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Crack Island
by Peter Nolan Smith 09/06/2008Neighborhood: East Village
East 11th Street between Avenue B and C on the Lower East Side of New York was hot for drugs the summer of 1986. The tenement building on the corner of Avenue B was called ‘the Rock.’ Teenage look-outs steered cokeheads into the tenement. The metal apartment doors were welded shut. A spy hole allowed [...]
Supporting Mick Jagger’s Habit
by Mickey Z. 03/31/2008Neighborhood: Astoria, Queens
In the glory days of Steinway Street, there was an establishment called Record Spectacular. A combination record store/head shop, it was located between 30th and 31st Avenues, on the west side of the street…and was a meeting place of sorts for music aficionados, potheads, and other 1970s misfits. I still remember walking wide-eyed into Record Spectacular [...]
Young Russian Immigrants Turn to Heroin
by Anne Noyes Saini 03/31/2008Neighborhood: Brooklyn, On the Waterfront
Her daughter tried dozens of rehab clinics and treatment programs. After awhile, Olga says, they blurred into a familiar pattern: “program, back, program, back.” “Back” meaning: back on heroin. Olga, who asked that her and her daughter’s names be changed for this story, came to New York City with her family in 1997, refugees from the former [...]
Hotel Edison
by Roberta Allen 12/15/2007Neighborhood: Times Square
Since my father’s suicide in the Hotel Edison, I made sure never to pass that hotel. I would not even walk down West 47th Street. But suddenly there I was, smack in front of it, thirty-nine years later on a brutally cold night in 2002 with my boyfriend Craig, who innocently suggested we stop in [...]
Leaves of Grass
by Neil R. Mooney 12/01/2007Neighborhood: East Village
I slouched on my unmade bed in the murky mid-afternoon twilight, back against the wall, staring forlornly out the window. The sooty red bricks across the air shaft, crusty with flecks of ancient pigeon shit, provided little comfort. I tried casting my eyes around my room every now and then, for variety, but that was [...]
Liquid Straightjacket Works Every Time
by Thomas R. Ziegler 11/18/2007Neighborhood: Murray Hill
It’s 1983; I’m on the job ten years and have received my first promotion. Yesterday as a firefighter I carried an axe and fought fires; today as a Fire Marshal I carry a gun and fight crime. In most departments around our country, the title Fire Marshal denotes a person who performs inspectional duties. In NYC, that title [...]
One Snort
by Shawn Vandor 10/09/2007Neighborhood: Williamsburg
Cocaine did not ruin my life any more than video games or an overprotective mother ruined my life. Which is to say, not at all. Whether or not cocaine impaired my intellectual abilities (I am not a member of MENSA) is something I’ll never know but as for my physical development (I’m six foot nine) [...]
Living with Nicola’s Single Life
by Jed Lipinski 06/01/2007Neighborhood: East Village
Nicola is a lively twenty-year-old girl of Thai and Italian descent, born and raised on the Upper East Side. She has been my roommate on East 4th Street for four months, since I answered her apartment ad on Craigslist, and she works as a cocktail waitress at Thor—a fashionable nightclub in the Lower East Side—until [...]
Four Years
by James Patrick Brogan 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
We are driving in from the country, out where we go to school, a little town in a valley and a school on the hill. We come in from the west, over the Bridge with the sun sliding around the tip of lower Manhattan, mocking the Lady’s little torch, basking in its own reflection off [...]
More or Less How It Got To Be 4 O’Clock
by Bill Teitelbaum 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad
Six months out of college, with an undergraduate degree in English literature and still operating on the assumption that my real life had not yet begun, I was offered a job conducting interviews for a market research company. The firm occupied a converted warehouse in a Garden City industrial park, but most of my assignments [...]
It has been many years since I last spiked.
by Eugene Barron 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
It was a chance encounter a few years ago in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side where I peeked into the shadowy universe of the “junky.” After the meeting I invited Harry to my office to continue to tell his story which goes back thirty years when the island on 72nd Street and [...]
The Naked New Year’s Eve Bartender
by Ronald Douglas 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Tribeca
The job sounded perfect: bartending a gay sex party in a private loft in Tribeca. If I had to be stuck in New York for New Year’s Eve – a very depressing thought after having spent four New Year’s Eves in Cape Town – then I might as well work, earn some money, and just [...]
