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Live Free or Die
by Pam Widener 09/24/2006Neighborhood: West Village
On a recent Tuesday morning, at exactly 9:32 AM, Suzanne Seggerman pulled her white, full-sized van, a Chevrolet Gladiator she affectionately refers to as The Gladiator, into a choice parking spot on Bleecker Street near the NYU gym. She was fresh on the heels of the street-cleaning vehicle assigned to this block every Tuesday and [...]
Bonfire of the Remedies
by Andy Christie 06/28/2006Neighborhood: Clinton
My mother’s narrow little medicine chest is a joke to her. It’s quaint. It’s for amateurs. She keeps her medicine in the kitchen cabinet and the kitchen drawers and the candy dishes. Her canisters for coffee and flour and sugar are filled with Lipitor and Propranalol and Prozac. She could collapse from overmedication at any [...]
Detroit, Detroit, Where Did Our Love Go?
by Ronit Feldman 06/08/2006Neighborhood: All Over
When I was seven years old my mother, ignoring my protests, packed me into the station wagon and drove downtown to the Detroit Institute of Art where I proceeded to vomit on the marble floor. I blamed my sick stomach on a sculpture, but it was more likely the stack of pancakes she fed me [...]
David Zuva: Shoemaker
by John Bowe (interviewer) 06/03/2006Neighborhood: West Village
My name is David Zuva. I’m from Russia, from Odessa. I’ve been here twenty years. I’m a shoemaker. I repair shoes. This my profession. I worked in Russia in the same profession. I learned when I was small boy. My father teach me. All the family shoemakers–my whole family–my wife, me, my father, my brothers, [...]
Caviar & Coleslaw
by Julie Lanway 04/20/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
It was during my second month in the new office that I determined I was in love. She was standing next to the fax machine, paperwork in hand, bending over slightly so she could read the message in the small screen. She had a short skirt and long legs. They looked very shapely but solid. [...]
Talk Your Way Out
by Brian Shuman 04/13/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
On my first day of the assignment I was pointed toward a stack of newspapers and told to find a pair of scissors so I could cut out any articles mentioning Hillary. My supervisor’s name was Jennifer. She was waving an adding machine above her head and ticker tape hung by her face like a [...]
An Untimely Death
by Mr. Murphy 03/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Jimmy, the boss, and I are in the basement still mourning the passing of 16A, when the passenger car opens and a white envelope dances out of the elevator. The white rectangle shimmies and gyrates obscenely, beckoning us. We are powerless to resist. As we near the object of our desire, the envelope, and the [...]
The Incident
by Alison Bull 03/31/2006Neighborhood: Times Square
When I walk through Midtown Manhattan, I think of The Jetsons. One episode in particular, where George and Co. bought a new apartment, and that apartment was taken up by a big space-age crane and placed in an empty hole in an apartment building, thus making it full and round. That’s how I think of [...]
The Lost Collar
by Michelle Zaffino 03/16/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
The world of magazine publishing in New York is extremely competitive. No matter how talented one is an editor or a writer, one must have contacts in the industry to obtain that first, entry-level job. Mrs. Carpati, my landlady, happened to work at Cosmopolitan in ad sales, and she was glad to introduce me to [...]
Transit Strike In The Diamond District
by Thomas Beller 02/10/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
On the first day of the New York City transit strike of 2005 I went to talk to Rosa Gutgold. She sells pearls, and is usually good for a few pearls of wisdom. But Rosa did not come to work on the first day of the strike. Nor the second. On the third day the [...]
The Job of the Forcible Entry Team
by Thomas R. Ziegler 02/06/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
Autumn has arrived and the cooler air has dampened but not ended the fires of this years “Summer Offensive.” Somewhere the trees are changing color but here in Hunts Point it has been one of those days. We’ve already caught more work on this day tour than any company outside the ghetto will see in [...]
The Unsung Hero: A Ford Motor Company Story
by Eric C. Novack 01/26/2006Neighborhood: Letter From Abroad
The headline on the Detroit Free Press was bold. But it was just another clever way of stating the obvious. Ford Motor Company was going to announce “The Way Forward,” actually a way to cut back. Ron Novack sat at his kitchen table and skimmed the story about the plant closures and layoffs that would [...]
