Favorite Celebrations ~ New York

Watercolor portrait of Cole Porter in warm, bold Jazz Age colors New York has a way of getting under the skin. Skyscrapers, subway songs, late-night laughter, and quiet corners in the middle of it all — the city holds a thousand stories at once. Songwriter Cole Porter caught that fierce affection in his lyric: “I happen to like New York, I happen to like this burg… I happen to like New York.”

Below are Daily Celebrations rooted in the city’s spirit — actors, artists, athletes, comics, pioneers, singers, places, and writers whose lives are woven into New York’s skyline of stories.

ACTORS
Adrien Brody
James Cagney
Tom Cruise
Robert DeNiro
Jackie Gleason
Buddy Hackett
Burt Lancaster
Viggo Mortensen
Al Pacino
Christopher Reeve
Susan Sarandon
Sylvester Stallone
Christopher Walken


ARTISTS
Berenice Abbott
William Bernbach
E. L. Doctorow
Keith Haring
Philippe Petit
Alfred Stieglitz
Andy Warhol


ATHLETES
Joe DiMaggio
Lou Gehrig
Derek Jeter
Sandy Koufax
Mickey Mantle
Joe Namath
Casey Stengel

COMICS
Jimmy Fallon
Whoopi Goldberg
Andy Kaufman
Bill Maher
Ray Romano
Jerry Seinfeld
Jon Stewart
Steve Wright


DIRECTORS
Mel Brooks
Ken Burns
Rob Reiner
Martin Scorsese


COMPOSERS
Leonard Bernstein
Sammy Cahn
Aaron Copland
Ira Gershwin
Stephen Sondheim


PIONEERS
Charles Atlas
Elizabeth Blackwell
Nellie Bly
Andrew Carnegie
Amelia Earhart
Eileen Ford
Rudolph Giuliani
Rose Hawthorne
Jean Nidetch
J. Robert Oppenheimer
John D. Rockefeller
Oliver Sacks
Jonas Salk
Margaret Sanger

PLACES
Brooklyn Bridge
Carnegie Hall
Empire State Building
Gilda's Club
Statue of Liberty
Strawberry Fields
World Trade Center


SINGERS
Fiona Apple
Pat Benatar
Mary J. Blige
Maria Callas
Mariah Carey
Harry Chapin
Miles Davis
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Neil Diamond
Jakob Dylan
Carole King
Lenny Kravitz
Cyndi Lauper
Natalie Merchant
Pete Seeger
Frank Sinatra


WHITE HOUSE
Hillary Clinton
Millard Fillmore
Alan Greenspan
Robert Kennedy
Nancy Reagan
Eleanor Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt


WRITERS
Isaac Asimov
Ralph Ellison
Pauline Kael
Norman Mailer
Herman Melville
Henry Miller
Cynthia Ozick
Walt Whitman