You are currently browsing the stories about the Chelsea neighborhood
Facing The Day
by Judith Luongo 06/25/2012Neighborhood: All Over, Chelsea, Gramercy Park, West Village
On the first Wednesday of every month for the past year, my walk east from Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue where I teach, to the corner of Eighteenth Street and First Avenue took about twenty minutes. There are intriguing neighborhood changes along the way but I was usually lost in thought. I would arrive at [...]
My Friend, The Fire Chaplain
by Kathleen Crisci 09/11/2011Neighborhood: Chelsea, Uncategorized, Washington Heights
I met Mychal Judge in the spring of 1985 when my boyfriend, Javier, and I decided to get married. As a lapsed Catholic, estranged from the Church for over a decade, I was tormented with guilt and worry, yet I wanted to have a church wedding without having to account for prior errant ways—our daughter, [...]
Spanked
by Nathaniel Page 07/08/2011Neighborhood: Chelsea, Featured
WHAP! The paddle hit my ass. The first time I recall getting spanked, I was four. I had stolen a box of matches and lit a fire behind my house. My father spanked me down the hall. The last time I recall getting spanked, I was 25. I was in Paddles, New York City’s main [...]
Have I Heard of You?
by Peter Wortsman 02/28/2011Neighborhood: Chelsea
Have I Heard of You? By Peter Wortsman The following encounter between the late William Packard (1933-2002), poet, playwright, teacher, and publisher of the literary journal The New York Quarterly, myself, and a postal worker, took place at the Chelsea Station Post Office in the 1980s. I immediately recognized the man in front of me [...]
Three Basketball Vignettes, 2001
by Thomas Beller 06/03/2010Neighborhood: Chelsea, Featured, West Village
1. March 25th, 2001 Basketball City Chelsea Piers There Were Horses A pick up game at Basketball city. Cold Sunday afternoon. The academy awards that night. Dreading them. Miserable but psyched about the game. We ended up playing four on four full court. On the other team were the guys I play with in my [...]
Trolling Whores for Coke: How to Get Started
by Kent 03/17/2010Neighborhood: Chelsea, Washington Heights
So you’ve got the wife and the kids. You’ve got and are just barely hanging onto, the co-op in the chic enclave, you’re so middle-aged. Some men, finding themselves adrift in a wood in their middle years, go to the gym: I troll whores for coke. After you’ve seen the horrors of Chelsea Pier’s ice [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
