You are currently viewing the stories for “June 2002.”
On Broadway, between 84th and 85th Street, next door to Haagen Daas and Godiva, is the Origins cosmetics store. Outside the store sits the Origins gumball machine. Someone has scratched off the ‘e’ in “Peace of Mind,” so that the gumball machine now reads, “Pace of Mind.” The pace of the gumball is slow. Intended to evoke the purity of [...]
My girlfriend Emily recently got a job as personal assistant to a stockbroker who lives on the Upper West Side, on the forty-seventh floor of a building directly adjacent to Lincoln Center. The stockbroker goes to work at eight or so and often doesn’t get home until eight or nine in the evening, at which point she eats and goes [...]
At 7:30 on a Monday evening, my apartment on 122nd Street and Broadway fills with the voices of young Mormons singing hymns. From 7 on, around 40 clean-cut, blonde, smiling 20-somethings, some bearing baked goods, arrived in a continuous stream. They bustled down my bowling alley of a hallway to the living room, where they proceeded to comment on their [...]
"You can tell when a person's just not ready," the young man in charge of birds at Petland Discounts told me as I pressed my face against the glass atrium to get a good look at the small animals so close to danger. "Have you ever had to say no to anybody?" "There have been occasions." "What have those people [...]
He rushed into the Starbucks on 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, camera in one hand, laptop in the other, holding them up high, like they were platters of food. He wore an FDNY baseball cap on backwards, and a light green, somewhat military looking vest over a blue shirt. He moved among the tables very quickly with the spry agility [...]
One February night in1969 a man knocked on my door and introduced himself; he had heard about me from somebody, he said. He didn't say what he heard. He had just moved into #2 with his wife Jamie and his little girl Hannah, they had just arrived from Alfred University; there was something about the SDS and an ROTC armory [...]
We decided to visit Manhattan and everyone agreed that was a good idea. In the weeks before we left Scotland emails and telephone calls arrived telling us all the places which we absolutely must see, and all the things which we absolutely must do. On arrival, we followed instructions and headed down towards the World Trade Centre like true tourists. [...]
1. Recently, a cousin of mine stopped over on his way from Beirut, a city which now has most of its politics in the street, but almost no sanitation services. Standing outside my door, he looked down the Bowery and marveled, "They keep it so clean!" 2. My most persistent fantasy is that one day, when I'm gathering up the [...]
In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he apprenticed to a Philadelphia shipowner. In our day of wooden men and iron ships, "learning the ropes" is a cliche. To Levy, it was life and death. [...]
On this past Tuesday, November 7th, just about every living room in America was its own small war room. Phones rang, people screamed at the television, and moods soared and plummeted (it is an absolute certainty that every single person who cared about the election experienced, on that particular night, at least one gigantic mood swing). Off all these war [...]
Ellen was our captain. When they started canceling step classes at Body Strength Fitness, a small, privately owned gym on 106th Street and Broadway, Ellen clandestinely circulated a petition for the reinstatement of high-energy aerobic courses. She solicited support before and after classes. She held impromptu meetings in the locker room. She kept the whole of the high-impact faction up [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper I know I'm not alone. Off the top of my head I can think of two friends, single women, Upper West Siders living alone, who are experiencing a similar ordeal. "It's traumatic," I agreed when Nina called, frantic about the leak in her bathroom ceiling and the building's lack of a super. "You'll be okay," I [...]
