At the block parties, the photographers sought to capture moments of community — the games, dancing, conversation and food — that represented what the parties mean across the boroughs. When the Times staff photographer Todd Heisler found out a father was celebrating his son’s birthday, he made sure to capture it. The photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn spotted a group of children in her own Brooklyn neighborhood playing a game of skully, flicking a bottle cap across the asphalt.

“Until you just put your feet on the street and get out there and start chatting people up, you won’t know. That was what was so fun about it, the discovery part of it,” Mr. Heisler said. “To be out and discover the serendipitous moments was the most satisfying part of it.”

For their part, many of the partygoers were surprised to have their block parties, where they are used to recognizing everybody, attended by journalists. (Ms. Barrayn, for one, scouted the blocks in advance to introduce herself to the people she would be photographing.)

“People were kind of surprised about how we found out about their block parties, and a little mystified,” Mr. Heisler said. “Everybody was really welcoming, but just surprised. Which kind of gets at the heart of the idea — this idea that we hit every party we could and democratized it in a way, or just really tried to catch every corner of the city and celebrate life in every borough.”

(They were pleased with the final product, too. In an email to the project’s editor, Meghan Louttit, the photographer Gabriela Bhaskar wrote that after it went online, one of her subjects was “screaming thanks joyfully into the phone for this project and how well represented she felt this piece was.”)

To anchor the piece, the desk integrated a personal essay from Sandra Garcia, a reporter on the Express desk, about her own experience growing up attending block parties. Ms. Garcia, who celebrated her childhood birthdays at block parties in Harlem, touched on the themes that make block parties uniquely New York to complement the imagery.

The project relied heavily on photographers who lived in the neighborhoods they photographed. “We wanted to work with photographers that intimately knew these communities and reflected the communities that they were photographing,” Mr. Furticella said.