To get the best out of a crawfish, you need to work for it: You have to twist and pull to separate the tail from the head, push the meat from the tail with your thumb, then go back and suck the flavor from the head. But getting the best out of Liverpool, New York, isn’t nearly the same squeeze.
The village, only a square mile in size and 2,600 strong in population, fits right in neighboring Syracuse’s pocket. Despite its small scale, both charity and volunteerism pour from Liverpool at a disproportionate rate, making it a lily pad and vital leaping-off point for the entire region. The westerly side of town is almost entirely modest homes on shady, tree-lined streets; the easterly side is Onondaga Lake Park and small businesses with punny names (e.g., a yarn store called Knitty Gritty, a hair salon called Dead Ends).
The neon filament that lights the sky at Heid’s of Liverpool, a legendary hot dog restaurant that draws crowds from miles around, serves as Liverpool’s informal welcome sign. American High, an indie film studio, moved into the old A.V. Zogg Middle School in 2017, borrowing the classrooms and Liverpool’s all-American good looks for the teen movies it produces.
“Many of the suburbs of Syracuse are just that—a sprawl of homes,” says Rick Pelotte, project manager for Operation Northern Comfort, an area nonprofit born in Liverpool. “But Liverpool has a stronger identity.” One of the biggest parties of the year for the village is an annual crawfish festival, when Liverpool’s Operation Northern Comfort borrows Syracuse’s bustling Clinton Square to host more than 6,000 attendees from all over central New York.
But that idyllic small-town vibe is only part of what makes Liverpool an amazing place. It also has a rich history of service that stretches back more than two decades, and its residents show up for one another in tangible, heartwarming ways. Read on to find out what makes this tiny town tick and why it earned the title of Reader’s Digest’s Nicest Place in America for 2026.
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Inside Operation Northern Comfort
It wasn’t always called Operation Northern Comfort. When it was founded in 2005 by the late Norm “Mr. Liverpool” Andrzejewski, it was Operation Southern Comfort, an organization that sent central New Yorkers to Louisiana by the busload to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Cisco Gonzales Jr. was 11 when Operation Southern Comfort helped rebuild his church in Louisiana and raise a family member’s house after the storm. He remembers the volunteers bringing supplies, extra hands, meals, and even donated tubas, trumpets and snare drums for local school bands. But more importantly, “they just brought hope,” he says.
For six years, the organization made routine trips to Louisiana, equipping a class of thousands of volunteers with new building and construction knowledge. It rebranded in 2012 as Operation Northern Comfort, ready to put its volunteers’ new skills to work at home, but not without taking a bit of Louisiana with it in the crawfish festival. Today, Operation Northern Comfort primarily builds ramps and lifts that give area residents with accessibility challenges the freedom to leave the house. (“People think there’s a government agency or something that you can call, but there isn’t,” says Laurel Flanagan, CEO of Operation Northern Comfort.) But if you can dream it, they can build it: bookshelves, desks, even DJ tables.
The festival, always the first Saturday in May (crawfish are no good any later), took place this year in unseasonably brisk weather, but the steam kept volunteer crawfish cooks warm as they stood over the boil. Blistering red mudbugs swirled around the pot with onions, garlic and lemon, plus a healthy serving of celery to soak up some of the Cajun spice that dyes the broth orange. Youth volunteers washed baskets of live crawfish—shrieking if one clung to their shirt—to replenish the stock.
More volunteers appeared with sport fishing nets slung over their shoulders to scoop cooked mudbugs from the boil and deliver them to a preparation station. Boxes of crawfish packed with corn and potatoes disappeared from the pickup table, toted around by merry attendees as they danced to live music and snapped photos with the crawfish mascot.
“I didn’t know it was a fundraiser for, like, a year,” says Flanagan, a festival attendee turned volunteer before she became CEO. Gonzales, now 32, flies up for the festival every year, often staying in the homes of old pals in Liverpool and showing attendees how to peel crawfish. “I always laugh, because if you ask my dad, he says, ‘You go there every year just to drink and have fun,’ ” says Gonzales, “and I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I do.’ ”
Every cent of the $40,000 raised by this year’s event will be poured directly back into the town and its neighbors. Festival revenue is the source of nearly all the money that Operation Northern Comfort raises each year, powering the 57 projects it completed in 2025. But Operation Northern Comfort is just one piston in Liverpool’s charitable engine.
“I nominated Liverpool because there are so many things that end up in our news of individuals who spend their time, their effort, to help other people,” says Liverpool resident Susan Edmonds, who herself volunteers at both the Humane Society and the airport military courtesy room. “If you think an individual doesn’t make a difference, boy that’s wrong.”
An individual difference
Ralph Rotella moved to Liverpool from Syracuse 31 years ago, after having arrived in the country in 1970. The village offers a bit of space between him and the city, and more room for a garden. Around the back of his house, you’ll find the tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis he tends with any free time he can eke out. On the doorstep, there’s a good chance you’ll find a garbage bag full of shoes.
Rotella is a cobbler, a trade that the Italian immigrant inherited from his uncle, along with his shop, Discount Shoe Repair in downtown Syracuse. Every year, the Liverpool resident gives away thousands of refurbished shoes to the Syracuse Rescue Mission so they can find the feet of someone who needs them.
Donations come in all forms (boots, sneakers, dress shoes, loafers), sometimes by the bag, sometimes a pair at a time. Occasionally, someone will buy and donate a new pair of shoes just to support the cobbler’s cause and save him the work of fixing heels, replacing laces or restoring soles. “The first year, I was so excited—we got 35 pairs. After the third year, a few hundred pairs. Now, every day, you see how many we got,” Rotella says, gesturing at the shoe-filled trash bags in his shop’s entryway. “That pile is only a week old. We almost got 500 pairs.”
Every day, at least a few people drop by the shop to add to the mountain of shoes—and some drop them off at Rotella’s doorstep in Liverpool. The Rescue Mission makes a pickup every three weeks so Discount Shoe Repair won’t get totally overrun. “I could never do it by myself,” says Rotella of the thousands of donors who make it possible. “Thanks to you guys and thanks to me, we do a good deed.”
Last December, when the Rescue Mission backed its truck up to Discount Shoe Repair’s doors for the final pickup of the year, the shoe drive made a new one-year record of more than 45,000 pairs. It’s always a celebration, complete with roasting chestnuts and jaunty Italian music, but this was a special milestone—300,000 pairs collected since Rotella started the drive in 2011.
“I reached my goal, but I’m still going to do it no matter what,” he says. “As long as my hands work and I can walk and dance, we’ll do it. I’ve been in Liverpool since 1995, and anyplace I go, in the grocery store or Home Depot, they say, ‘Ralph, I got some shoes for you. Can I bring them down?’ ”
“If the doors are open, you are welcome here”
The Rev. Bruce Gowe hasn’t lived in Liverpool for nearly as long as Rotella, but it didn’t take long for the village to reveal itself to him. He moved to Liverpool about two years ago, when he started his ministry at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, a simple redbrick building on Liverpool’s outskirts near the highway that borders the village on the opposite side from Onondaga Lake.
Lots of the offerings in the region appeal to Gowe: hiking the Finger Lakes, the boisterous festival seasons, a community that cares for nature. He’s among the younger priests that staff the area’s 22 churches of varying denominations, and the first openly gay one at St. Matthew’s. The congregation, and Liverpool, embraced him with ease, an openness that he sees extending well beyond himself.
“There’s a sense of community and safety; you can thrive here,” says Gowe. “There’s that sense of being a large city, but there’s also the small-town America feel too.” Last August, Gowe noticed a woman using one of the church’s outdoor outlets to charge her phone in the parking lot. He’d seen her once before, pushing a shopping cart a bit up the road, and realized she must be homeless and had likely set up camp in the woods behind St. Matthew’s. Gowe didn’t mind—he said hello and told her that any time the church doors are open, she’s welcome to come inside.
“The Scripture says you never know when you’re hosting angels,” he says.
In time, a few members of the congregation built a rapport with the woman, until she eventually felt comfortable resting in the shade of the entryway and coming inside for a cup of coffee. St. Matthew’s supports local food pantries and also runs its own, and a care team began regularly preparing a special basket to help her get through the week. There’s a shower in the church building—they asked if she would like to come in and use it? One churchgoer offered to take the occasional load of laundry home for her, until another found a donated washer and dryer to install at the church. By fall, she was donning a Halloween mask for the trunk-or-treat event.
Gowe decided to contact In My Father’s Kitchen, a nonprofit in Syracuse offering direct street outreach to people experiencing homelessness, after hearing about it from another parish. Upon meeting the woman, co-founder John Tumino realized he’d met her before and had been trying to get her into housing for months before she disappeared to Liverpool. Today, she’s in an apartment in Syracuse thanks to Tumino—and the relationships she built in Liverpool. “Being part of the community allowed her to make those steps forward of ‘Maybe I do need help, and maybe there are folks who are safe enough for me to take that step,’ ” says Gowe. “I don’t think this would happen at other places—certainly at other places in Liverpool, but not necessarily other places in the country.”
What makes a village
“In a time where everyone is looking straight ahead and just taking care of themselves, it’s nice to know that if I get in trouble, I can knock next door and there’s someone there that’ll open the door and smile,” says Liverpool resident Simone McCarthy. “And that’s what Liverpool is.” Or, as 31-year-old Kenyan immigrant Raiss Muya puts it, “What makes Liverpool, Liverpool, is the people.”
Muya is the “someone next door” McCarthy was referring to—he has been her neighbor since he was 17. His kids call her Grandma, just as he used to, and spend hot summer days swimming in her above-ground pool. His parents have since gone back to Kenya and his siblings have moved out of state, but he took over the family home, unable to imagine life away from the village that welcomed him.
“Once we got here, everyone around just helped us out. We told ourselves, ‘This is the place to be,’ ” recalls Muya. “They had their hands open for us.”
So when a blizzard demolished the fence between his and McCarthy’s properties a few winters back, leaving her recessed driveway exposed to snow that would drift in and be impossible to clear, she barely had to ask before Muya opened his own hand.
He dug up the old fence, which was buried beneath mounds of snow and ice, and tethered the panels to the posts with wire as a temporary fix until spring. A few months later, McCarthy’s landlord ponied up for the supplies, and Muya, a handyman, built a 6-foot cedar fence to block the following years’ snowfall. He worked in the evenings, after long days of fixing up other people’s homes, with the help of his young daughters, who did more wrestling with the shovel than digging post holes but held the level and fetched water for him.
“She helped us with everything. There’s no reason why I should say no or even think about it, you know?” says Muya. McCarthy often stops over with cookies and extra meals for the Muyas when she cooks too much. (“The best place to store food is in your neighbor’s stomach,” she’ll tell you.) To this day, she brings home groceries, dry goods and halal chicken, from the CNY Blessing Box, a food pantry in Syracuse where she volunteers. Not because they asked, but because, she says, “It’s the right thing to do.”
“If you have new neighbors in your town, go see what they’re about,” says Muya. “They’ll surprise you—because Simone definitely surprised us.”
“You don’t have to go out and save the world,” says McCarthy. “Just save your block.”
Block by block
Stacy Finney, Liverpool’s mayor and a public school art teacher, doesn’t think most people in town realize how special the place is. She remembers a friend passing through on his way to Chicago, and the way he marveled at their kids and other townsfolk, blissful and carefree at Onondaga Lake Park.
“He was like, ‘Look at them thinking this is totally normal.’ And it was true, you know, they do,” she says. “They genuinely think that this is normal.”
They were biking that day along Onondaga Lake, on whose shores the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca people once brokered peace, making it a sacred space to be respected. Decades of industrial dumping at the turn of the 20th century rendered Onondaga one of the most polluted lakes in the country, but tremendous effort has made it fishable again, and birders flock to photograph the eagle’s nest near the Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center.
“I do think there’s a spirit of volunteerism in Liverpool,” Finney continues. “Because people love the area they live in, they want to enhance it. You’ve got to love where you live, and invest your time where you live.”
Why trust us
For more than 100 years, Reader’s Digest has been known for its heartwarming true stories and focus on community. In 2017, we launched the Nicest Places in America, an annual contest that honors kind, inspiring people making a difference in their hometowns. Readers send in nominations, and Reader’s Digest’s editorial team vets the entries and whittles them down with the help of a panel of judges. This year, the judges included Today’s Al Roker, Tuesdays with Morrie author Mitch Albom, author and podcast host Mónica Guzmán, StoryCorps CEO Sandra Clark, Today co-anchor Craig Melvin, and Molly Irani, the co-founder of Chai Pani Restaurant Group in Asheville, NC, which was 2025’s Nicest Place in America. We are committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
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