NYC Cab Drivers Pose Shirtless in Final Edition of Taxi Calendar — and It's All for a Good Cause
After seven years, the ride is officially coming to an end for the NYC Taxi Drivers calendar.
The husband and wife duo behind the unique project, Shannon and Philip Kirkman, announced that 2020 will be the final year they will come out with the hilarious and sexy calendar, according to the New York Post.
In its last installment, the brand is going out with a bang — offering some of the silliest and most animated photos yet of both returning cabbies and a few newcomers.
“Creatively, we feel like we took it to its limit,” Philip, the creative director, told the Post. “The idea of keeping it fresh has always been top priority. It’s important for us to go out on a high note.”
When the calendar first debuted, the couple decided that a portion of each sale would go toward University Settlement, one of America’s oldest settlement houses, which serves over 40,000 people.
“As we learned more and more about the drivers and industry (90% of drivers are immigrants), partnering with University Settlement was a perfect fit as they were the first U.S. immigrant settlement house (1886) and continue to provide services to immigrants and working individuals and families today,” Philip explained to Gothamist.
The upcoming calendar will continue to benefit the settlement, adding to nearly $70,000 that the calendar has already brought in for the charity, the outlet reported.
This year’s photos follow the cab drivers as they do all sorts of sultry activities, including squeezing a sponge of water over one man’s head, standing shirtless while fixing a steamy engine, and measuring the taxi’s tires.
“First, we thought of ideas surrounding what drivers could do with their cabs (e.g. washing the cab, talking on an old car phone, getting tangled up in the receipt roll),” Philip told Gothamist. “And then we pulled from cliché and pop culture (e.g. Sadi with the phone book a la strongman contests, Sajjad measuring the size of his rims). And lastly, we’ve always had an element of random in there as well — like Dorothy’s composite image.”
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Special to this year’s calendar is that 10 of the 12 drivers are immigrants and represent eight different countries.
Women are also spotlighted in the 2020 edition, which includes cabbies like Dorothy Leconte and Arminda Cuervo.
Philip shared with Gothamist that Cuervo “has such a great spirit and personality… She originally came to the U.S. in 1963 from Colombia as a single mother, worked a few odd jobs for about 10 years to keep her family afloat, and then took up taxi driving in the 1970s.”
Cuervo — whose job as a cab driver has spanned nearly 40 years — sometimes drives her cab “all the way to Florida to see her family,” Philip told the outlet.
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The Kirkmans explained that they created the calendar with the hopes of showcasing all kinds of people.
“Our goal has always been to make it funny and to portray the drivers in a positive light,” Philip told Gothamist. “I think a large reason the calendar resonated with people was due to the juxtaposition between the negative stereotypes that have been thrust on taxi drivers over the years and the calendar’s imagery, which highlights the drivers as they truly are: nice, fun, interesting people.”
What’s proved most special for the creative couple, though, has been getting to know all the cab drivers individually.
“We learn their stories and have grown close to some of them,” Philip told the Post.
