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Blue on 14th Street
by Claudette Covey 12/31/2006Neighborhood: West Village
Blue never counts the raccoon coat in her estimate. By this time in 1984, t’s too old, even though from a distance it makes her look like a rich person. The coat, which falls to her ankles, is from the 1920s and was her grandfather’s. The inside label even spells out his name in baroque [...]
You’re Supposed to Make Mistakes
by Shawn Vandor 12/31/2006Neighborhood: West Village
“Just like a boxer in a title fight you’ve got to walk in that ring all alone You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own” –Billy Joel I was looking at some apartments with my realtor, Harriet Loshin, just west of Union square, [...]
A Driver You Can Trust in Flatlands
by G. Madlyn 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Flatbush
My parents and I live in a dangerous neighborhood. It started getting dicey in 1989 when my father got mugged. One night, a man put a gun to his head. My dad foolishly used a dangerous shortcut. It was an error he would not make twice. If my mother didn’t realize it before, she now [...]
The Enchanted Jury Summons
by Laren Stover 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Financial District
I had gotten a summons for jury duty. Or should I say yet another one. I was afraid of those tall, gloomy, impersonal Wall-Street-area buildings full of people in somber look-alike suits. Jury duty was some sort of gulag. Stripped of rights. Where was the joie de vivre? What about poetic justice? Besides, I wasn’t [...]
Rage & Thanksgiving
by Sherri Rosen 12/01/2006Neighborhood: Financial District
It was 60 degrees this morning so I decided to do some of my work in City Hall Park. The park was relatively empty. I was reading my magazines and enjoying the outdoors when I began to hear this loud screaming. Living in NYC, you get used to this kind of sound, so I continued [...]
The Scorekeeper
by Courtney Lichterman 12/01/2006Neighborhood: Murray Hill
One of the oddities of growing up in a big city like New York is that the discussion and anticipation of crime enters into everyday childhood rather unremarkably. In many ways it is the first real adult problem children are asked to deal with and conversation about murders in general were, by necessity, exceptionally frequent [...]
Loaded Hallways
by JB McGeever 10/17/2006Neighborhood: All Over, Multiple
The campus of my public school building in New York City is a fortress these days. Gazing through the mesh caging of any stairway window, I can spot faculty deans, campus security (a branch of the NYPD with arresting powers), as well as regular NYPD uniformed officers patrolling the grounds like medieval sentries. As I [...]
Chelsea’s Least Wanted
by Sarah Ruth Jacobs 10/10/2006Neighborhood: Chelsea
I’m at the opening of Least Wanted, a collection of mugshots, many of them enlarged, from the 1930′s through the early 70′s. The young and the bad are beautifully indignant in black and white, and I could stare for hours at the badass mug of a 17 year old boy caught rioting on the streets [...]
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 [...]
We’re Doing It For Them
by Thomas R. Ziegler 06/07/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
Looking around for the lieutenant, I find him standing alongside the firehouse, staring down into a neat row of freshly clipped hedges. I hurry to his side and he tersely commands, “Get to work.” Right then and there, my life changes forever. * For firemen, there is nothing more startling than a Verbal Alarm–the riotous [...]
The Night My Cell Phone Got Stolen
by Josh Lefkowitz 06/01/2006Neighborhood: East Village
At the risk of sounding terribly cliché, I was mugged in New York. It was July, 2005. I was a block away from home when two gentlemen – black, backwards hats – pushed me up against the wall, took the phone out of my hand, and asked if they could make a phone call. I [...]
Frosted Flakes and the Primitive Animal God: A Night in the Tombs
by Andy Hick 05/11/2006Neighborhood: Financial District
The pivot of this story is not the state of generic poverty that I found myself in upon entering New York. You don’t have to be poor to be thrown in jail, but it helps. I had broken some sort of levee on the China Town bus between Philadelphia and New York. That morning I [...]
