You are currently viewing the stories for “June 2006.”
There used to be this guy who came to the park in a business suit with a thin black tie and his straw hair slicked back and wet-looking to make the case against Darwin's theory of evolution. He had a clutch of professional-quality charts, which he set up on an easel behind him to help illustrate his points while he [...]
MOROCCAN LETTERS Phase 1: The Seduction Jane Bowles liked to call her husband, Paul, a spider. The spider is a dry creature, and she was referring to the spider’s thirst to lure its prey into his net and drain their fluids. She herself suffered that fate. Bowles met Alfred Chester at a dinner party in New York in the winter [...]
Depending on how you look at it, Kamran Shirazi is famous in the world of chess for his flamboyant and innovative style of play, or for his amazing ability to lose, or perhaps both. He cobbles together a living by combining prize money from chess tournaments with fees from chess lessons, for which he charges eighty dollars an hour. If [...]
Joseph Mitchell is famous for inventing, to a large degree, the tone and style of the New Yorker long profile, of which he is perhaps the unrivaled master (Calvin Trillin has said as much). He is equally (and perhaps a bit more) famous for enduring one of the most grueling and peculiar writer's blocks on record--it lasted from 1964 until [...]
Autumn, 2000 It is fall in London, where I now live, but I spent ten years in Manhattan so it comes as no surprise that I would remember early dark evenings, dark so suddenly that you know with a flash that summer has gone, and that I would think of crisp mornings when leaves first shuddered at my feet and [...]
I live where the wide expanse of Houston Street, in crossing 6th Avenue, suddenly dwarfs down to the little tributary of Bedford Street. It's an old Mafia neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop for hours. I've lived here 12 years, long enough so my neighbors and I know each other, or so I thought. I have one neighbor, Joe, [...]
All over the city, people leave their bikes locked up to fences, sign posts, whatever they can find, but there probably isn't a neighborhood with a higher bikes-locked-overnight density than the West Village. Our photo editor, Josh Gilbert went out one snowy January day and politely asked some to strike a pose or two. That's all for now.
My name is David Zuva. I'm from Russia, from Odessa. I've been here twenty years. I'm a shoemaker. I repair shoes. This my profession. I worked in Russia in the same profession. I learned when I was small boy. My father teach me. All the family shoemakers--my whole family--my wife, me, my father, my brothers, my grandfather--all shoemakers. Zuva means [...]
Right up until the time men started to stop wearing hats, the city was woven together by a network of pneumatic tubes that connected post offices and major buildings. A letter took seven minutes to go from Manhattan's 32nd Street to downtown Brooklyn through this Pneumatic Tube System, or PTS. Making use of the city's subterranean foundations, the tubes ran [...]
An odd thing happened during game two of the Knicks' first round play-off series, against the Indiana Pacers. With a little under six minutes left in the third quarter, the Knicks were fighting there way back from a 10 point deficit, when Anthony Mason made a spectacular reverse dunk. The Pacers immediately called a time out, and the crowd, understandably, [...]
The Mail and Express reported appointment as a patrolman cost $300, promotion to sergeant, $1,400, and advancement to captain, $14,000. Policemen made back their investments by taking bribes. As Luc Sante observed of Big Bill in his book Low Life, "It was well known that he was corrupt; he in fact admitted as much quite readily." By 1891, Devery was [...]
For several hours one afternoon last week, the unremarkable interior of a midtown hotel room was transformed into a kind of cat fantasia for the nineties, featuring some of the more exotic and genetically up to date entries in the Ninth Annual Cat show, which was recently held at Madison Square Garden. Cats were perched on chairs and couches and [...]
I am not from New York, nor have I ever lived there; the result, mostly, of not being a multimillionaire, nor having friends who are multimillionaires. I was living in Philadelphia, New York's embarrassingly second rate little brother, and had traveled up to "da big city" for the day with my girlfriend, to peruse potential art galleries for her paintings [...]
Between 10th and 11th avenue, on the north side of 18th street sits the Roxy night club which, on Wednesday nights, houses a medley of characters whom appear to have been pickled by time. Wednesday at the Roxy is "disco night." Everyone is on roller skates. The speakeasy secrecy of this sub-culture scene contaminates one with an air of stagnation; [...]
A company called Viacom has recently purchased another company called Paramount for about ten billion dollars. This followed several months of intensive maneuvering between Viacom and another company called QVC. The competition held the businessmen and a large segment of the media in thrall. It was also good news for poets and the like. It's not often that what is [...]
Every few years, on the front page of the Times, a plan is announced by a consortium of merchants and industrialists and bankers to transform Forty-second Street into a squeaky-clean thoroughfare. One recent proposal calls for glass-enclosed atriums (the Ford Foundation, sponsoring the project, is big on Atriums), "bridges crisscrossing 42nd Street, and escalators moving through a complex set of [...]
A letter came in the mail not long ago, informing me that it was time to make a pilgrimage back to my old college for my tenth year reunion. The letter has sat on my desk ever since, sometimes under a pile, and sometimes, after a vigorous purge of junk, all by itself, unabashedly requesting my attention. There are several [...]
For some people, a bicycle is something to be taken out for a pleasant jaunt in the park on weekends, an opportunity to feel the breeze in your hair and to coast alongside novice roller bladers whose eyes are wide with terror. Then there are the brave souls who use it to make a living, the bicycle messengers, a group [...]
They are like a set of bees fighting over a flower. The waitress waits as long as she can before taking our orders because she knows there is an order to everything, that I was the sort of homecoming queen who slept with half the football team before a Saturday night game. Used as I am to this sort of [...]
At the risk of sounding terribly cliché, I was mugged in New York. It was July, 2005. I was a block away from home when two gentlemen – black, backwards hats – pushed me up against the wall, took the phone out of my hand, and asked if they could make a phone call. I said I was on the [...]
This past Saturday's election was as colorful as the primary--Just with fewer candidates. Scholars will probably dissect Mitch Landrieu's loss for the next several months by analyzing black versus white voting patterns and the numbers from each precinct along with the fact that it was a beautiful day for a stroll to the polls and then, perhaps, they will count [...]
The first nice weekend of the season, temperatures in the 70s, a light breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. A year ago today, I would have had a pang of jealousy thinking of the suburbanites who were combing their garages and heading to Home Depot to find tiki torches, bug zappers, weed whackers, and new patio furniture for [...]
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