Inside the Underground Harry Styles Hospitality Network

It remains one of Gillian Harmon’s great pop culture regrets that she never got to see One Direction live. The 26-year-old is from Irvington, a small town in Mobile, Alabama, where major artists rarely make so much as a pit stop. “I think the closest they came was either Atlanta or New Orleans,” she says, though at the time Harmon was too young to make the trip across state lines on her own.A year ago, she moved to New York City, which is more frequently graced with the presence of pop stars. Especially these days, as Harry Styles performs a 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, with fans come from all corners of the world to attend. But Harmon, who lives on the Upper West Side, had something many of them don't: an apartment with a spare bedroom. So, in the spirit of fandom and hospitality, she figured she could give someone else the experience she wished she had and started inviting out-of-state Styles fans to crash—for free.Harmon isn't the only one. Around the city, a small hospitality network has emerged among Styles devotees, with fans opening their apartments to strangers traveling to New York to see the residency. They offer up their couches, guest rooms, and even subway directions, acting as something closer to a tour guide than a host. For fans coming from places where seeing Styles requires a flight, hotel, and a considerable financial commitment, their generosity can make a huge difference. To these fans, seeing Harry Styles in concert is not a luxury. It's an inalienable right.When tickets for the MSG residency went live this past January, not all New York-based Harry fans were feeling so magnanimous. Some fans who couldn’t get tickets complained of tourists swooping in and snatching them up. Harmon, however, saw an opportunity. If fans were coming all the way to New York City to see Styles command the stage in a rotation of business casual get-ups while singing the hits from his four solo albums, she could help ease the financial burden. When she posted a TikTok offering her spare bedroom to roving fans, the response was immediate. More than halfway through the residency, she has already hosted four people, with more scheduled to arrive for Styles’ final run of shows. Her roommates, who aren’t particularly devoted Harries themselves, were game. After all, they are used to Harmon adventures in popstar-chasing, and they liked the idea of meeting new people.Harmon gave priority to people who told her it was their first chance to see Styles, particularly those coming from places where the cost of both travel and accommodations would have been difficult to absorb. When too many fans wanted room and board for the same dates, she would simply spin a wheel.The arrangement has made Harmon’s five-bedroom apartment a kind of accidental commune. She has personally shepherded some of her guests to the Garden by subway, shown first-time visitors how to navigate the city, and met up with them post-concert to debrief. They’ve gone to pop-ups, ridden boats in Central Park, and explored Roosevelt Island. “It was really wholesome,” Harmon says.She has experienced the financial and logistical hell of trying to attend a Harry Styles concert firsthand. Harmon has traveled to Nashville for Styles shows herself, sometimes with friends from college, and has been scammed trying to get tickets. She remembers the humbling experience, later, of unknowingly buying bad seats. But she was grateful just to be in the building. The MSG residency marked her fifth time seeing him live. And she recently watched her best friend, who flew from Alabama for his first-ever Styles concert, have the time of his life in the pit.It’s fitting that friendship has become part of the Harry Styles fan experience. During the 32-year-old’s Wembley show in June, he announced that “being somebody’s friend is the most incredible, beautiful thing you could possibly be to someone.” Throughout his solo career, Styles has returned to the intimacy of friendship as both a thematic linchpin and guiding philosophy: the people you find, the people who stay, the people who make an otherwise lonely life a little less so. Fans have especially latched onto the motto "Treat People with Kindness,” from the Fine Line track of the same title. “They’re happy,” Harmon says. “They’re positive, uplifting, encouraging.”Across town, 32-year-old Carolina Sanchez saw Harmon’s video and got inspired. Originally from Mexico, Sanchez has been a Styles fan since he was first discovered on X Factor in 2010 and later moved to New York. When she saw a slew of comments from eager fans needing a place to stay under Harmon’s videos, she offered up her own two-bedroom in Staten Island.. Soon, messages came pouring in.“I just want to be part of something special,” Sanchez told me. Her first guests arrived in early October. At first, Sanchez admits, the idea of allowing strangers into her home made her nervous. But she started vetting prospective guests on Instagram and getting a sense of their connection to Styles and his music. Eventually, she created a Google form asking for basic information and identification to make sure the person she had been speaking with was the person who arrived her the door.Her husband was initially surprised by the arrangement but understood the compulsion. He had seen firsthand how expensive Sanchez’s own ticket to the concert was. If hosting another fan meant someone could put that money towards a ticket of their own, Sanchez wanted to help. Now, her husband is cleaning their guest room and putting together goodie bags for the people staying there.Sanchez hopes the connections will last beyond the residency. She imagines visiting some of the women she meets on future trips, including one who is coming from Florida. The idea, she says, is to make friends and treat other people well. In the process, she is also making New York feel a little less like a city of strangers. “When I've told people what I was doing, they're like, Are you insane? Are you crazy?," recounts Zaia Rodriguez, one of Sanchez’s lucky guests. “I think part of it is stan culture; we make these connections on the internet with absolute strangers, and we talk to these people so often, we bond over the things that we love, and we become friends.”For other fans, the journey is a little more complicated. Maria Miglio, a 29-year-old surgery resident from just outside Detroit, flew to NYC with a coworker and stayed a 15-minute walk from MSG. The hotel was $500-a-night, and tickets to the concert set her back another $200. Residents in Miglio’s program get only four days off each month. She flew out Friday after work and was back in Detroit by Sunday.“Concerts are just such a community-based thing, especially for me,” says Erowyn Walsten, a 20-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. For her, the neighborly instincts demonstrated by Styles devotees are innate to One Direction fandom. She attended her first 1D show when she was nine, and even had a Harry Styles doll; he was always her favorite. She saw him again at 16, and is now preparing to go to MSG alone, where she expects to make friends, like she has at other concerts.“I really think that honestly, as long as I've even been a Directioner, it truly felt like a family,” she says. The fandom’s largely female community, she believes, has made it easier to form lasting connections with people who are, ultimately, total strangers. Some of her closest friendships have grown out of mutual acquaintances met through Styles. “I think it's one of the most beautiful things,” she says.The residency has also given the Garden a particular significance, the same way it’s Mecca for fans of the New York Knicks. Styles has called the venue “Harry’s House,” a phrase that has stuck with devotees. Cara McDonald is planning to fly from Ireland for the historic residency, the longest single-engagement run in the venue’s history, even with the steep price of hotels and flights. But she’s been saving up. Like Walsten, Mcdonald’s first concert was One Direction, giving the trip a certain emotional resonance. Even the cost of attending has become part of the story: McDonald’s resale pit ticket for the residency cost more than the ticket she bought for his previous tour in Los Angeles. But that's her primary indulgence, she says. “Concerts and rent, that’s it.”There’s also a sense that this moment might be more fleeting than it seems. In a September 9th email to fans, Styles wrote that he “doesn't know what comes next,” a line that sent fans online into a frenzy of speculation. For those old enough to remember the collective emotional whiplash of One Direction’s indefinite hiatus announcement, there’s a particular appeal in making the trip now, while there's still a chance.