbrushes belonging to Barbara Ramsey and her late husband, Jack Naughton. Devin Yalkin for The New York TimesLove Lost
Additional reporting by: Michael Alles, Stacey Baker, Radhamely De Leon, Maty Drame, Sandra E. Garcia, Katie Herchenroeder, Tajae Hinds, Amy Kellner, Philip Laudo, Sonyi Lopez, Alia Malek, Greta Mantilla, Lia Miller, Pia Peterson, Austin Steele, Anthony Viola.
Contributing photo editors: David Carthas, Rory Walsh-Miller.
Video credits:
Director: Ryan McGinley
Music: “Make Out in My Car,” by Moses Sumney (Jagjaguwar Records)
Producers: Jessica Dimson, Kathy Ryan, Mary-Clancey Pace, Shea Spencer
Cinematographer/Editor: Steven Rico
Additional Cinematography: Josh Garcia
Lighting: Jordan Strong
Movement Director: Luisa Opalesky
Safety and Stunt Coordinator: Chris Barnes