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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 [...]
Just Another Part of the Job
by Thomas R. Ziegler 03/31/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
Inside the firehouse, sweeping floors, cooking meals and maintaining equipment are routine parts of the job. However when the doors go up and the rigs go out you have to be as flexible as Gumby, because you do not know what you are going to be faced with next. While responding to alarms, we always [...]
The Man’s Wallet
by Karen Miller 03/10/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
On a summer evening in 2001, after work and after grilled cheese in the Greek diner on Amsterdam, Jeremy and I are walking through Verdi square, past the 72nd Street station on the 1 and 9, the most treacherously narrow subway platform in all of Manhattan, forever poised on the precipice of disaster. The streets [...]
Twilight in the Toy Shop
by Christine Nieland 02/22/2006Neighborhood: West Village
I’d dashed in about a half-hour before closing time. This little toy store in the Village, whose shelves cheerfully overflow with cute wooden toys in primary colors, funny stuffed monkeys and bright plastic puzzles. A friendly, crowded little place devoid of Gameboys and electronic pinging, the kind of place where you can reassure yourself you’re [...]
Doing Squats with Bruce Cutler
by Mickey Z. 02/09/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
I was recently musing about my time as a trainer at Manhattan’s most prestigious 1980′s gym: The Vertical Club. The place was loaded with the beautiful people and the celebrities they yearned to be. A regular in the weight room was one Bruce Cutler, the late John Gotti’s lawyer. The barrel chested Cutler was a [...]
