You are currently browsing the stories about the Chelsea neighborhood
Sharing Vectors with Jesse Lee
by Aaron Gilbreath 03/07/2008Neighborhood: Chelsea
“Do you know–” “Of any sports bars around here?” I interrupted. The towering man paused, chapped lips parted in a bewildered grin revealing white teeth caulked with white material. “You looking for one too?” “No,” I said, “you asked me that last week.” We stood this December afternoon on 22nd off 6th. Last time, 19th and 5th. He smiled [...]
Petrillio, or Love on the 90th Floor
by Prof Barbara Foster 02/23/2008Neighborhood: Chelsea
Even the janitor’s wife has a perfectly good love life and here am I, facing tomorrow, alone with my sorrow, down in the depths of the 90th floor.  –Cole Porter It may not have been the 90th floor, perhaps the 30th or 40th. The exact number is foggy in my memory, but the rest of this [...]
Heteroflexibility
by Daphne 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea, Multiple
I troll craigslist searching for traces of my ex. He dates trannies and the dregs of society. I had lunch with him the other day and I said, “Hey Luke, did you put this ad up?” “Oh my god! How the hell did you know!” I wanted to say, it’s really not that difficult when you date [...]
Cold Storage
by Nora Maynard 11/16/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
I’ve always preferred to do things the hard way, without anybody’s help. For the first five years my husband and I lived in New York, half our things were in storage. The other half were crammed into a 280-square foot apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement building overlooking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The place [...]
Chelsea’s Least Wanted
by Sarah Ruth Jacobs 10/10/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
I’m at the opening of Least Wanted, a collection of mugshots, many of them enlarged, from the 1930’s through the early 70’s. The young and the bad are beautifully indignant in black and white, and I could stare for hours at the badass mug of a 17 year old boy caught rioting on the streets [...]
The Mayor
by Anna McDonald 08/10/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
A guy on my street, let’s call him Eddie, is probably thirty-eight, only two or three inches shorter than Wilt Chamberlain, with a sort of pirate’s crook nose and a Russian infantryman’s sinewy musculoskeletal system. He doesn’t seem to mind the smell of trash. I know this because he’s my trash man. He used to [...]
Spinning Tables at the Frying Pan
by Ellen Moynihan 08/10/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
I had never gone to the Frying Pan—the restored boat/event space docked beside the Chelsea Piers—before last week. It was one of those places that I’d almost been to a bunch of times, but never actually made it. I nearly didn’t go that night, either, but I’m glad I did, because I think I ended [...]
Alice Quinn
by Josh Lefkowitz 07/31/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
The woman comes into the New York restaurant where I work and is reading a poetry magazine. “Say,” I say, “is that some sort of poetry magazine?” “Yeah,” she says. “I like Billy Collins,” I say. “Yeah?” she says. “Yeah,” I say. “But don’t you think Poetry is Dead, kinda?” “Not really,” she says, and she gives me facts and figures and [...]
The Information Superhighway, Circa 1870
by Matthew Wills 06/03/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
Right up until the time men started to stop wearing hats, the city was woven together by a network of pneumatic tubes that connected post offices and major buildings. A letter took seven minutes to go from Manhattan’s 32nd Street to downtown Brooklyn through this Pneumatic Tube System, or PTS. Making use of the city’s [...]
A Face in the Crowd
by Thomas Beller 06/03/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
An odd thing happened during game two of the Knicks’ first round play-off series, against the Indiana Pacers. With a little under six minutes left in the third quarter, the Knicks were fighting there way back from a 10 point deficit, when Anthony Mason made a spectacular reverse dunk. The Pacers immediately called a time [...]
The Last Police Chief
by William Bryk 06/03/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
The Mail and Express reported appointment as a patrolman cost $300, promotion to sergeant, $1,400, and advancement to captain, $14,000. Policemen made back their investments by taking bribes. As Luc Sante observed of Big Bill in his book Low Life, "It was well known that he was corrupt; he in fact admitted as much quite readily." [...]
Cat Fantasia
by Thomas Beller 06/03/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
For several hours one afternoon last week, the unremarkable interior of a midtown hotel room was transformed into a kind of cat fantasia for the nineties, featuring some of the more exotic and genetically up to date entries in the Ninth Annual Cat show, which was recently held at Madison Square Garden. Cats were perched [...]
