Last November, soon after Barack Obama was elected president, a close friend of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's was hospitalized on Long Island because of a series of strokes.
Speculation was already swirling that the new president might make Sotomayor his first pick should a vacancy open on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor also had a full caseload she was balancing as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan.
But three or four times a week, Sotomayor would leave work around 7 p.m. to visit her friend. Ever the urbanite, Sotomayor would pick up some chicken soup, get in her white Saab convertible and wind through rush-hour traffic to Long Island to sit by the bedside of a woman who was often unconscious and unaware that Sotomayor was there. Finally, the trips came to an end in April -- not because of the pressures of the trip on her busy life, but because her friend died.
Those visits, recounted by several of Sotomayor's closest friends, provide a telling glimpse into the private life of the woman nominated last week by President Obama to be the next Supreme Court justice and the first Hispanic on the high court. The friends go on to describe her in laudatory, if predictable, ways: collegial, intensely loyal, a bedrock in crisis.
But another portrait emerges as well in their descriptions, one that sets her far apart from the retiring justice she would succeed, David H. Souter. Souter is known as a bookish recluse, a loner who hates airplanes and prefers the solitude of his New Hampshire hamlet called Weare, and is said to have no interest in overseas travel.
Urban rhythms
Sotomayor is precisely the opposite. Hers is a life that rises and falls on urban rhythms.
"They couldn't be more different," said Ellen Chapnick, dean of the social justice program at Columbia Law School and a close Sotomayor friend. "Not talking about judicial philosophy -- talking about personality type and how they spend their time: They couldn't be more different."
If Sotomayor is confirmed and moves to Washington, Chapnick said, "She'll probably find parts of the city to enjoy that other people don't even know are there."
A 54-year-old divorced woman who never had children, Sotomayor is said to be a workaholic who fills her free time with a huge network of close friends, extended family members, colleagues, former classmates and just about anyone else who has entered her circle. They are judges and lawyers and also secretaries and a mail carrier. She has more godchildren than her friends can count.
She is a gregarious and social New Yorker who loves dinner parties -- in restaurants, at friends' homes or lechon de asado for large gatherings at her two-bedroom apartment in the West Village. She loves dancing; a few years ago, she and friends took salsa lessons at a Tribeca dance studio to improve their moves. She loves shopping. And she loves travel, vacationing with close friends such as Ken Kinzer and his wife, Dawn Cardi. A trip to the Netherlands. Sailing around the Caribbean. Sailing, canoeing and biking around North Carolina's Outer Banks.
A woman from a humble background -- the South Bronx projects -- who now lives on an appellate judge's salary of $179,500, Sotomayor would be the court's poorest member. On financial disclosure forms, she lists her only assets as a Citibank checking and savings account worth combined $50,000 to $115,000, plus the equity in her Greenwich Village condo.
Nonetheless, friends consider her generous with whatever money she has. When Kinzer, who owns a Brooklyn dry cleaning business, got into financial problems in the early 1990s, Sotomayor offered him a loan of $15,000. "We needed some funds right away. Sonia volunteered," he said. "I was taken aback, never expecting it. I've had family members say no to me."
Kinzer and Cardi became Sotomayor's friends in the 1980s when Cardi was working as a legal aid lawyer and Sotomayor was a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office. Cardi persuaded Sotomayor to move to their neighborhood, Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, when there was a vacant apartment next door. Sotomayor later bought her own condo down the block, and the friends got together almost every night. "Whether I cooked or ordered in, she was always there at the dinner table," Kinzer said.
Broadway shows
Sotomayor only reluctantly left the neighborhood when she became a judge in Manhattan, because rules stipulate that judges must live in the district to which they are assigned. Still, Cardi said, the dinners continued at Sotomayor's new apartment, where the women would kick off their shoes and order in Thai or Spanish food. Cardi and Sotomayor would also often go to Yankees games -- Sotomayor is a lifelong fan who grew up near Yankee Stadium -- but without Kinzer, a Mets fan.
Besides the Yankees and friendly poker nights with friends, Sotomayor also enjoys Broadway shows and dance -- Alvin Ailey or American Ballet Theatre. Sometimes, when she is too loaded down with work, she passes her tickets on to her clerks.
And she often does work late, arriving home at 9:30 or 10 p.m. and placing a takeout order at Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q, a ribs-and-chicken joint near her apartment building. It's almost always the same order: the quarter chicken with two sides for $8.95, said Sam Barry, the woman who owns the restaurant.
"I didn't even know she's a big shot -- just the next-door woman," Barry said. "I didn't know her name. I only knew her as Sonia." She said when friends told her about the appointment and she saw the news photographers outside, she typed her regular client's name into the computer and saw it come up as Sonia Sotomayor.
Like most New Yorkers, Sotomayor eats out as much as at home. She's a regular on her block and in the neighborhood. Twice a week, between 11 a.m. and noon, she shows up at the Blue Ribbon Bakery on Bedford Street for three breadsticks, a decaf coffee and, sometimes, the sturgeon toast with whole-grain mustard, a few capers, olive oil, chives, sea salt and onions, said employee Milcar Cruz.
"When she comes here, we talk in Spanish, and we just talk about the weather sometimes, about how she's doing. She asks how we're doing. She's a great person. She's very humble," Cruz said.
Sotomayor also pops into a corner bodega for a Fresca and a neighborhood cheese shop for a favorite blue, and she sometimes takes her clerks on a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get a slice of Patsy's pizza in Brooklyn.
The huge circle of people in her life, from a diversity of backgrounds, perhaps speaks to her own modest beginnings. Several friends told a story of the ceremony held for Sotomayor when she was elevated to the Appeals Court from the District Court. In her speech, she singled out the janitors and security guards by name, and talked warmly about how they had become a part of her life.
Never particularly athletic as a child, Sotomayor has lately tried to exercise several times a week at the courthouse gym and has hired a personal trainer at the nearby Equinox gym. She has also become an avid bicyclist, sometimes going up the West Side of Manhattan and cycling back down the East.
Visits to Puerto Rico
On top of her busy courtroom docket, Sotomayor also teaches and speaks regularly at legal conferences and seminars.
She has been co-teaching a class at Columbia University since 1999, called the Federal Appellate Court Externship. Once a year, she teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, where she and her mother, who was born on the island, travel around visiting relatives.
"She reads, she dances, she's a normal person," Chapnick said. "She's a modern woman and leads a very full life."
Out of deference to her privacy, the one topic Sotomayor's friends won't discuss is her personal relationships. They said only that Sotomayor "does date."
She married her high school sweetheart, Kevin E. Noonan, in August 1976, and they divorced in 1983. She was engaged in the 1990s to Peter White, who worked in construction and real estate, but they later broke up.
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