You are currently browsing the stories about the Lower East Side neighborhood

Number 6 at the White House

by Brea Tremblay 08/16/2010
Neighborhood: East Village, Lower East Side, Midtown

The front of the White House wasn’t that bad. The  reviews online had been awful but perhaps they’d been hasty. The doors were bright blue and no place with bright blue doors could be that bad. I heaved my suitcase over the step. At the train station, a frat boy had tried to help me [...]

City Habitats

by Thaddeus Rutkowski 03/08/2010
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

My partner and I found an apartment with one bedroom—one more bedroom than either of us had in our old places. The new residence did not, however, have a bathtub. The bathroom—an extension of a hallway that also served as the kitchen—was too small for a tub. The space left for a tub measured about [...]

Naked and Never Hungry: How I Come to Know This City

by Temim Fruchter 07/27/2008
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

I don’t know what I’m doing here. It is a Thursday night and I am in a tiny Lower East Side theater at a dress rehearsal for the play I’m in where I am going to take all my clothes off. Now, generally, I don’t act and do not, by any means, take all my [...]

Graffiti

by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh 05/12/2008
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

On Saturday night I walked from my apartment on the Lower East Side over to Housing Works in SoHo. It was a little after 8:00 at night and my intention was to spend a few pleasant hours drinking coffee and reading Grapes of Wrath. It was also a way to give my wife some time [...]

The Tombstone Read L.E.S.

by Royal Young 05/11/2008
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

Recently, driving with my grandmother to meet family for dinner at a French restaurant on Lafayette, mouth watering in anticipation of filet mignon, I bemoaned the fate of the once urban wasteland, now over developed, over exposed Lower East Side we had both grown up in. As I ranted she nodded, indifferent to the hipsters [...]

Daydreaming on the Q

by Amanda McCormick 04/11/2008
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

On the train on the way home, I scan the occupants of the car, playing Wildly Inappropriate Matchmaker, my favorite daydream. For the purposes of this exercise, I settle on a tall woman with black hair tied back tight, librarian glasses slipping down her nose as she reads a copy of Finnegans Wake. I want [...]

Small Claims is a War of Attrition

by Sarah Miller-Davenport 04/06/2008
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

It is a cool, dry August evening and I am in a windowless room at 111 Centre Street. I leave New York, the city of my birth, in less than a week. Yet, through a series of escalating events, I choose to be here, stubbornly clinging to the dream of winning back a minor sum [...]

Hip Hop Subway Series

by Dvora Meyers 06/09/2007
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

On May 20th, while most of the city was watching the Yankees and Mets slug it out for "Best Team in New York Baseball" bragging rights, just beneath their feet, a different sort of battle was being contested inside the Brooklyn-bound J train. The whole car, even when stationary with its doors open onto a [...]

To Every Dog Its Bone

by Suzanne Comeau 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

I felt like I owed him something, even if I couldn’t say what. It wasn’t money. I closed my eyes like a dead man and gave those coins to the nuns on the corner. My brother is a music publisher. I’m not really sure what this means, but I’m proud. People always ask about it. [...]

I $^(&$#*! NY

by Bonny Finberg 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

6:30 A.M. I’ve only been able to sleep about six hours because there are three bars downstairs which close at around 3 A.M. It’s just getting light. I’m in a corner apartment on the 6th floor overlooking Orchard and Stanton Streets facing South and East. The morning sky is streaked with indigo, pink and brown. [...]

Raw Like Sauerkraut in the Market at Leinfelden-Echterdingen

by Dara Colwell 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

Today it hit. I woke up with the usual thought—coffee. Despite the heat that caked my mouth like cracked paint, my craving kicked in immediately. I rolled out of bed and as I walked toward the kitchen it suddenly hit. My heart was broken. The heartbreak had been triggered the week before but the realization, like [...]

The True Origins of the Egg Cream

by Daniel Bell 06/04/2006
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

About Daniel Bell. Illustration by Milton Glaser Not so. I happen to know that the egg cream was invented 40 years ago by my Uncle Hymie. It did have egg and it did have cream. And when I was ten years old, I worked behind his soda counter serving egg creams. Uncle Hymie had a candy store on [...]