Chelsea’s “Longest Table” Potluck Draws Record Crowd

The recently inaugurated tradition of Chelsea’s “Longest Table” lunch potluck, which brings neighbors together in a block-long celebration of community, has another year in the books. Started in 2022 by the organization NYCNext, the potluck was conceived as a way for locals to reconnect–or meet kindly strangers–after COVID-19 lockdowns lifted.

The potluck is held on W. 21st St., between 9th and 10th Aves., which is designated as a carless Open Street for most of the week. According to NYCNext co-founder Maryam Banikarim, 1,000 people attended this year’s event, a doubling of the roughly 500 that showed up at the first iteration. Featured dishes included everything from dumplings to deli-prepared sandwiches.

Banikarim told Chelsea News that she’s seen a “hunger to be together in real life, and actually build our community from the ground up.”

Although undeniably rooted in the particularities of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, NYCNext said that this year’s potluck attracted participants from other boroughs, not to mention a few international guests. Indeed, the practice has both national and global roots at this point, and versions of “The Longest Table” can be found everywhere from France to California.

“There are table captains. Somebody will invite their friends, and if they have a friend from out of town, they’ll invite them too. That’s kind of the thing that’s amazing about New York,” Banikarim said.

The event is always volunteer-driven, which aligns with the mission of NYCNext. This means that participants do everything from bringing out chairs to cleaning up garbage. At one point, this year’s attendees joined together in singing the soul song “Lean on Me.”

The song was an apt choice, given that NYCNext is fond of citing federal statistics that highlight the epidemic of loneliness in the United States, which hasn’t exactly subsided since pandemic lockdowns eased.

For example, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey found that nearly half of Americans–a total of 48 percent–have felt lonely at “least sometimes” in 2024. This comes on the heels of U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declaring loneliness to be a “public health crisis” in 2023, which he deemed to be the equivalent of smoking “fifteen” cigarettes a day.

NYCNext has also come armed with fresh statistics that it hopes will combat this epidemic, courtesy of a study on “The Longest Table” by Barnard College’s Urban Studies Program; ninety-seven percent of attendees reported “connecting with friends and neighbors,” 89 percent “made new connections,” and 69 percent “said the event reduced their feelings of loneliness,” according to a summary of the study.

Banikarim hopes that the organization can soon replicate these stats elsewhere, possibly by expanding “The Longest Table” into other neighborhoods and venues.

Since the inception of the Chelsea table, NYCNext has hoped to turn it into a simultaneous massive event, Banikarim explained: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we did 100 of these tables, in all the five boroughs, on the same day?”

Furthermore, Banikarim’s personal dream is to host a “majestic” table that expands the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, which could “connect 7,000 New Yorkers across the East River.”

”We live in a world that is incredibly fractured, and I think we need to come together and be with each other,” she emphasized. “Food is something that connects us all. It will remind us of our shared humanity.”