Love City: A Day In May of Love in New York City

The annual New York issue: 24 hours. 23 photographers. One city. View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Friday, June 8, 2018 [NYTimes.com »]( The New York Issue [Love City: A Day In May of Love in New York City]( By THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE [Ryan McGinley captured 24 couples in New York for 24 covers on May 19.]( Ryan McGinley captured 24 couples in New York for 24 covers on May 19. Ryan McGinley for The New York Times Dear Reader, This week we unveiled our annual New York Issue. Over the past four years, this has emerged as one of our most ambitious and creative annual special issues. In 2015, we created a massive work of public art for the cover of an issue about walking in the city; the following year we reoriented the magazine to make each page spread taller for an issue about the city’s supertall skyscrapers; and last year we crafted an issue entirely by hand, with graphic novelists drawing classic stories from The Times’s Metro desk. This year our theme is love. New York is a famously dense city, and so it is also a city that is rich with human intimacy, its streets jampacked with individuals and couples carrying around their own private (and, occasionally, public) romances and heartaches. To capture this magical crowdedness, the feeling of all these beating hearts stuffed onto an island, we structured the issue around a single day. All the photography for the issue was shot on May 19, 2018. This was a feat of planning and execution, primarily involving our spectacular photo department, led by the incomparable Kathy Ryan, the magazine’s longtime director of photography. Kathy also happens to be a lifelong New Yorker and someone who I think embodies the best qualities of the city, which are on full display in this issue — ambition, compassion, grit, style and a wide-open mind. All this is evident in the wildly fun and bighearted cover concept for this issue, which Kathy created with the photographer Ryan McGinley and our deputy photo editor, Jessica Dimson. The idea, which came from McGinley, was straightforward: photograph a series of real New York couples kissing on the back of an open-air truck while the city rolled by. We put out a call on social media for volunteers and overnight had 1,100 replies. In the end we shot 37 couples, and then narrowed that down to 24 for a split run of 24 different covers, which will be distributed at random this weekend to subscribers and newsstands. This is the largest split run we’ve ever done (and maybe the largest any magazine has ever done), but we needed that much variety to even come close to capturing the incredible diversity of New York City. This was a project that deeply affected those of us who worked on it. Meeting all these couples and seeing how proud they were to showcase their love for each other in our pages lifted everyone’s spirit. I hope it does the same for you. Onward, Jake Silverstein Editor in Chief [THE HEARTS OF NEW YORK]( In his introductory essay, Sam Anderson reflects on the nature of love in the city on May 19. It was a rainy Saturday, but it was also a day devoted to the spectacle of love in every form: famous, infamous, open, secret, proud, tainted, physical, spiritual, selfish and selfless. In New York City, writes Anderson, “love is ambient and omnidirectional, as tough as lichen and as flexible as a flock of pigeons; it finds its own forms,” capturing the rest of the issue perfectly. [A ROYAL WEDDING TO HIGHLIGHT ONE'S OWN SHORTCOMINGS]( Sloane Crosley, accompanied by the photographer Dolly Faibyshev, spoke to New Yorkers who woke up at 6 a.m. to witness the live broadcast of the royal wedding. What did the romantic union between the American actress Meghan Markle and Prince Harry signify for them? For some, it was setting aside the complexity of love and bringing a fairy tale to life in Manhattan. For others, it was hope: “If they can find love in a unique situation like theirs, I don’t know what would preclude me from finding love in New York City,” said one viewer. [THE LOVE STORY OF THREE KIDSÂ]( Hanna, 17, is the kind of person who falls in love with one thing and then falls in love with another thing and then just adds on. And so it was with Harry and Beaux. Love can be hard and confusing when you’re a teenager, but for these three, it was just simple: “Wow, I like you, and I like you, and I don’t feel tense about that!” — that’s their basic feeling, writes Elizabeth Weil. No one in New York is straight, Beaux told her via text, ESPECIALLY not high-schoolers. [NEWLYWEDS: ONE IN NEW YORK, THE OTHER MILES APART]( May 19 was also the third day of the fasting ritual of Ramadan. After breaking a 16-hour fast, Maher el-Rowmeim, in Queens, opened his Imo opp to video chat with his wife, Ghadeer al-Howthi, who’s currently in Yemen. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote about their future of uncertainty after nearly five years of marriage and four years in the immigration system, largely because of the travel ban that named Yemen as one of the six Muslim-majority countries. [LOVE LOST]( To conclude our love -letter to love in New York City, the photographer Devin Yalkin captured the grief felt by Barbara Ramsey, 78, who recently lost her husband of 18 years, Jack Naughton. Ramsey had already lost her first husband and the father of her children years ago. For her, grief is like a muscle memory, writes Susan Dominus. But loss can also be a great reminder of the importance of living. “That’s what we are here to do,” she said. [The Making of ‘Love City’]( By ANDREW MICHAEL ELLIS On a single day in May, photographers and writers spent 24 hours documenting love throughout the city for The Times Magazine’s New York issue. Here’s a look behind the scenes. [New York Couples Who Have Been Together at Least 40 Years]( Photographs by JACK DAVISON Everlasting love gets its close up. ADVERTISEMENT [Popping the Question, Professionally]( By GILLIAN LAUB Three proposals, arranged by planners. (They all said yes.) [Love Is Everywhere on the Subway, if You Know Where to Look]( Photographs by HANNAH LA FOLLETTE RYAN A photographer’s project to capture “how honest, bizarre and beautiful” hands can be. If you enjoy our newsletter forward this email to a friend and help the magazine grow. Getting this from a friend? [Sign up to get the magazine newsletter](. Let us know how we can improve at: [newsletters@nytimes.com](mailto:newsletters@nytimes.com?subject=Newsletter%20Feedback%20NYT%20Magazine) Check out our [full list of free newsletters]( including [Summer in the City]( The best of what to see and do and eat and drink each week. And don’t worry about a commitment — like summer, this newsletter will be fleeting, running only through Labor Day. 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