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

Bento Box Bingo

by 02/26/2012
Neighborhood: Featured, Lower East Side

Many things are curated in this day and age. Google will happily refer you to “a curated book,” “curated digital apps,” “a curated list of televised soccer games,” a “meticulously curated” fixed-gear bicycle boutique in Paris, and “a curated set of grooming products.” A curated door, such as can be found at 27 Ludlow Street [...]

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Reading, September 23 At Happy Ending

by 09/16/2011
Neighborhood: Lower East Side, News

MR. BELLER’S NEIGHBORHOOD READING SERIES HAPPY ENDING in the Lower East Side Friday, September 23, 8:00 PM A Free Evening of Non-Fiction In The Lower East Side. Reading on September 23 will be: Rob Williams - Bear Patrol  Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s Nathaniel Page - Spanked  The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out [...]

Primary Day

by 09/13/2011
Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights, Lower East Side, World Trade Center

I stumbled bleary-eyed out of my building still hours before the sun would rise over the East River. Allen Street was black and still. The bars were closed and the morning rush hadn’t yet begun. The homeless slept soundly in the street-median park. Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish [...]

Baby Through the Looking Glass

by 04/11/2011
Neighborhood: Lower East Side, Uncategorized

On a brisk bright February afternoon, father and baby daughter entered the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street. A planned Cobble Hill Cinemas screening of Duck Soup the month before had been canceled due to a single-digit temperature (sorry Groucho, Daddy really wanted it), so this was to be the four-month-old infant’s maiden moviegoing voyage. The [...]

69 Years After

by 03/24/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Greenwich Village, Lower East Side, Uncategorized

In the spring of 1980 I was a cocky new teacher of English as a Second language, fresh from education grad school, with innovative pedagogy that I couldn’t wait to try out on students. My first job in New York was a gem: "Vocational ESL." It was funded by the feds and I'd gone to [...]

Second Chances

by 01/30/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Lower East Side

With Illustrations by Carlo Quispe I don’t go to Dr. Dave for check-ups, just when something goes wrong. And something is wrong today. I suck down the last hit of my cigarette and stub it beside a mural of spray-painted camouflage that covers part of Dr. Dave’s corner office on Clinton and Stanton. A sign—red [...]

Number 6 at the White House

by 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 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 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 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 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 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 [...]