You are currently viewing the stories for “February 2002.”
Another morning at the Bedford L stop, reluctant professionals line the platform waiting, not saying much. Several dozen yards into the crowd, you hear screaming -- a high-pitched, angry sound -- against the tinny sound of recorded music. People closer to the commotion direct their attention towards the center of the platform, next to the bench; typically, this is where [...]
Imagine a 20th-century history of the United States that omitted the 1900s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Something of the kind has attended the chronicling of Times Square's latest identity as Disneytown, Goofyville, or Mickeymart. Most accounts of West 42nd Street's conversion have been content to say that for decades the district was a magnet for penny- ante drug dealers, dollar-ante [...]
This recent snow made me think of my friend Glen Seator, who is dead. In January or February of 1996, there was a bad snowfall -- Glen and I were very good friends then. I was living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, next to the BQE, and Glen was about two miles south of me, right next to the Manhattan Bridge. [...]
I met Marty between Fourteenth and Forty-second Streets after having waited most of my ride for a seat to free up. One finally did, next to him. "Is this Fourteenth Street?" he asked as soon as I sat down, ignoring the fact that I was deeply engrossed in the Metro section. I replied that it was. He then continued as [...]
My girlfriend, Amanda, and me, and her friend Heather were at Nacho Mama's, drinking. It had just gotten cold. My friend Sal came in. He had been drinking, too. Heather brought up liquor, how old it had become, how tired she was of it, and asked him if he had any drugs. He said he had some K up in [...]
John Epperson is Lypsinka, but Lypsinka - the performace artist drag super star whose show, The Boxed Set, has been a smash hit at the Westbeth Theater since this past September, - is not John Epperson, or rather John is a lot of things in addition to being Lypsinka. John has agreed to keep a diary for Mr. Beller's Neighborhood [...]
"All my dishes are masterpieces ‘cause my customers deserve the best! They should lick their fingers to the bone," my Dad would say. "Nobody eats here just once unless he dies before the next time he plans to come in," my Dad said. He was always busy cooking and talking at the B-29, the restaurant so named because of the [...]
We got the phone call on a Tuesday night. It was Nick’s boss telling us he hadn’t been to work since Thursday and hadn’t called in sick either. That wasn’t like Nick, and his boss was worried. Nick was an older man who lived downstairs from us. Since he didn’t have a phone and we were his best friends in [...]
Staying at a disheveled hotel in Midtown across from Madison Square Garden, I call and ask her to meet me at the restaurant downstairs for breakfast. We haven't seen each other since she moved away three years ago and have only spoken on the phone once (when she called to flirt with me after leaving her boyfriend). I walk down [...]
The John Kieran Trail in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx is cut through sturdy black locust and black cherry trees, their crowns bending the day's sunlight. As it veers towards the water, the trail mixes with wet mossy woods with willow branches hanging over the path like Rapunzel’s hair, patches of skunk cabbage and pitcher plants, and a feathery [...]
Passing by St. Mark's Bookstore, I hesitate and peer in, sizing up the window displays. I’m anxious about a fifteen minute gap in my color-coded schedule. Brown for my day-job, red for visual art, aquamarine for friends & family are the colors I assigned to the categories in my laptop’s organizer program. A few moments in a bookstore can absolve [...]
A few drunk men standing around the television in Puffy's Tavern on a Saturday morning is not that unusual for the historic watering hole--back before when Tribeca became DeNiro-ified, a man "Puffy" opened his bar at the corner of Hudson and Harrison at 6 a.m. and closed it at 4 in the afternoon so the local blue collar types could [...]
During the past few weeks, representatives from Red Cross have been going around to people who live below Canal St (in Tribeca, oddly enough, not Chinatown) offering them financial compensation whether they needed it or deserved it, or not. They came to my door. After they left,I wrote about the experience. It was an innocent act. That is, writing the [...]
So I paid $400 to St. Vincent's nursing school and took their EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) training course in February 1989. I went to class three days a week and I also had to do eighteen hours of rounds at St. Vincent's Hospital, which was like, total misery and insanity. Then I found out that getting your EMT license from [...]
Michael Chabon told us that The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (246-6080) was offended by this piece when it was first published in Civilization Magazine (Harper's reprinted it, too, and you can find it and a lot of other Chabon related stuff on his website, http://home.earthlink.net/~mchabon/). This seemed sufficiently peculiar that we called them up to ask why. But no [...]
I ran away to Manhattan with a rich girl. Well, it was more of her sweeping me away than running away with her. I was actually running away from a different rich girl, who had introduced me to this new rich girl. I was 19 years old, halfway through my studies at a prestigious university in Boston. I had grown [...]
Thomas Beller: You once said that one of your roles, Nora of Doll's House, helped you find out where you stood as a woman today. What did you mean by that? Liv Ullman: I don't believe that one single play will teach you what you are. I think that every time you work on something, whether it is a play [...]
Just short of the 96th street station the kid next to me started to get really agitated. He was digging around frantically in his pockets for a pen, and since I was sitting next to him he kept pushing and bumping me with his shifting. He finally found his pen in his pocket, but he didn't have anything to write [...]
It's been one year since I moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant from Fort Greene, where I'd live for about fifteen years. Like most change, uprooting myself was uncomfortable, but not nearly as painful as I thought it would be. I remember telling people that if I ever moved from Fort Greene, I'd be moving out of New York because there was no [...]
Ever since my first wooshing ride down a log flume, I’ve been enamored of water. From sprinklers to swimming pools to lakes and the Atlantic,water soothes me like no other substance. Except beer. So when I heard the Staten Island ferry served cold brew on its cross-bay excursions, I knew I’d found my manna. A Friday night was chosen. That [...]
My mother was a talented seamstress so for the earlier part of my childhood most of my clothes were homemade. She loved embroidering tiny flowers and animals on dress pockets, basting collars and hand-sewing French hems. This was the late sixties and early seventies and downtown parents had two choices in clothing for kids: shopping for the cheap polyester items [...]
A sloppy silver and rose sunset is visible over the bunker-like structure of the Whitestone Lanes bowling alley, whose sign says: PLAY AMERICA’S GAME/75 LANES OPEN 24 HOURS 7 DAYS. Ahmadullah Raghbat, his uniform and sneakers in a polystyrene shopping bag, stands waiting for the bus. Raghbat is a young Afghani, and though he has lived in New York for [...]
I went to XO on Walker Street last night. It's a small Chinese restaurant, far enough from mott street that little English is spoken there. It's the kind of restaurant where i like to go by myself...sit at the bar, suck down the rice noodle with shrimp and chinese vegetable, and hide behind a paper watching ancient eating rituals unfold. [...]
To order at Amazon.com, click here. "Before and After: Stories From New York vividly captures the fissure of a place suddenly and utterly transformed... It's hard to imagine a more appropriate or more moving collection of voices." --San Francisco Chronicle This is a book of true stories about New York, written, for the most part, by the people for whom [...]
February 4, 2002 ARTS ONLINE New York City has twice as many stories now. Everyone has a tale to tell, but since Sept. 11 everyone here can also describe the personal impact of that day's epochal events. Thomas Beller, a New York novelist and editor, presents nearly 200 of these real-life accounts on his Web site, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. The [...]
February 4, 2002 ARTS ONLINE Today's Publishing: Better by the Book or by the Web? By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL New York City has twice as many stories now. Everyone has a tale to tell, but since Sept. 11 everyone here can also describe the personal impact of that day's epochal events. Thomas Beller, a New York novelist and editor, presents nearly [...]
This very quiet bird, with whom I am hoping to build a relationship, is called Number Two. I received Number Two and his ex-companion, Number One, as a Valentine's day present from a woman I used to go with. Her name was Johanna. Johanna used to work in my office--in fact she used to work for me. I felt a [...]
My wife and I had agreed that we didn’t want to know the sex of our baby. Sure, we had discussed the somewhat finite possibilities: My wife said she thought it might be easier to raise a boy in this bizarre world. Knowing a little about that one myself I wasn’t quite so sure. But I remember thinking that I [...]
All the names in this article have been changed, except for the author's. November 29, 1998 Carol Suskind, Principal Fielding Elementary Day School Lower Manhattan Dear Carol, As you are probably aware, my son, Luke is a student at Fielding, in Debra’s 4/5’s class. Last week, I found Luke huddled in a corner outside his bedroom, crying. When I asked [...]
The news crews were outside the old Fillmore East, getting a last shot before the legendary concert hall was razed and turned into apartment buildings. As I walked along Second Avenue to the video store, I saw tv trucks lined up outside. I felt sad; my youth was vanishing. I'd gone past this now boarded up building hundreds of times [...]
Hurrah's began as a nexus for disco (in the early days it was a rival of Studio 54 and Xenon), then moved over into what was still called "new wave." It was booked by Jim Fouratt, famous for coining the slogan "The Man Can't Bust Our Music" at Columbia Records in '68 and for being one of the leaders of [...]
Fresh off the train from Westfield, New Jersey, our family stood on the corner of 42nd Street and Park Avenue. Exhilarated by the fact that his breath was suddenly visible, my ordinarily quiet seven-year-old brother James began to speak loudly and quickly, pushing air from his lungs in great hyperbolic gushes. I followed suit. Soon the shivering began, and we [...]
In the summer of 1980 I was living on East Fifth Street and First Avenue with Alpha Lorraine and I was eighteen, feeling not so much on top of the world as right in the middle of it. Alpha was a new friend and when Yves, my French dancer friend from when I was a dishwasher at Food Restaurant, went [...]
We were from out of town. We had finished school, were about to get engaged, and were moving to New York at the end of the summer. They showed us a “model apartment.” They put the hard sell on us. They asked us for a deposit in the form of a money order (can’t cancel ‘em). Then they asked us [...]
On January 25 at 7:30 in the morning, two raccoons were found dead by Central Park personnel. One was found just below the reservoir and the other in the tangled stems of Shakespeare garden. Instead of just cleaning them up, as they might have done in different circumstances, they called the Urban Park Rangers. The Rangers too had been primed [...]
You could easily have walked right past her. An attractive young woman, about twenty-five years old, sitting quietly on the half-full subway car. Her hair was done, her make-up expertly applied. She sported dangly earrings and a jaunty scarf knotted above a new leather jacket. Nothing unusual about her. Except for the pants -- or more precisely, the absence of [...]
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