You are currently browsing the stories about the Tribeca neighborhood

Baby Doll

by 02/07/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Tribeca, Uncategorized

It was 1995. I was a junior in college, working full-time at a Fuddrucker’s restaurant on the Upper East Side. I wore a uniform three sizes too large, in custodial colors, bedecked with promotional buttons for mega-nacho platters and S.O.B. sundaes. (“Son of a bitch?” a customer asked me once, pointing quizzically at the pin [...]

Brookti & Me: 3 Years On

by 02/10/2008
Neighborhood: Tribeca

[For earlier Brookti & Me, check here and here . --eds.] ** I’ve been reading a lot recently about our new “post-racial” world, where we have “transcended race,” where a black man is running for president and white people are actually voting for him. I’m wondering, if we have transcended race so successfully, why are [...]

The Naked New Year’s Eve Bartender

by 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Tribeca

The job sounded perfect: bartending a gay sex party in a private loft in Tribeca. If I had to be stuck in New York for New Year’s Eve – a very depressing thought after having spent four New Year’s Eves in Cape Town – then I might as well work, earn some money, and just [...]

The Smell of Shark

by 06/04/2006
Neighborhood: Tribeca

About a month ago, a terrible new smell turned up on North Moore Street in Tribeca. It did not coexist peacefully with the other smells on the street: the coffee and cooking smells from Bubby’s, a local hangout; the sweet, strong smell of olive oil stored in Hillside Imperial Foods; pepper and nutmeg smells from [...]

Funky Piers of Tribeca

by 12/01/2005
Neighborhood: Tribeca

I’m savoring the last days of Pier 25, which closes next month for a three year renovation. I loved this funky wharf in Tribeca– a rest stop on my daily bike rides through Hudson River Park. I would visit the Sweet Love Snack Shack for a lemonade or veggie burger grilled on an old fashioned [...]

Brookti & Me: A Story of Adoption, Episode #2

by 02/13/2005
Neighborhood: Tribeca

The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here. ** Episode #2: I expected freaky racial—and class—‘episodes’, which are inevitably intertwined, when Brookti touched down. I knew the most common ones to expect and assumed I’d easily brush them off. What I didn’t expect: how intricate the race/class hiearchys are (I [...]

Brookti & Me: A Story of Adoption

by 01/27/2005
Neighborhood: Tribeca

Brookti came from Ethiopia 8 months ago when she was around two. Initially I’d tried to adopt domestically, but it turns out that adopting in the U.S. as a single mother, aside from being a 21st century version of some kind of slave trade, (i.e. black/interracial children are ‘a third of the price’ of Hispanic [...]

Village Car Wash

by the man with the funny camera 06/08/2003
Neighborhood: Tribeca

This man is proud of his work. He’s from Russia.

Summer Expectations

by 05/26/2003
Neighborhood: Tribeca

If I didn’t have the summer to look forward to, I might just cap myself. Think about the glory of planning a summer. The forward-looking nature of the enterprise is inherently optimistic. You’re at the back end of a long winter and up ahead shining in the middle distance is the summer’s three emotionally clustered [...]

On Cleaning: An Interview With My Mother

by 02/04/2003
Neighborhood: Tribeca

I wasn’t always a compulsive cleaner. Quite the contrary: I was once slovenly and slothful– an unmitigated slob. The cleaning disease crept up on me over the years like a bad case of the measles; until, lo and behold, I’d become a fullblown clean freak. The kind who, at 6:00pm, reaches for the Fantastik with [...]

At The New York Academy of Art You Are Always Being Watched

by 10/12/2002
Neighborhood: Tribeca

Pictures by Josh Gilbert I dropped by the New York Academy of Art with my spiffy digital camera, feeling like an artist and ready to snap a few pics while I waited for my friend, Beag. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for me to feel like a fraud. For one thing, my friend [...]

Saturday Morning at Puffy’s

by 02/17/2002
Neighborhood: Tribeca

A few drunk men standing around the television in Puffy’s Tavern on a Saturday morning is not that unusual for the historic watering hole–back before when Tribeca became DeNiro-ified, a man “Puffy” opened his bar at the corner of Hudson and Harrison at 6 a.m. and closed it at 4 in the afternoon so the [...]