Everyone has a narrative.

New York Narratives (NYN) is a storytelling project born out of a desire to tell the stories of New York City that have yet to be told. Let me share mine with you. When COVID-19 brought New York to a standstill, I found comfort in taking long walks throughout the city. After the pandemic, I traveled everywhere from Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to Hasidic Williamsburg to Arab Bay Ridge to Puerto Rican Bushwick, immersing myself into the cultures and histories of these neighborhoods. My passions for my hometown only increased as I then got my NYC tour guide license and was offered jobs at the Museum of the City of New York. And yet, something was deeply missing in all of this.

There were tours of sites like Central Park, Greenwich Village, and Grand Central, all of which are awesome—but who was telling the stories of new New York? Who was telling the stories of my part of Brooklyn, where Russians, Mexicans, Pakistanis, Uzbeks, and Turks all live together? How many people know that Kensington is called “Little Bangladesh” and that New York’s first Muslim woman to City Council hails from there? What if we told the story of Williamsburg from the angle of immigrants? Do people know that the city’s largest Chinatown is in Sunset Park, right next to thriving Latino and Arab communities? What if we heard NYC’s origin story in Lower Manhattan from the perspective of Indian ship workers, Arab merchants, and West African enslaved peoples? It was then that I decided to become the answer to my own questions: New York Narratives was born.

— Asad Dandia, NYN Founder