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The Crack Van

by Connor Gaudet 07/31/2010
Neighborhood: All Over, Carroll Gardens, Featured

I drive a van for a restaurant. Actually it’s several restaurants but they are owned by the same people. They have three restaurant locations and two cafes, but only one location has a full kitchen and bakery. All the food is prepared at this main location and then sent to the other various restaurant and [...]

Ride the Lightning

by Edward Mullany 07/04/2010
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

Outside the shop where we'd just bought ice cream, my wife and I were sitting on a bench against the window, my wife with a cone and myself with a small cup. It was sunny. We'd just come over from Riverside Park, where we'd been leisurely biking, and where people were already starting to gather [...]

If Dad Was A Doll

by Royal Young 06/19/2010
Neighborhood: Coney Island, Featured

My father took me to the Coney Island Freak Show every summer growing up. My artist Dad seemed unfettered from his day job as a social worker, sketching subway riders on the hour train ride from the Lower East Side, where we lived surrounded by junkies and prostitutes wandering derelict streets. On the [...]

Dental Cares

by Daniel Menaker 02/26/2010
Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side

I have had a lot of trouble with my teeth, having been born with weak enamel in store in my childhood, a nutritional illness that almost killed me as an infant, and then a horribly incompetent dentist during my adolescence. Norbert Vaughan, who sadly encouraged his patients, even his teen-aged patients, to call [...]

Nina’s Wedding

by Marilyn Horan 02/12/2010
Neighborhood: Park Slope

If my twenty-year-old sister Janet not been maid of honor, I would not even have been invited to my neighbor Nina Milano’s wedding. Nina was 18, one year younger than I, and her fiancé Larry was just 21 on their wedding day, not that unusual in 1969, when many young men, Larry included, were [...]

And Bingo Was Her Name

by Christine Nieland 02/06/2010
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village

She looked like a collection of spheres stuck together to represent the female body. Round little torso, round little head, protruding chipmunk cheeks like those on the marionettes on that TV show “Spitting Image.” Dark little eyes that glared from some bottomless well of anger and pain. Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. [...]

Under Jimmy’s Awning

by Brendan Patrick Hughes 08/22/2009
Neighborhood: Times Square

Jimmy’s Corner isn’t like other Times Square bars--those oversized Irish pubs made of dark, polished wood or the theater-crowd cocktail lounges with big windows, people inside looking like they’re drinking in a department store display case. Jimmy’s is a dim, narrow cave of a bar, a hunk of coal in a glittering craton. Late in [...]

Undertow of Summer

by Justine Blau 08/05/2008
Neighborhood: Midtown

My radiant, delusional mother, my two older brothers, and I lived in second-rate hotels and one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan from 1961, when I was five, until 1967. We’d sporadically get locked out of wherever we were staying for not keeping up with the rent, have our possessions confiscated, and spend the night sleeping in Central [...]

Madame Butterfly Goes Down

by Thomas R. Pryor 05/04/2008
Neighborhood: All Over, Manhattan

Saturday night, I had smelly cheese, cashews, black bean dip, spooned Hellmann’s and three Coronas for dinner. I over-bought crap for company, it’s causing me stomach problems, but I have to finish the stuff. Sunday morning, I met a writing editor on Cathedral Parkway who took too much money to tell me too little about my [...]

Kill Whitey Day

by Michele Carlo 04/27/2008
Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx

I was standing in the basement of Macy’s Parkchester in The Bronx, in a line of what seemed like a thousand teenagers, smoking both cigarettes and weed, chanting and cheering and waiting for Ticketmaster to open. Adult shoppers were non-existent and salespeople had abandoned their posts either in foreknowledge or in fear, except the lone [...]

Naughty and Not Nice on Craigslist

by Daphne 12/15/2007
Neighborhood: Midtown

As always when I break up with a boyfriend, I go back to trusted Craigslist. There’s something comforting about shopping for sex on the internet. Safety behind the screen. This time, I was more daring. I wanted a dominant man. This much I knew for sure. I’ve had a lot of mediocre sex in my [...]

Jeremy the Liar

by Alia Akkam 11/04/2007
Neighborhood: SoHo

“No, it should be to your left,” I whispered into my cell, trying not to disrupt the hushed conversations of the infatuated couples around me. Jeremy couldn’t find the bar, it was tucked away upstairs from a bakery, so I guided him to it over the phone. With each direction I spouted out, I grew giddier, [...]