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All That They Can Be?
by JB McGeever 05/16/2012Neighborhood: Bushwick, Ridgewood, Uncategorized
The local recruiter is at my classroom door again and I really wish he’d stop doing this. When I explain that there are designated areas throughout the building for him to speak with students or ‘potential recruits’ as they’re called in his line of work, he apologizes profusely. In fact, his demeanor and etiquette is [...]
As Elevators Shrink
by Ellen Greenfield 04/16/2012Neighborhood: Flushing, Pomonok
When had the elevator gotten so small? When I was ten and living on the top floor of a building in the New York City Housing Project called Pomonok -- a word the Algonquin Indians used for Long Island -- I dreamed of stabling my horse in that elevator. The fantasy of actually having my [...]
Any Kid In The City
by JB McGeever 04/06/2012Neighborhood: Flushing
The students enter the building through a side door, where they promptly submit backpacks and any other personal items to the NYPD safety agent who greets them at the steps. There’s a male agent for the boys, a female for the girls. Everyone is scanned for weapons, cell phones and drugs upon entering the building. [...]
From Howard Beach To An Ashram; A Mafia Journey
by eugene baron 04/06/2012Neighborhood: Featured, Howard's Beach
All names in this story have been changed. It is not every day that one visits an Ashram for yoga and encounters a “retired” Mafia soldier, adrift there because of illness and poverty. From my end, I envisioned a documentary film covering his faded world; however, for his own security - though the events occurred [...]
A Forgotten Game
by Peter Wortsman 03/27/2012Neighborhood: Jackson Heights
I don’t know who invented the game or whether it is still played today. Slap Ball had a brief vogue in New York City schoolyards in the early Sixties, and in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I grew up, it attained minor cult status as the game of choice for the physically challenged. A welcome alternative [...]
Secret Staircase
by Heidi Rain 05/22/2011Neighborhood: Sunnyside, Uncategorized
On beautiful May mornings like this one, when the sky holds a brightness that hints at a sunshiny day and the birds are all a-twitter, I miss Nancy terribly. I miss knowing that after school we’ll go beyond the alley that stretches out behind my back yard, to the communal gardens there. As we do [...]
Wurst Lust
by Peter Wortsman 04/11/2011Neighborhood: Featured, Jackson Heights, Uncategorized
What is it, I wonder, about the German fondness for the flesh of the pig and the Jewish abhorrence of it? Like lust, revulsion too is a visceral thing fueled by the same hunger, only in reverse, a passion linked to the salivary glands that passes down the gullet to tantalize and taunt the gut. [...]
Getting to St. Martin
by Sabrina Hassan 02/07/2011Neighborhood: JFK/LGA
It was my biggest disappointment in recent memory. I slumped in a blue plastic seat at the JFK terminal to absorb the shock while my plane to sunny St. Martin took off without me. I couldn’t believe I had let my vacation slip through my fingers. I had remembered to pack everything—the sunscreen, the bikinis, [...]
Beat It!
by Peter Wortsman 01/30/2011Neighborhood: Queens
On the middle level of the ever moving station stop at Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, where the subway and the elevated meet in a shaky embrace and humanity flows on a non-stop escalator between heaven and earth, the melting pot boils over with new arrivals as trains disgorge their loads. Here reed-flute players from the [...]
Citi Something-else Place
by Peter F. Eder 04/06/2010Neighborhood: Flushing
“Citi Field,” the New York Mets new home, is a misnomer. Someone needs to coin a word to describe a venue that is part amusement park, food court, a Brooklyn Dodger mini-museum, sports specialty shop, tourist trap, and that by the way, also happens to contain a poorly designed baseball playing field. My first visit [...]
Wonderland
by Nicole Ferraro 03/08/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Whitestone
In Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, 19-year-old Alice – played by Mia Wasikowska – returns to Wonderland, 10 years after her last visit there, to rescue it from the Red Queen. At 26, two decades since my last trip to the rabbit hole, I can only say I envy her. I was six years old [...]
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 [...]
