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Very best wishes xx

Chris

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My publicist and good friend lives here! He sent me a package recently. It was so magical. - Maddie

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My best friend lives in Portland and we talk every day. As soon as it's safe, I'm going to visit! -Maddie

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My ex lives in Taiwan, and we've been corresponding regularly, which comes as a surprise. -Maddie

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My sister lives with her wife and son in Portland. They just bought a house! - Maddie

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Trinity College, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

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Trinity College, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

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Trinity College, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

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I attended a Master's program here, and have been thinking about Ireland a lot lately - my friends and teachers, the museums and libraries - it's such a beautiful place that holds so many memories, and I want to go back! -Maddie

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115 Breckenridge Drive, Wexford, PA, USA

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115 Breckenridge Drive, Wexford, PA, USA

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115 Breckenridge Drive, Wexford, PA, USA

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This is where my parents live with their three dogs, and my sister (due to COVID)! - Maddie

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My partner, Bryn, is from Australia! The last time we saw them was in January, 2020 - which feels very lucky, all things considered.

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My sister lives here. I love visiting her in this fun city. During the pandemic we have been dancing together and she has gifted me many playlists. I love sharing spotify playlists with each other. It's a way to connect through music.

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This is where I celebrated my childhood and teenage birthdays with  family. Some family and friends are still there. During the pandemic I have connected with them more frequently.

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Every year in Italy there’s the Sanremo music festival - a contest that decides who goes to Eurovision. I never watched it but this year - since I’ve been feeling VERY homesick because of the pandemic- I watched it all and discovered many cool artists. This was my fav performance 💘

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Festival di Sanremo - S2021 - Gaia con Lous and The Yakuza - 'Mi sono innamorato di te' - Video - RaiPlay

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Nella terza serata del Festival di Sanremo 2021 dedicata alle cover Gaia, al fianco di Lous and The Yakuza, propone il brano 'Mi sono innamorato di te' di Luigi Tenco.

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My fav place on earth 💘 I spent July remotely in Turkey, taking classes of Turkish & chatting with my turkish friends. I can’t wait to be back.

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Home - where family and friends are. I am taking remote dance classes there, so in a way I’m home twice a week :)

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A great friend of mine lives there. Someday I hope to visit him.

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It is where I have learned to swim and love the ocean

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One of my best friends lives in Brazilia. It is so close to the power, state power, and yet she continues to invest in her sensibility and ability to care about other people!

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Rio Vermelho, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Rio Vermelho, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Rio Vermelho, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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I have many wonderful collagues that I miss very much

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Ribeira, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Ribeira, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Ribeira, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Where my whole family is, the place from where I came from. It is where I have my fondest memories and my best friends. I have missed to be there over the last 5 years and covid has retarded my possibility of physical connection

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My life has been divided between Paris and New York. But during this pandemic, I spent the last year living in my New York apartment. Because I couldn't go home, I brought Paris to me, through music, cinema, and food. So much food. My next project is to try to make Pain au Chocolat!

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Isham Park, Isham Street, New York, NY, USA

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Isham Park, Isham Street, New York, NY, USA

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Isham Park, Isham Street, New York, NY, USA

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The big snowstorm in February was a real highlight and comfort of the past year. It was a joy to go sledding in my local park and see everyone at play.

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Inwood Hill Park, Seaman Avenue, New York, NY, USA

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Inwood Hill Park, Seaman Avenue, New York, NY, USA

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Inwood Hill Park, Seaman Avenue, New York, NY, USA

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Two mornings a week my friend and I meet and take a walk through the paths of Inwood Hill Park. We did it pre-pandemic and it gives us an anchor to our previous life. It is our coffee breaks, our happy hours, our dinner outs, our therapy sessions, and our laugh sessions. A way to release the tensions of the day, week, month, year. So if you see two middle aged ladies leaning against a tree laughing hysterically come over and say hi.

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"El meu poble Alcoi" by         Ovidi Montllor

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"El meu poble Alcoi" by         Ovidi Montllor

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Té costeres i ponts,
música de telers;
té muntanyes que el volten
i li donen fondor.
Allí fan ser un riu
aigües brutes de fàbriques;
allí fan nàixer boira
del fum brut sense ales.
Eiximeneres trauen
en prova de treball
d'un poble que l'ofeguen
i que no mataran:
el meu poble Alcoi.

Poble d'història d'homes
que han volgut llibertat;
poble tossut i obert,
carrancs, clavillat.
Com un gall matiner
canta i alça la cresta,
com si el seu horitzó
fóra fora finestra.
Hi ha també un raconet
que només el sé jo,
ple de flors a l'estiu,
ple de flors a l'hivern.
El meu poble Alcoi.

Allí hi ha un campanar
que en guerra el van tombar
i que després l'han fet
calcat com era abans.
Per vergonya de tots
i beneït pel clero;
la vergonya de fer-te
anar al teu enterro.
I encara té una font
roja i fresca tostemps;
com ella dóna vida
la primavera mou
al meu poble Alcoi.

Allí fan unes festes
que a molts els dura un any
i que altres les esperen
sense pensar en el sant.
Són moros i cristians
que el cafè els fa germans;
sempre perden els moros
i guanyen els cristians.
Tants amos, tants obrers,
tan dolç i tan amarg;
ballen colors de festa
amb músiques i focs
al meu poble Alcoi.

Amb un Cantó Pinyó,
lloc de cita amb tothom;
amb el Barranc del Cinc
com dos braços oberts.
Allí hi ha una glorieta
que ensenyen als infants
i que els dóna cabuda
quan s'han cansat d'anar;
i els té fins que se'n van
al món millor que ens diuen;
rient pels qui li vénen,
plorant pels qui se'n van
va coneixent-t'ho tot
el meu poble Alcoi.

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One my close friends, who I lived with for 3 years and who lived nearby for another 6, left New York for St. Louis in Fall of 2019. Thanks to Zoom, we've gotten to talk to her on a weekly basis for the past year, having craft nights, watching movies, and having a book club. We could never have "seen" her as much if it weren't for the pandemic. She's also a nurse and it was exhilarating to hear in January when she got vaccinated!

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I have several friends who used to live in New York but now live in Philadelphia--normally I would have visited them once or twice but this year I didn't see them. But two of them, who met through me, ran into each other in the streets partying after the 2020 election was called and texted me a photo of themselves. The outpouring of joy in general that day, the feeling of connection with Philadelphia and their special role in calling the election, and the chance meeting of friends in the street all really touched me that day.

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I'm from Queens but I live in Manhattan now. During the pandemic I went to far fewer places in the city than I normally would, including Queens, where many of my family members still live. In a typical year, I probably would have gone to Queens about 10 times, but this past year I've been there twice. The feeling of distance, even from somewhere that's geographically not far away, made me think about my home borough a lot and resulted in this essay I wrote in February 2021.

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In an essay first published in The New York Times in 2001, Colson Whitehead wrote, "You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it." I started building my private New York at the top of a hill, one of the several that gave my neighborhood, Forest Hills, its name. My apartment building was the first one in the area when it was built in 1931; photos of the time show it standing anomalously, surrounded by single-family homes and vacant lots. My family moved there in the mid-1980s and I was born in 1988, and by then the area had filled in with several generations of structures-six-story brick apartment buildings named after presidents and built in a colonial revival style, taller later-generation apartment buildings with cantilevered awnings and terraces, midcentury modernist reform temples, a strip of one-story shops we call "the Russian stores," and a movie theater named after the Battle of Midway. The English garden that had taken up the rest of my building's block had been turned into a city park in the late 1960s, and throughout my childhood a steady stream of bouncing basketballs, bicycle bells, Mr. Softee and Good Humor truck jingles, and the shouts and footfalls of kids at play drifted into my first-floor window.

I grew up in Queens, I study Queens, and much of my family continues to live in Queens, so I find myself there regularly. But it's a place I'm appreciating more and more as time goes on. When I was growing up in the 1990s, my Queens was stable and safe, but not a place people really noticed or thought about. My parents had moved to Forest Hills somewhat grudgingly, having spent a decade living in emphatically more cool, more walkable, more dynamic Greenwich Village. The feeling in my family was that Forest Hills had some things going for it-good schools, affordability, safety-but didn't have the art, the architecture, the edginess, the magnetism of Manhattan. It was static, incurious, a place where your relatives (at least in our family) were buried. It was caught between city and suburb, with all the contradictions that entailed.

Photo by author.

But when I think about Queens now, and the place it occupies in the city, I marvel at how my impressions have changed. In the face of accelerating gentrification, I now realize that there is no such thing as a static part of New York, and that what I once dismissed as the mundane qualities of Queens are what have enabled it to be a home for millions of people-a place that's more affordable than other parts of the city, a giant web of overlapping communities that give newly arrived migrants and immigrants a foothold and a springboard. As someone who now has worked in educational settings, I feel much more viscerally how lucky I was to go to school and be friends with kids who had either immigrated themselves or whose parents had come from India, Colombia, China, Japan, Korea, and Russia, although I am acutely aware that my Queens was not fully integrated.

I love Queens the way you love the people who raised you. When I was young, it was an easy affection based on an assumption of permanence. As an adult who has had that quintessential New York experience of becoming disoriented when you revisit a place and see that some of your landmarks are gone, I love Queens in a deeper way. It's a special place, it's fragile, and it shaped me. Thanks to the work of people like Frampton Tolbert and Rafael Herrin-Ferri, I have become more curious about the vernacular architecture of Queens and respectful of the intention behind the structures, knocked off the high horse from which I used to see just kitsch and chaos. As a historian, I now see how Queens's history is a collage of different aspirations layered onto the landscape over time-the English-style village of Forest Hills Gardens, the garden city experiment of Sunnyside Gardens, the high-rise enclave of LeFrak City, to name a few among many-and that this borough is currently in a struggle for its identity and its future. My feelings toward Queens are my feelings toward New York City and urbanism more broadly: infinitely confounding, infinitely defiant of my assumptions, infinitely fascinating.

Katie Uva is a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research focuses on the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs as a lens for understanding midcentury urbanism. She is an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College and hosts The Ultimate New York City Trivia Night at the Museum of the City of New York. Featured Image (at top): Photo by author.

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By Katie Uva In an essay first published in The New York Times in 2001, Colson Whitehead wrote, "You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it." I started building my private New York at the top of a hill, one of the several that gave my neighborhood, Forest...

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My in-laws live here and we didn't get to see them in Spring or Summer 2020 like we normally would have. After a lot of precautions and quarantining we did visit them over Christmas--it was wonderful to be there but also throughout the year it's been great to stay connected through phone calls and texting pictures of our neighborhoods to each other.

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These snowdrops poked through the snowbank last week and now that it's melted it feels like spring.

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Served in the Peace Corps there in 2015-2016.

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We have regular conversations with family in Kolkata (and Dubai), which drives home, in fascinating ways, the extent to which this pandemic is a global phenomenon.

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Early spring. The Hudson River through some sumac.

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An academic journal that provides an interdisciplinary forum for critical scholars dedicated to interrogating the economic, social, political, and environmental dimensions of psychological research and practice.

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it is where my sister is raising my nephew, same place from where my grandparents came from...

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Rio Vermelho, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Rio Vermelho, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Rio Vermelho, Salvador - State of Bahia, Brazil

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Miss and care about my place

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My childhood best friend lives here. Since the pandemic started we've been Zooming every week, which is the most regularly we've talked in over a decade <3

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I planted some tomatoes here.

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Lots of walks in greenwood over the past year. I discovered this little pond and learned that this is the one place in Greenwood that is not "groomed". So it stays 'wild' to allow wildlife to live in abundance here. This is a very popular bird watching spot and just feels very different and removed from everything around - city, cemetery, etc.