You are currently browsing the stories about the Midtown neighborhood
Three O’Clock High
by Katherine Dykstra 11/02/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
It is 3pm on a weekday, and I have left the office to caffeinate. As I step through the revolving doors and out into the day, I note that summer has seamlessly turned into fall. I gather this not from any change in the weather, but because the kids are back. I work in Midtown [...]
Bet on Crazy
by peter nolan smith 10/12/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
I knew very little about diamonds as a child other than Superman could squeeze coal with his steel-hard hands to create diamonds and my father had bought a diamond ring for my mother. It was a hundredth of the size of the diamonds Superman never gave to Lois Lane, but my mother loved hers, often [...]
Lick Us
by Kurt Rademacher 09/01/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
It’s 31 degrees on the third Saturday in February and I’m ignoring everyone on 9th Avenue. I am not a native and my ability to ignore is still a blunt instrument, numbing when engaged, so that walking down the street feels a bit like being led by a string out of a dark tunnel into [...]
Hope in a Jar
by Sandi Sonnenfeld 08/21/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
I’ve become obsessed by wrinkles. Particularly the ones surrounding my eyes and across the map of my forehead that extend like arid rivers across my skin’s terrain. About a year ago, I purchased my first wrinkle cream, Oil of Olay Anti-Aging Eye Gel ($12.99) from the local Duane Reade. This was followed by Olay’s Regenerist [...]
Before Oprah
by Marc Alan Di Martino 08/19/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
Back in the days when bookselling was uninfected by the dubious influence of Oprah’s Book Club, I was employed at the historic Midtown Book Retailers, a New York City landmark. The bookshop was housed in a now bulldozed brownstone buffeted by crags of diamond mines, popularly known as West 47th St. Manhattan, ground zero of [...]
Undertow of Summer
by Justine Blau 08/05/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
My radiant, delusional mother, my two older brothers, and I lived in second-rate hotels and one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan from 1961, when I was five, until 1967. We’d sporadically get locked out of wherever we were staying for not keeping up with the rent, have our possessions confiscated, and spend the night sleeping in Central [...]
Meet Your Match on Craigslist–by a Victorious Veteran
by Prof Barbara Foster 04/20/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
As the New Years Eve hullabaloo in Times Square exploded, I followed suit with a cataclysmic orgasm. That was the good news! Then things became Byzantine! Did complications arise because I met Desmond on Craigslist, where a dizzying succession of weirdoes and losers answered my ad? Since that New Years, I’ve evolved a strategy, plus [...]
Lower Torso Must be Covered in Food Area
by Kelly Kreth 04/20/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
I’ll admit it, I was uptight. I didn’t know what to expect and tend to have social anxiety in big groups, even when the folks that comprise them are fully clothed. I sat uncomfortably in the Beamer, cruising down 2nd. Still, I don’t consider myself a prude and the opportunity to go and view seemed [...]
Little Blue Bag
by Shawn Vandor 04/06/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
I only had twenty-four hours in New York to buy my grandmother a gift for her 90th birthday before my flight out to Portland for the big party. I’d just gotten back from Germany where I unsuccessfully tried to woo a woman I’d been in love with, or thought I’d been in love with, for [...]
R2-D2: Working Stiff
by Tom Diriwachter 03/09/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
In commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of “Star Wars,” a number of mailboxes around the city have been made over–shrouded in an industrial strength decal–like R2-D2, my preferred mailbox among them. The USPS website quotes a postal representative as saying it was a “natural fit,” the tone of his hyperbole exuberant. My suspicion is that [...]
Some Lice to Live
by Carol Paik 03/02/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
I come home to find a message on my answering machine from the nurse at my daughter’s school. “We had a case of head lice in the 5th grade, so we did a school-wide check.” Pause. “Meredith has some nits.” I immediately think of The Thorn Birds, which I read when I was a kid. [...]
The I of the Tiger
by Peter Wortsman 02/23/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? –William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and [...]
