‘Longest Table in Chelsea’ Draws 600+ Guests to Pot Luck Party

What began as a post-pandemic fête for a group of Manhattanites in Chelsea has become an annual ritual of food and neighborly good will that is starting to attract people from across the city.

Over six hundred people gathered on West 21st Street earlier this month to break bread at what organizers billed as “the longest table in Chelsea.” The oversized potluck brought residents from around the borough to share a meal with neighbors and strangers in what is turning into a fall tradition in the Chelsea neighborhood.

“The magic I think is really in the fact that it’s outside on an open street where we’re all equal, where all kinds of people come,” said Maryam Banikarim, a 23-year Chelsea resident who conceived of the idea last year as a kind of collective exhale after the isolation of the COVID-19 shutdown. “It’s totally open.”

The table is actually a composite of sixty-eight smaller tables, pencilling in at a combined 544 feet. It takes advantage of the one-block open street on West 21st between 9th and 10th Avenues, which has been closed to car traffic during daylight hours since the height of the pandemic.

A small organizing committee rented the tables and 650 chairs, recruiting local residents to coordinate meals and whip up interest throughout the city. It was the second time the community had held the feast since the inaugural meal last October. Around 100 more people attended this year, according to Banikarim.

“We rent the tables and chairs, you bring the friends and the food,” she said of the now tried-and-true model.She got the idea for the potluck during the pandemic after she saw a photograph of people in an open-air Egyptian street breaking fast together during Ramadan. “Imagine if we got together with these neighbors that we’ve gotten to know, and the ones we don’t know, over a meal,” she remembered pitching in a neighborhood forum.

“The first word that came to my mind was ‘reassuring,’” said Stephen Tracy, an organizer who hails from the Channel Islands and has lived in the city for the last 11 years. “It reminded you that we have this innate capacity as humans to just meet each other and to let our guard down and to form connections really easily when the environment is right for that.”

Three years after the first wave of the pandemic, residents described an atmosphere that was both cosmopolitan and intimate. Attendees came from Lower Manhattan up to Harlem.

“That’s far away,” said Dana Kuznetzkoff, another organizer who herself is from the Upper West Side. “There were a lot more people and with more people brings more excitement and more energy. And more food, different food,” Kuznetzkoff added.

Council Member Erik Bottcher, who represents District 3 in Chelsea, used the event as an opportunity to promote the city’s Open Streets program. “This is what happens when we dedicate space to people and community and not cars,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. New York City is home to other large tables. .