The Art of Tipping

Not too long ago I sprained my ankle playing basketball and was unable to walk for several days. I had no food in the apartment during my ordeal so I was forced to order all of my meals in. It was a great indulgence which I thoroughly enjoyed. Yet by the eighth meal on the […]

World Gym

The man sitting on the locker room bench looked like he was asleep, but he was merely exhausted. Sweat coursed down his massive torso and dampened the white towel tucked around his waist. His stomach, of which he was always aware, spilled over the towel and rested on his thighs. In two weeks he’d lost […]

The Cost of Silence

My mass transit had misplaced its insanity. The B48 bus driver obeyed traffic signals. The one-legged beggar banking on his one-leggedness vanished. Even the angry accordion player took a sabbatical. My chunky-monkey commute was now old-fashioned vanilla. But vanilla was what I craved. It was another day answering phones for a tri-monikered firm. The job […]

It was 1972 and I was walking along Third Ave. one evening past PJ Clarke’s, a bar-hangout for the sports crowd and the media, and a booming voice hails me, “Joe!, Joe! Over here!’ I looked over in the direction of the voice and I saw a guy as big as a building in a […]

Drama at Dramatics

There’s this place on 57th between 8th and 9th called Dramatics for Hair. There are a few of them in the city. Dramatics has this thing going on where they give each of their employees a “dramatic” name, something like Flame or Lightning or Cognac. They are usually nouns but once in a while you […]

Smalls is Dead

Smalls–a tiny, 50-person-capacity club in a West Village basement where for the last ten years you could watch the city’s rising jazz stars grow up before your eyes, where the jam sessions kept going past dawn, where musicians (and sometimes the customers, it seemed) often lived in some of the club’s back rooms–is dead! On […]

Village Car Wash

This man is proud of his work. He’s from Russia.

The Other Church Lady

My teenage years in the suburbs of Philadelphia were filled with lone trips to the city to cruise South Street and ogle its unsophisticated riff-raff. Later, to help finance my Bachelor’s Degree at NYU, I worked at the counter of an Espresso Bar near Carnegie Hall. The neighborhood got some suprisingly rough traffic. There was […]

The Best Sushi In New York

Iso is the best sushi in New York. This is due, mostly, to the freshness of the fish, the portions, which are generous, the style of presentation, the bustle of the place, the color of the napkins and table cloths (an extremely appealing pink), the manner of Iso himself and the other sushi chefs who […]

Horsing Around With Jason Kidd

The following article was reported and written in the winter and spring of 2002. This article deals, in part, with the fact that Jason Kidd’s childhood was formed in part by his chores caring for horses. ** It was a cold winter night, and the Knicks were playing the Nets. I took the bus from […]

War and Peace in Bryant Park

In the reading room at the Public Library they were working in the pleasantly vague, ethereal light, the faint smell of body odor hanging in the air, the many laptops and furtive glances. In Bryant Park, behind the library, a girl sat amidst a sea of chairs and stared out at the empty lawn. The […]

Stillman’s Gym: The Center of the Boxing Universe

The name: Stillman’s Gym still is magical to old ring veterans–rapidly vanishing–but it’s mostly just a revered icon like Jack Johnson or Boyle’s Half-Acre that fight purists have read about in an old issue of Ring Magazine or on the internet in vintage columns of Dan Parker and Jimmy Cannon. For me, Stillman’s isn’t like […]