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Floating on Air at the St. George Hotel
by Rachel Cline 01/27/2008Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights
The visible landscape of Brooklyn Heights is much the same as it was in my childhood, which is a large part of why I moved back to the neighborhood after almost twenty years. Every so often, someone stops me on Clark Street to ask directions to the subway station. It always takes me a second or [...]
It Wasn’t Our Turn
by Thomas R. Ziegler 07/20/2007Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
Arriving at work for the night tour on October 29, 1974 I discover the firehouse to be as abandoned and silent as a cemetery at midnight, I was spooked by something but wrote it off to the approach of Halloween when in reality it was actually an omen. I am the first member of the night [...]
I Lose My Cherry
by Thomas R. Ziegler 08/10/2006Neighborhood: East Harlem
It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday in April 1973, and my first-day tour on the job, when that seminal alarm sounds. The disembodied voice of the dispatcher booms from loudspeakers throughout the firehouse, “Attention the following units…Engines 83, 60, 41-1 Ladders 29, 17-2 Battalion 14…Respond to…” The box number and address are given, and then the dispatcher adds, [...]
Katrina Did One Good Thing
by Debbie Nathan 06/14/2006Neighborhood: Letter From Abroad
It sounds like Harlem when black people in New Orleans talk, but way more so. They open their mouths and cane syrup sounds roll out. “Awright, Sugar. Heego, dawlin’,” said the steam table lady serving shrimp as I lunched at a conference that brought me recently to this gorgeous, mangled city. I asked where she [...]
The Old Building on the Way to Dad’s Office
by Steven Rosen 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
My dad worked in midtown at an advertising agency and for years as a young kid I would go to work with my him in the summers, just as a way to stay out of trouble. We would always take the same route and on the way we would pass an old decrepit building sandwiched between [...]
Christmas Day in a Parallel Queens
by Emily Weinstein 01/05/2006Neighborhood: All Over, Letter From Abroad
On this warm, wet Christmas, I ambled without purpose somewhere in America. I prefer the inevitable disappointment of a sodden Christmas–the remains of an earlier December snowfall dribbling down storm drains, the exiled smokers unshivering, unbothering with jackets, exhalations elongated in the humidity, the theatrical coziness of houses all the more fake against temperatures well [...]
Industrial Ruins, Digital Gallery: An Interview with Lowell Boileau
by Patrick W. Gallagher 08/05/2005Neighborhood: Uncategorized
“Athens has got ruins, Rome has got ruins. Ours are bigger, but there’s no guidebook to them.” —Lowell Boileau Part collage, part museum, part mausoleum, and all constructed around a series of intricately conceived online “tours,” detroityes.com depicts Detroit’s past and present in a library containing thousands of vivid photographic images. For many, the centerpiece of the website [...]
The Northern Dispensary
by Kenneth Hamner 04/20/2005Neighborhood: West Village
Across the street from my apartment is a vacant building known as the Northern Dispensary. Founded as a hospice for the poor in 1827, this wedge-shaped landmark is a West Village oddity situated at the oddest of intersections: the point at which two branches of Waverly Place come together, and where Christopher Street and Grove Street [...]
Unfinished City
by by Said Shirazi 12/02/2002Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Multiple
Lately when I go for a walk I make a vow not to walk under any scaffolding, in protest of there being so much of it these days. Two minutes later I realize I’m walking under scaffolding. One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer [...]
Chemical Fire
by Jasmine Dreame Wagner 12/01/2002Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Sunset Park
The building, Morgan described, was a monolith of brick with a flat, black hole blasted out of the side. Standing at the edge of the entrance, he peered inside and swore that he saw someone moving. He shivered and stumbled to the curb, then quickly retraced his footsteps back up First Avenue, skirting the fringe [...]
Inside the Tenenbaum House
by Adam Baer 10/09/2002Neighborhood: Harlem
Just east of Amsterdam Avenue, in a section of Harlem called Hamilton Heights, a newly poignant obsession of mine was given life. I had spent my week with the DVD of Wes Anderson’s third movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. I sang along with the quirky soundtrack songs (Nico, The Clash, Paul Simon); listened to the director’s [...]
The Dakota: John Lennon Speaks
by Leland Pitts-Gonzalez 07/01/2002Neighborhood: Upper West Side
The Dakota It’s not simply a brown building. On the northeast corner of 72nd and Central Park West, it stands like a fortress. It has the soothing color of earth. Near the entrance to the park, a hot dog vendor sells an abundance of meat and buns. Multicolored balloons hang from a tree. A guy [...]
