You are currently browsing the stories about the Bronx neighborhood
Bumping Heads with New York Yankee Steve Whitaker
by Barry F. Bealick 10/22/2009Neighborhood: Bronx
No, I wasn’t going to cut school to go to Yankee Stadium and watch the Yankees play the Orioles during their 1967 season. “Aw, c’mon, BB, let’s do it,” recommended “Reese,” one of my Southwest Bronx neighborhood pals and fellow schoolmate during my sophomore year at DeWitt Clinton High School. Otherwise easygoing, when it came to [...]
The Piano
by Raanan Geberer 09/14/2009Neighborhood: Across the River, Bronx
The old upright piano was in the living room from my earliest recollection until the day my father died. He must have brought it sometime in the early ‘50s, soon after he’d gotten married. Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song [...]
Turds Fall Within Pepe’s Bailiwick
by Marcelle Harrison 08/16/2009Neighborhood: Across the River, Bronx
Someone pooped in the cabinet today. It wasn’t the first time the staff bathroom had been despoiled. It happened once before but I’d completely forgotten about it in the general whoosh of activity around the clinic. The bad part is we don’t know if it was a patient passing by or a staff person. That [...]
The 1977 Blackout Hits Co-op City
by Raanan Geberer 04/08/2009Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
It was July 1977. I had gotten my master’s degree in journalism the year before, but I still hadn’t gotten a full-time job. Not that jobs in journalism were easy to find. At the present time, I was writing weekly news articles for the Eastside Courier, a neighborhood newspaper on the Upper East Side, and [...]
After Dark
by Michele Carlo 06/14/2008Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
“Nothing good ever happens after 2:00 am.” That’s what my mother told me when I tried to get my curfew raised. I was 19 and thought I had made the right choice by choosing to stay home and go to the School of Visual Arts instead of Art Center in California. I could get Latin [...]
It Was One Hell of a Ride
by Thomas R. Ziegler 06/01/2008Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
Fuck… you… fireman. I had never known such rage. There was no conscious thought to exiting the rig and beating each member of this group to death. Unguided, my hand found its way to the door handle. But try as I might, the door would not open. That’s when I started to climb out of the rig through the half-open [...]
Kill Whitey Day
by Michele Carlo 04/27/2008Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
I was standing in the basement of Macy’s Parkchester in The Bronx, in a line of what seemed like a thousand teenagers, smoking both cigarettes and weed, chanting and cheering and waiting for Ticketmaster to open. Adult shoppers were non-existent and salespeople had abandoned their posts either in foreknowledge or in fear, except the lone [...]
A Force of Nature: Patrick O’Connell
by M. O’Connell 01/06/2008Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
A few years ago in my father’s eighty-first year, my brother Patrick and I went to his house to spend Thanksgiving. My father lived in the Bronx at that time. We are the only children in the family still living in New York. Neither of us particularly wanted to spend the day in my father’s [...]
Magic City: Not In Our Town
by Patrick J. Sauer 12/22/2007Neighborhood: Across the River, Bronx
One of the great, underrated things about living in New York is meeting all those people who come from everywhere else. Not that Gotham natives aren’t a barrel of monkeys, but it’s cool that someone always seems to have a different frame-of-reference, a different slice of life about where they came from, which is my [...]
It Wasn’t Our Turn
by Thomas R. Ziegler 07/20/2007Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
Arriving at work for the night tour on October 29, 1974 I discover the firehouse to be as abandoned and silent as a cemetery at midnight, I was spooked by something but wrote it off to the approach of Halloween when in reality it was actually an omen. I am the first member of the night [...]
The Smell of Bologna (An Essay in Ten Parts)
by Patrick J. Sauer 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
[Patrick J. Sauer also has a website. --Ed.] The sense of smell is the most powerful reminder of past events. It’s the hardest sense to pin down, the hardest to define. A smell is never described as it is, only in simile form. It smells like burning leaves. You know, it smells wet, like…like…like a wet dog. That’s nasty, [...]
Wat is the Wat
by Matthew Fishbane 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
One thing Sambath Suen can’t abide is the cold. Until four years ago, Suen lived in Kandal, a Cambodian province that borders on Vietnam. Before that, he lived in Vietnam, where he earned his diploma, and before that he had lived in his native village, about thirty knots downriver from Phnom Penh, where he spent [...]
