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Overheated In Gravesend

by 06/20/2011
Neighborhood: Gravesend

It’s hot. We have one air conditioner and one TV. The TV is black-and-white; the air conditioner is in my parents’ bedroom. I usually sleep with my door wide open, letting in a cool breeze from the back door to our attached row house, the access to our backyard. Back then no one imagines someone [...]

Secret Staircase

by 05/22/2011
Neighborhood: 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 [...]

The Longevity of Women

by 04/17/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Uncategorized, Upper West Side

My Uncle Carmine had a theory that the reason for the longevity of women was due to the fact that their  sex makes men wait for them and every minute and hour of a man’s waiting is stored within the genetic code of a woman’s body. In America that advantage of life over death is [...]

Wurst Lust

by 04/11/2011
Neighborhood: 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. [...]

Close Shave

by 04/03/2011
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, Uncategorized

On a steamy afternoon last July, I paid a barber to shave my face. I had no real reason to indulge in this service. I had no company party to attend, no weekend away with the missus scheduled. I didn’t even have firm dinner plans for the night. Like eating and ironing, shaving is one [...]

69 Years After

by 03/24/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Greenwich Village, Lower East Side, Uncategorized

In the spring of 1980 I was a cocky new teacher of English as a Second language, fresh from education grad school, with innovative pedagogy that I couldn’t wait to try out on students. My first job in New York was a gem: "Vocational ESL." It was funded by the feds and I'd gone to [...]

The Bocce Courts of Dyker Park

by 03/20/2011
Neighborhood: Dyker Heights

Nestled in the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Dyker Park is renowned throughout New York City for its lush golf courses. Proud Brooklynites, always ready to boast about their home borough, might inform you that these Dyker courses spawned a legend: Tiger Woods’ father, Colonel Earl Woods, caught the golf bug there in 1972 while [...]

Stuff in Stockings

by 03/20/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Yorkville

Gabriella breezed into St. Stephen’s 6th grade as a new student, and left a battleship wake when she mysteriously disappeared after seventh grade. Gabriella was an adorable Hungarian immigrant with a low voice like Natasha on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Her hair was cut short and bobbed to show off her huge dark almond-shaped [...]

Tower of Rubble

by 03/20/2011
Neighborhood: East Village

My mother is watching the DON’T WALK sign blink on the corner of 6th Street and Avenue B. My twelve year old twin sister and I have been trekking with mother all over Alphabet City for what seems like hours. I am carrying a plastic bag filled with clothes that mother found a block away [...]

Looking Up

by 03/13/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Grand Central Station

I first passed under Grand Central Terminal’s Sky Ceiling in 1985 as a young actress new to Manhattan, on the way from my job as a Broadway theater bartender to visit my first serious boyfriend in Connecticut. Several times a week, I raced to catch the last New Haven-bound train at 11:20 pm. Winded as [...]

Hemmed In

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: Midtown

This is a story about my grandmother, who was young in Manhattan in the 1920s. Speakeasies, nightclubs, drop-waisted dresses, bobbed hair, cloche hats, waist-length strands of dime-store pearls. Even for a middle-class workaday office girl like Frances Thornton, those were heady times. She was among the first of the gals in her office to bob [...]

The Whip and The Bonnet

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Financial District, Uncategorized

For a long time I used to go down to Pearl Street at the bottom of Manhattan. It was around the time that I had started writing a book about the famous case of the man and the woman who had disappeared from Pearl Street in 1997. The book led to the street and, in [...]