You are currently viewing the stories for May, 2006
There’s No Rainbow on the FDR
by Josh Lefkowitz 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper East Side
It was an unseasonably cool Sunday evening in July, and, like the weather, I was feeling a bit out of sorts. I was looking for a new job and getting used to the pressures and angst of being in my first serious relationship. Walking on 78th Street between First and York, heading to the subway […]
The Balloons on the Night Before the Macy’s Day Parade
by James Jospe 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper In the sixties and seventies watching the balloons being blown up wasn’t such a big NY “happening” and the only people their were residents of the neighborhood, building and neighborhood employees and business owners, the volunteers who inflated and walked the balloons, and the police. The street was closed at around […]
Big Fat Love
by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
It started in a house. A bunch of guys playing music. It turned into a rambling, on again off again musical adventure, with numerous incarnations. The band’s only record, Hell House, was released in 1997 by Grand Royal Records, thirteen years after most of the material that appears on it was recorded. John Berry, an […]
The Love Train
by Victoria Torres 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I can’t help but think about The O’Jays when I ride the C train. And not just because I used to commute back and forth from my boyfriend’s place on 105th and Manhattan to my studio on Suffolk and Houston. The C train officially became the Love Train one day four years ago somewhere between […]
Home Is Wherever You Are Until They Tear It Down
by Daniel P. Torday 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
For three years my girlfriend, Erin, lived in Dakar, Senegal, and though I never even made the trip there, I developed an attachment to Africa. There was something in knowing, truly knowing of her life there that became a part of my own life–acquiring not a working knowledge of Wolof (the language native to Dakar) […]
Front of the Train
by Rebecca Toby Letz 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
When I take the subway I like to stand in the front car and look out the window. The window is long and narrow and through it I begin to watch the moving narrative of traveling through the underground on my way to wherever it is I want to go. I must keep my balance […]
The Kitchen at Le Cirque
by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
“Chef!” The word rings out over the din of the vast kitchen, swirling in heat and motion, as 62 men and women in white smocks and white chef’s hats go about the business of making dinner for the eight O’clock seating. “Chef!” The eight o’clock seating at Le Cirque is not to be taken lightly. […]
Tulips and Addresses
by Edward Field 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away–that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter […]
The Man in the Pinstriped Suit
by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
I was reading the fall issue of Esquire Gentleman recently, experiencing the slightly pleasing, slightly lulling sensation of an American fashion magazine, when I came across a photo of Adolf Hitler in a pin-striped suit. It was part of an article on old-fashioned pin-stripe suits, like the ones worn by the Duke of Windsor or […]
Parking Trauma
by Benjamin J. Kirby 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
The flat palm of my hand slammed into the steering wheel again and again. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck ME!” Yes, I was being vulgar — and a bad driver — but it had taken more like five or six hour to get from Washington, D.C. to New York, and now it was going to […]
The Extortionists of Sixth Grade
by James Parry 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
It was 1978 and I was in sixth grade at public school I.S. 44 on the Upper West Side. A group of boys robbed me- daily. Tyrone, a mean little black kid in a blue down coat, which he wore regardless of whether it was summer or winter, grew up in the projects just a […]
Scribbler Nabbed in Library Heist
by Tracy Charlton 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
My writing teacher Sue said getting published would change my life. But as I prepared to dart past the security guard at the library, a stolen copy of The New York Post hidden in my parka, I sensed this wasn’t what she had in mind. Only a month ago, everything had seemed so promising. An […]