You are currently viewing the stories for “March 2002.”
The cellar of the Chrysler Building is midtown's one great monument to the American filling station. It offers (for free) the same perfume of motor oil, the same lulling throb of distant engines, the not unpleasant heat, the mesmerizing hiss of compressed air. And it is always noontime in the Chrysler Building cellar, the same endless noontime with everything suspended [...]
I'm not much of a TV person. I am completely unfaithful to any one show or annual event, certainly anything like the Academy Awards. My theory has always been, why watch a three-hour awards show when I can watch E!, or some other all-celebrity network, and get the highlights in thirty minutes? But this year was different. Still suffering from [...]
I’m standing on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street staring up at an enormous billboard advertisement, which in behemoth white letters is instructing me to "ProCreate." Gaslight, the venue for this evenings HurryDate party, is on the bottom floor of the building directly below that billboard. HurryDate takes fifty eligible singles and pairs them up for three-minute long [...]
The other day I realized that the further away September 11th gets, the rawer I seem to get, and the less I want to talk about, be reminded of, or think about it. When people ask even the simplest questions about that day, I’m tempted to hand out copies of "Witnessing," and then, like Forrest Gump, stare grimly ahead and [...]
In October 1965, the New York Times received a tip that a young man arrested at a recent Ku Klux Klan demonstration in the Bronx was, in fact, a Jew. His name was Daniel Burros, he was twenty-eight, and lived in Ozone Park, Queens. Until a few months earlier he had been a high-ranking member of the American Nazi Party, [...]
I don't think I thought of Eli every single time I walked down lower Seventh Avenue, but I may have. His parents' West Village brownstone had been a shrine to me in high school insofar as Eli, himself, had been a god. When passing it back then, I craned my neck at the upstairs window and said whatever magic words [...]
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I was temping. My ‘agent’, as I liked to think of him, was overweight and short, with a firm handshake and a friendly manner. He called me “Bud” a lot. Although he was very enthusiastic every time we spoke on the phone, he seemed incapable of placing me in a job that paid more than ten dollars an hour. I’m [...]
Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood was started in the year 2000, and we have published many stories about what happened in New York on 9/11/2001 and the months that followed. Today is the 24th anniversary of that day. This story was first published on March 11, 2002. (JM) Here was a morning like any other. I got up at 6:40, took a [...]
It's a trick of the light. Depending on where you stand, the "Tribute in Light" memorial looks more like a pillar of fire descending from heaven than a recreation of the World Trade Center. You’d be forgiven if, after 9/11, you thought you’d never crane your neck to look that high up again, because there it is, against all gods, [...]
Like the homes of many New Yorkers these days, the Illera apartment in Flushing, Queens, has a small American flag taped to the door. Six-year-old Vanessa answers the knock, her hair held back with a stars-and-stripes headband. She walks inside, past the Colombian flag in the kitchen, into the living room. The walls of the Illera home are covered mostly [...]
Since I wrote my piece about Fresh Meadows a year ago, the sleepy little Klein Farm has exploded into public prominence. In late 2001, word spread that the elder Klein, now happily ensconced out in Jericho, had indeed decided to sell the no-longer profitable farm, despite the younger Klein’s desire to continue the enterprise. ("It’s the only job I’ve had," [...]
One would be inclined to describe Jen Miller's 5'3'' frame as pixyish, were it not for her very strong self- identification with another sort of sprite. Miller, a 29-year-old Lower East Side performance artist, would love to wake up one morning to find she'd become an elf. Barring that unlikely miracle, she'll have to settle for wearing her prosthetic elf [...]
It was my first official piece of furniture purchased for my new apartment in Park Slope. Two overweight deliverymen, breathing and sweating heavily, carried it up the four flights to my apartment on the top floor of the Brooklyn brownstone. That's when they found that the angle of the doorway and the large wooden banister, made it impossible to get [...]
Here is one of the more interesting faces on 11th street: Electronic Ed, so named for his uncanny knack for finding electronic devices in still working condition. There are few people with a keener aesthetic eye wandering around than Ed, who in spite of his disheveled appearance is often carrying all sorts of elegant and eccentric objects. This morning the [...]
Jon Voight he was not. But the Midnight Cowboy rides again in the Big Apple. It was twilight, late April, 2001. A cool breeze blew from the East River as I waited for the Manhattan bound J train at Marcy Avenue. The J ferries passengers, mostly working folks, across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan. On the Brooklyn [...]
I get on the downtown F train at W. 4th street, it’s a Saturday at 1:30 a.m. The car is pretty crowded, there’s nowhere to sit but that’s fine since I’ve been sitting for the past 4 hours listening to Elvis Costello speak about his career for a TV show. He sang a little too, wish he would’ve chatted less [...]
