More Than Likes is a series about social media personalities trying to do positive things for their communities.
Before he was New Yorker Nico (Name: @newyorknico), the popular social media documentary maker about New York’s quirks and characters, Nicolas Heller was the “Mayor of 16th Street” – by the age of 3.
On the way home from kindergarten, Mr. Heller bumped into all the friendly faces in the neighborhood: the manager of Steak Frites, who had a cone of ice cream with the boy’s name on it; the security guard at the tile shop tipping his cap and making funny faces at him; the antique sellers turning their standing mirror upside down so he could see his reflection.
In a way, it formed the template for what was to come decades later.
“Everyone would say, ‘Hey, Nick. How are you, Nick?’” recalled Mr. Heller.
Mr. Heller’s mother, Louise Fili, a graphic designer and author, coined the nickname “Mayor” because of her son’s ability to connect with the ordinary people who made the city come alive. “It’s kind of like what he’s doing now,” Ms Fili said.
“New York through and through”
Mr. Heller has been the self-described one for a decade “unofficial talent scout of New York City” has scoured the city in search of “quintessential New York” moments. His New York Nico accounts — he now has more than 1.3 million followers on TikTok and 1.1 million on Instagram — invite people to celebrate the colorful side of the city: the people, the community staples, and the kooky, random moments that only those who regularly walk its streets will understand.
An approach that sets Mr. Heller, 34, apart from most social media personalities: he likes to stay in the background.
“The bigger I’ve become, the less I want to attract attention,” said Mr. Heller. “It’s my lens. I don’t think people really care that much about me, they care about what they see through my eyes.”
Only after he left New York did he really appreciate the city, Ms. Fili said. After graduating from Emerson College, Mr. Heller moved to Los Angeles to establish himself as a producer of hip hop music videos. “It didn’t go well,” he said. Six months later he was back in New York, living at his parents’ house and unsure of which direction to take his life.
One day he was sitting in Union Square Park when he spotted a busker he’d long admired holding a sign that read, “Six-foot-tall Jew wants freestyle rap for you.” Mr. Heller had always been too shy to speak to him, but plucked up the courage to approach the man and ask if he could make a short documentary about him. The man agreed and Mr. Heller turned the project into a YouTube series about local street figures: ‘No Your City’.
Mr Heller’s approach is based on the knowledge that life could quickly take a turn for the worse, he said, be it through a terrorist attack – he was 12 on 9/11 and said he still has nightmares about getting out of the buildings to flee – or a pandemic.
Mr. Heller created his Instagram account in 2013 and began taking it more seriously in 2015, when traffic for “No Your City” slacked off. He switched to taking photos with his phone, and instead of presenting full narratives, he focused on smaller, snippets of life that captured the city’s weird and charming corners.
“It’s important to me to preserve what is New York in all its character and in all its glory,” said Mr. Heller.
‘Real friends’
At the beginning of May, Mr. Heller left the house Village Revival Recordsa record store he made famous on social media, into anonymity on a crowded sidewalk in Greenwich Village.
However, passers-by noticed the man at his side. Here was “Bobby,” stumping around New York on hilariously high stilts, whom Mr. Heller first introduced to social media exactly a year earlier.
“Hello, Bobby!” said one fan.
Bobby is part of a group of recurring characters in Mr. Heller’s videos, which also include “The Green Lady”, “BigTime Tommie” and “Cugine”. A man named “Tiger Hood” organizes “street golf” outings and trains pedestrians to hit milk cartons filled with newspapers.
“As I would always tell him, they are people I would run away from on the street or ignore and shy away from in New York City,” said Mr. Heller’s father Steven, a writer and former senior art director of The New York Times. “A lot of Instagram is voyeuristic. And I don’t think Nick is a voyeur. I think he has something to do with these people.”
During the pandemic, Mr. Heller shed light on struggling local small businesses such as Astor Place hairdressers and the Village Revival record store, owned by Jamal Alnasr. “There has been an amazing change in my business,” said Mr. Alnasr. Equally important was the personal connection to Mr. Heller: “We have become real friends.”
In December 2022, the Heller-directed film Out of Order was released, starring nearly two dozen of the people he regularly features on his social media accounts. It’s important, he said, to help the people in his videos “make their own careers.”
After saying goodbye to Bobby, Mr. Heller headed to Union Square Park, where he crowded around a cannabis rally, snapping photos and videos that they might check out on his Instagram story later that evening. His lens focused on a person dressed from head to toe in a cannabis leaf costume.
The art of observation
Mr. Heller is used to observing people without being noticed. Another genre of his milieu is the candid, cropped shot: a man in a blonde wig, high heels and a Santa Claus skirt, strutting through Times Square; a woman crosses herself as she crosses the finish line of the New York City Marathon; Two Hasidic Jewish men converse on the sidewalk and gesture while their payot blows in the wind. (He often collects these in what he calls his “Sunday Dump.”)
After the cannabis festival, Mr. Heller returned to 16th Street to play golf with Tiger Hood, a longtime photographer whom Mr. Heller portrayed in a 2019 documentary. .
As Mr. Heller walked to the makeshift tee box (a row of milk cartons scattered on a floor mat resembling a $100 bill) and set up his bat, a small crowd began the recording. Maybe you recognized Herr Heller. Or maybe they didn’t, just pulled out their phones to capture a moment on a New York street.
Mr. Heller made contact, the milk carton flew through the air and for a brief moment all eyes – and cameras – were on New York Nico.
