You are currently browsing the stories about the Upper West Side neighborhood
It is Easy To Speak Chinese
by Lily Shen 01/08/2011Neighborhood: Upper West Side
At the 96th Street subway station, a Hispanic man with a graying beard hopped on the train. He immediately launched into a barrage of loud, incoherent ranting, which made me wonder if he was freshly sprung from the Bellevue psych ward. After several minutes of rambling in English and Spanish, he finally hit upon a [...]
Guns Guns Guns
by peter nolan smith 12/19/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper West Side
Kids in America are supposed to like guns. Our movie heroes majestically wield weapons on the silver screen and TV cops dance through primetime gun ballets. Armed with air rifles and plastic weapons my friends and I played WAR in the woods behind my house. Imaginary bullets tore holes through the make-believe Nazis and Japs. [...]
Adopting a Pint-Size Pocketbook Pooch
by Martine Byer 10/26/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
As I am walking out of yoga class, an acquaintance asks, “How’s Rio ?” She is referring to the two pound poodle puppy I had mentioned I would be getting. At this point, I’ve had Rio a few days. “He’s great,” I say, “But it’s way more overwhelming than I thought it would be.” Her [...]
Riding With Ellen DeGeneres
by Gretchen Wiker 10/25/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
For the past several minutes, I've been watching Ellen DeGeneres drive a cab around Columbus Circle behind a camera crew. The cab is old fashioned, with a big square grill and black-and-white checkerboard sides. Businessmen rushing by don't notice her or don’t care if they do, and I stand with a few foreign tourists ready [...]
Celebrating the American Revolution
by Debbie Nathan 07/04/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper West Side
Young white man with large backpack, heavy French accent, and reasonably capable English: Excuse me, is there a local Number 2 train? It comes on this track? Middle-aged white New York woman with long, dangling earrings: No. This is the Number 1 track. Number 2 trains, they're all express. Over on that track. A Number [...]
Ride the Lightning
by Edward Mullany 07/04/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
Outside the shop where we'd just bought ice cream, my wife and I were sitting on a bench against the window, my wife with a cone and myself with a small cup. It was sunny. We'd just come over from Riverside Park, where we'd been leisurely biking, and where people were already starting to gather [...]
You Bet Your Life
by Roberta Allen 06/19/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
After work, my father usually went to the racetrack or played poker with his pals in the Ansonia Hotel, a few blocks from our pre-war apartment on West 76th Street, so my mother and I were surprised to see him home early one evening. It didn’t take him long to tell us why. “Turn on [...]
Covered Heads
by Brian Schwartz 06/03/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I have been to exactly one rabbinical student graduation party: Jewish Theological Seminary, class of 1998. The party was held outdoors on the rooftop of a pub on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the balmy May night helped create the illusion that the bar was somewhere outside the city—a mountaintop perch under an oddly starless [...]
Mrs. Graham, the White Ghost
by Carl Schinasi 03/08/2010Neighborhood: Beechhurst, Upper West Side
As a teenager, I lived with my dysfunctional family in a modest but comfortable apartment in Beechurst, Queens. One Saturday morning, too fried to suffer any longer the slings and arrows of my sorry-assed teenage life, I decided to run away from home. I told my mother I was going into Manhattan to spend the [...]
A Small Part at The New York City Opera
by Raul A. Reyes 02/26/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
The only thing I never liked about performing at Lincoln Center was the fake snow. During the years I worked at New York City Opera as a “supernumerary,” or stage extra, the tiny bits of confetti used for winter weather effect bugged me. I would be acting away, as much as possible without lines, while [...]
Opera for the Poor, Cheap and Masochistic
by Ken Paprocki 08/16/2009Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I’m Number 28 in line for rush tickets at the Metropolitan Opera. Today there was a ripple in the curvature of the space-time continuum: they moved the rush ticket waiting line upstairs. Ongoing construction forced everybody out of the usual spot. This means that instead of waiting in the hyperborean dungeon beneath the main level [...]
It Even Moves
by Roberta Allen 05/20/2009Neighborhood: Upper West Side
That morning in 1949 begins innocently enough in our one-room apartment in the Ansonia Hotel. I am four. My father gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. I go over to the bathroom door. The keyhole is just the right height. Curious, I peer through it and see my father. I can hardly [...]
