You are currently browsing the stories about the Lower East Side neighborhood
Small Claims is a War of Attrition
by Sarah Miller-Davenport 04/06/2008Neighborhood: 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 06/09/2007Neighborhood: 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 12/31/2006Neighborhood: 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 12/31/2006Neighborhood: 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 12/31/2006Neighborhood: 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, [...]
The True Origins of the Egg Cream
by Daniel Bell 06/04/2006Neighborhood: 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 [...]
The Reality of My Regression
by A. Leigh 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
12/31/00 It is the last day of the year at 8:30pm. I have just finished vacuuming, changing the sheets, and spraying the duvet with “Sweat Pea” pillow spray to make everything clean, cozy and refreshing on this wintry cold night. Tonight I am at home and alone, happily so, dancing around my apartment with dust [...]
Platza at the Russian Baths
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
This passage appears in the novel, The Sleep-Over Artist. Alex hadn’t really believed that Katrina would agree to visit him in New York, and so he threw himself into the task of convincing her with a kind of easy abandon, as though it were a joke really, and he was teasing her. She had children, [...]
Juvenalia
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
On the southwest corner of 2nd Street and Avenue A is a nameless bar (its patrons refer to it as “2A”), and it has on its second floor large picture windows through which one can survey the goings on in the neighborhood. Across 2nd Street is a wide patch of sidewalk where a street vender [...]
Chicago Has Its Merits
by Ryan Kenealy 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Chicago has its merits. For example: my apartment has a large garden in the front yard where I am sequestered if I wish to smoke because of my girlfriend Bertie’s so-called allergic reaction to cigarette smoke, which she has failed to show any scientific documentation for, but that’s another story. It could be 15 degrees [...]
Robert Longo On Shooting And Movies
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Robert Longo–the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker–is in the habit of referring to himself as “Longo,” just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, “This is Longo,” and [...]
Extreme on Rivington Street
by Harry Goldstein 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Junkies are ghost-slinking around the block, looking for their man, banging on window gates and ringing doorbells. I scan their eyes for some glimpse of what their lives are like, staring at their rumpled, smack-hunting clothes, matted hair and mottled skin. They only care about taking care of business, up their nose or in their [...]
