The Party's on the Best Sidewalks of New York

Ramin Talaie for The New York Times

By CHRISTOPHER LEE NUTTER

As Lori Coats dropped into a folding chair near the stoop of her apartment building on West 21st Street, she let out a deep sigh. "This is fabulous," she said, cradling her 18-month-old baby, Cate, in one arm and a plastic cup of sangria in her other hand.

Her neighbor Robert Walker nodded agreement as he appraised the picnic table set up with plates of focaccia and pasta salad next to a giant pitcher of homemade sangria. Two neighbors from 10th Avenue maneuvered awkwardly through the crowd perched on the stoop or on chairs. When Mr. Walker heard a favorite disco classic on the iPod hooked up to computer speakers, he said, "That's my song."

Long a tradition in Harlem, Brooklyn and working-class neighborhoods throughout New York City, the summer stoop party has been a rarity on streets of $3,000-a-month apartments and single-family brownstones in the heart of Chelsea.

But lately residents of that neighborhood, as well as of Greenwich Village, SoHo, NoLIta, Gramercy Park and even the Upper West Side have been taking inspiration from uptown to give stoop parties of their own.

"I'll run into one about once a week," said Stephen Heighton, an owner of the restaurant Elmo in Chelsea. "This is the first summer I've seen anyone really partying on their stoops downtown like they do uptown. Hanging out in the open with your friends, watching the world go by, is usually done in a more formalized way down here, like in outdoor cafes and outside of gallery openings."

Merely sitting on a stoop to take in the cool of the evening, as people in many neighborhoods do in summer, does not qualify as a stoop party. A party needs music, food, chairs and drinks in some combination. And while the details of the traditional uptown stoop party tend to be more uniform - rap and salsa music, barbeque grills and beer are staples - Lower Manhattan versions include entertaining friends with bossa nova and expensive beer in paper bags, apartment building get-togethers with finger food on picnic tables and classic disco.

"Part of the appeal is that it's real and out in the open," said Tim Ranney, a party promoter and publicist, who has friends over on Thursday nights to drink margaritas on his stoop outside the landmark Colonnade Row on Lafayette Street in NoHo. "It's like a salon. Everyone is invited."

Why stoops in Harlem are peppered on summer nights with barbeque grills and boomboxes while the stoops of Lower Manhattan are used more as Carrie did in "Sex and the City" - as a platform for the occasional late-night talk with a friend, good-night kiss from a date or to smoke the solitary cigarette - is an old story that is mostly about economics.

"Up until the mid-19th century serving refreshments and socializing on the stoops was done by every income group all over the city," said Charles Lockwood, the author of "Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House 1783-1929." "But in the late 19th century the tenement districts became hugely overpopulated by immigrants swarming on the stoops. That created a stigma to the stoop, and by that time it became obligatory for the upper classes to leave the city for the summer anyway, so partying on the stoop went out of favor."

Similar social currents continue today. In affluent neighborhoods with an air-conditioner in every window, plentiful sidewalk cafes and ready access to a summer getaway, the social potential of the stoop is minimized. Rare is the Upper East Side brownstone stoop used for a summer party.

But in neighborhoods with fewer air-conditioners or sidewalk restaurants, families in need of a large communal space naturally find the stoop ideal.

"In Harlem your whole extended family just winds up spilling out on the street because you need the space, and it doesn't cost anything," said Joaquin Maceo Rosa, 31, an actor, who grew up on 105th Street and still lives in the neighborhood.

The increased social traffic in the last five years between Harlem and Lower Manhattan, as downtowners have moved uptown and in some cases, like Mr. Walker's, moved back downtown, has helped reintroduce the stoop as a place for a small party.

"Living up in Harlem, I used to look at all the stoop parties and think, oh my God, they are having so much fun," said Mr. Walker, the author of a comic book series called Delete. "That's partly why we started doing them."

Recently gentrified neighborhoods like Chelsea, full of stoops from pre-World War I construction, have also had time to mature, so that enough people have lived there long enough for neighbors to know one another well. Although these neighborhoods are high rent, they are often less pretentious, residents say, than other affluent areas of the city, and people are more comfortable visiting on a stoop. Many residents boast of loving New York in August and of having no need to flee to the Hamptons or upstate.

It is not even necessary to have a stoop proper to have a sidewalk party. Josh Hughes and Brian Ermanski began inviting friends to daily afternoon outdoor parties in NoLIta in the spring, with seating on trash bins and benches. They crank up the Velvet Underground on a jam box and crack open their Negra Modelo beer in paper bags.

"In the middle of all those models and filmmakers and rich women heading off to eat at Cafe Havana, it definitely creates a small scene," said Mr. Hughes, the author of "Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists," scheduled for publication next year by Three Rivers Press. "But that's a part of the statement we're making, that we're not above it."

Both Mr. Hughes and Ms. Coats said that passers-by at the gatherings on their blocks have sometimes muttered that partying on the street is "ghetto."

One who passed by and formed that thought, Ron Robinson, a beauty-trend consultant, said it was not meant as a derogatory comment. "Growing up in the outer boroughs," Mr. Robinson said, "this seems to me like a long-gone pastime which is reoccurring."

"I miss it," he added.

With stoop parties popping up in new neighborhoods, they raise not just the occasional eyebrow but also questions about legality and propriety. Will a neighbor complain to the building management or to the police about loud music? What about drinking alcohol on a stoop? (It is illegal, though the law is not widely enforced if no disturbance is taking place.) And what is the proper etiquette for passers-by?

Robin Lynn, the director of Municipal Art Society tours, said she recently walked through a stoop party on the Upper West Side three times in one night and did not know how to react. "Each time for a few seconds I was in their party," she said. "Do I stop and comment? Am I breaking into their party? Was it private or public?"

Ms. Lynn said she simply walked on by, quietly envious. "It made me wish I had a stoop," she said. "Maybe I'll just start traveling around with chips."

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