You are currently browsing the stories about the Upper East Side neighborhood
That’s My Daughter In The Water
by Trevor Laurence Jockims 03/27/2013Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
Getting your two year old daughter into a bathing suit in a men’s changing room can be a bit like stuffing an eel into a pillowcase. For some reason I thought the smart move would be to undress myself first, get my trunks on, my flip-flops, grab my towel, then shed Hana down to her [...]
Doormen For Romney
by Basil Totem 10/25/2012Neighborhood: Upper East Side
September 2012 - In anticipation of an Occupy Wall Street march up Park Avenue, I am polishing the brass poles of the canopy and humming The Internationale. Although my employers, the bankers and traders who live in this elegant pre-war co-op, are hostile to OWS’s call for higher taxes on the rich, I am among the [...]
Hiding in a Transparent City
by Deirdre Faughey Davison 10/10/2012Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
When I was fourteen, I auditioned for the School of American Ballet and was accepted. The school was too far from my home to travel back and forth everyday, so I lived in the dormitory at Lincoln Center during the week and travelled back to Long Island on the weekends. Every Sunday night, after a [...]
Cross Streets
by Trevor Laurence Jockims 08/28/2012Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side, West Village
I was running late for a new faculty meeting at NYU. "411 Lafayette," I said, jumping into a cab. The driver looked at me in the mirror with squinting, my-English-is-not-great eyes. "411 LA-FAY-ETTE," I said, raising my voice, hoping to hurry us along. I checked the time: If traffic was very light I might—might—make it [...]
Apartment 7
by melissa petro 07/18/2012Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
When I moved into my apartment going on four years ago, the building looked like a movie star fifty years past her prime. It was in such a condition that they were being ordered by the city to make capital improvements and were continually fined until they did so. I of course had loved its [...]
Stillness is the Move
by Trevor Laurence Jockims 06/19/2012Neighborhood: Upper East Side
It was after our third year in New York that my wife and I realized it was time to move. The deciding factor came when I’d picked up a stapler at a stationary store, looked at it in my hand, and thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ Our studio apartment was just that [...]
The Owner Likes It Loud
by Carl Schinasi 06/19/2012Neighborhood: Upper East Side
In the mid ‘70s I, a lifelong New Yorker, eagerly departed the crazy hustle and bustle of New York City when I landed a job in Birmingham, Alabama. I didn’t expect to miss New York or anything about it. But a few weeks after I moved to Birmingham, suddenly and unexpectedly I began craving almost [...]
Death Comes to The Fenwick Arms
by Mr. Murphy 12/31/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
I’m holding the door open for Mr. 11A and his dog, but when he sees the Medical Examiner’s van and the police car parked in front of the building, he stops, leans in close to me, and asks in a stage whisper, “Do they suspect foul play?” I tell him that the police had only [...]
Shoe Glue
by Susan Sawyers 04/15/2010Neighborhood: Upper East Side
The dark interior smells of leather, glue and shoe polish. It looks as if Jim’s Shoe Repair hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint since it opened. In 1932 when Vito “Jim” Rocco walked across the threshold of his shop on East 59th Street between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, it was one of [...]
A Sidekick for St. Patrick’s Day
by Brian Quinn 03/17/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
Walking the streets on St. Patrick’s Day in New York City is akin to walking into an insane asylum in which all the inmates have been starved for days, denied all their medications, punched about the head a few times, then painted green and released from their cells. Also, someone has pissed in all the [...]
Dental Cares
by Daniel Menaker 02/26/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
I have had a lot of trouble with my teeth, having been born with weak enamel in store in my childhood, a nutritional illness that almost killed me as an infant, and then a horribly incompetent dentist during my adolescence. Norbert Vaughan, who sadly encouraged his patients, even his teen-aged patients, to call him Norby. [...]
Crazy But True
by Elizabeth Manus 08/09/2009Neighborhood: Upper East Side
At 4 a.m. on a Saturday night in May, I was suddenly trapped in my own bedroom with no likely route to freedom. I had just turned out the light and pulled the covers when a strong draft slammed the bedroom door shut. This had happened before, but the door had never locked. The problem [...]
