You are currently viewing the stories for “September 2003.”
Vladimir Putin stopped by a gas station in Chelsea on Friday afternoon on his way to a visit with President Bush. On hand to greet him was Senator Charles Schumer. The gas station had received a make-over--new paint, new sign. It had once been a Getty, but like all the Gettys in the city it has been transformed into a [...]
I was sitting on the floor of my older sister's East Village apartment helping her pack up her things, when I found her diary. She was in the kitchen wrapping plates and bowls in newspaper, so I thought I’d take a break out of eyesight and read a few pages. I went up the steel ladder to her tiny lofted [...]
I. It is a popular misconception that autistics can count hundreds of matches in the blink of an eye and draw fantastic pictures. In reality, few are like this and less than one percent fall into the idiot savant category. Most are mildly to severely retarded and autistic. Some are autistic and emotionally disturbed. Some have Ausberger's Syndrome (a mild [...]
Apartment-house neighbors don't go bad suddenly, like winter avocados. You get an alarming sense of them as soon as they appear. A week after my upstairs neighbor Thad moved in, we were already engaged in a mortal vendetta. I've shared walls with annoying people, but this character was off the charts. His schedule was bizarre, and his habits were strange. [...]
The girl arrived late on a Friday afternoon and interrupted what I was doing. She refused to take a number and said she only had to collect her airline ticket and that she didn’t have time to wait. She had to get to the airport, she said. I was busy helping somebody, I explained with overt politeness, and she would [...]
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is located at 97 Orchard Street. From the outside, it appears to be no different than any of the other buildings on the street, save for a plaque proclaiming it to be a National Historic Landmark. On the inside, it is a different story. Through painstaking research of the former inhabitants of the tenement, [...]
