You are currently viewing the stories for October, 2001

The Bomb on the 4 Train

by 10/30/2001
Neighborhood: All Over, Brooklyn

I’m on a jam-packed rush hour 4 train headed to Brooklyn and am lucky enough to get a seat. I’m reading my book and the guy next to me says, “Is that your bag?” and points under the seats. I look down and see a large, square-shaped canvas bag. “No,” I say. So he asks […]

Ashes

by 10/30/2001
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

My first inkling of an attack on the Twin Towers came from the Fed Ex man delivering a packet. He rang the doorbell around 9:15, and when I started to sign for it, he said, shaken: “Did you hear what happened? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You can see the black smoke […]

The Glass Partition

by 10/29/2001
Neighborhood: Upper East Side

My cousins grew up in New York. I met them once in California, where I lived until I was seven. But when we moved to a Oxen Hill, suburb of Washington, DC, we began regular visits. This was in the late sixties. Thanksgiving in Manhattan followed by Christmas in Oxen Hill, or vice versa. My […]

Ritzing Away on Restaurant Week

by 10/28/2001
Neighborhood: All Over, Manhattan

The following was written before September 11th, 2001 Like most New Yorkers, I can’t afford those restaurants that garner plaudits in Zagat’s. I’ve made some peace with that. After all, I’m less a foodie than a chowhound, scouting outer-borough ethnic eats on the weekends. At lunch, I usually brown-bag it or grab a $2.25 rice […]

The Lighted Window

by Charles D'Ambrosio 10/27/2001
Neighborhood: All Over, Manhattan

She arrived in the city ahead of me to work as an assistant to the producer of a movie, a pretty girl’s job, a blonde’s job, and soon, very soon, while I was still talking to her by phone from Seattle, making arrangements for my move to NYC, she began sleeping with the director. In […]

Take A Look

by 10/25/2001
Neighborhood: Upper East Side

Anton sells photographs on Fifth Avenue and 81st Street in front of the museum. He arrives at his spot at nine o’clock in the morning six days a week – the Metropolitan Museum of Art is closed on Mondays and so the sidewalks are just too empty for business. The photographs come from the eye, […]

Rumble at the Riverside Skatepark

by 10/24/2001
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

On a lazy hot August afternoon my parents and I emerged from the coolness of the Walter Reade theatre at Lincoln Center after seeing a movie from the sixties. It might have been Italian, maybe something by Visconti – my memory of it has been erased by subsequent events. We ran into my co-worker Jim […]

Smoking Pot In Amsterdam

by 10/24/2001
Neighborhood: Letter From Abroad

Mr. Chancellor at the Algonquin bar in New York, before Amsterdam’s influence set in. I am much embarrassed to reveal that in 60 years I have never tried pot. I remember about 30 years ago being at a supper party in Rome when the person next to me at table passed me what I thought […]

A Letter from Israel

by 10/22/2001
Neighborhood: All Over, Letter From Abroad

I am not an American citizen and my only knowledge of New York City had been through TV series and movies. But three years ago I decided to save a few bucks and visit. From the moment I took the cab from JFK airport, I felt like I was coming back home. It was strange: […]

Bonnie Slotnick’s Cookbooks and the Feminine Mystique

by Thomas Beller 10/21/2001
Neighborhood: Manhattan, West Village

I like food, and I like books, but I’m not that into books about food. So when a friend of mine suggested we visit a great new store that sold old cookbooks, I was reluctant. Eventually, though, I got curious about the woman I saw sitting behind a busy desk in the window of Bonnie […]

The Scene At Union Square

by 10/20/2001
Neighborhood: Union Square

Sandwiched into the fourteen blocks north of Houston Street and south of 14th, Greenwich Village and the campus of New York University have formed a sort of demilitarized zone, patrolled by both civilian and military police. Below, access is restricted to officials and rescue workers. Above, New Yorkers move freely, and the city returns to […]

The Day the Music Retched

by 10/20/2001
Neighborhood: Multiple, World Trade Center

It was supposed to start with a mandated early-morning appointment with an “employment specialist” from the New York Department of Labor and end with me shaking my ass to minimal techno at Centro-Fly. Between these, I was going to vote in the primaries, work at the international DJ academy, and see Matthew Herbert, on of […]