You are currently viewing the stories for June, 2006
Detroit, Detroit, Where Did Our Love Go?
by Ronit Feldman 06/08/2006Neighborhood: All Over
When I was seven years old my mother, ignoring my protests, packed me into the station wagon and drove downtown to the Detroit Institute of Art where I proceeded to vomit on the marble floor. I blamed my sick stomach on a sculpture, but it was more likely the stack of pancakes she fed me […]
We’re Doing It For Them
by Thomas R. Ziegler 06/07/2006Neighborhood: Bronx, Outer Boroughs
Looking around for the lieutenant, I find him standing alongside the firehouse, staring down into a neat row of freshly clipped hedges. I hurry to his side and he tersely commands, “Get to work.” Right then and there, my life changes forever. * For firemen, there is nothing more startling than a Verbal Alarm–the riotous […]
I Lost Her At The Post Office
by Vanessa Mobley 06/04/2006Neighborhood: East Village
Four years ago, my best friend Pauline moved from San Francisco to New York. Like so many bright young women before her, she moved here to become a writer, to have a snazzier life, to get away from her parents. I did the same thing the year before, and so she stayed with me for […]
The True Origins of the Egg Cream
by Daniel Bell 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
About Daniel Bell. Illustration by Milton Glaser In a recent letter to New York Magazine, an innocent lass from California asked, “What is an egg cream?” and was answered by The Underground Gourmet that like the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Holy or Roman, the egg cream contains neither egg nor cream but […]
The Reality of My Regression
by A. Leigh 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
12/31/00 It is the last day of the year at 8:30pm. I have just finished vacuuming, changing the sheets, and spraying the duvet with “Sweat Pea” pillow spray to make everything clean, cozy and refreshing on this wintry cold night. Tonight I am at home and alone, happily so, dancing around my apartment with dust […]
Platza at the Russian Baths
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
This passage appears in the novel, The Sleep-Over Artist. Alex hadn’t really believed that Katrina would agree to visit him in New York, and so he threw himself into the task of convincing her with a kind of easy abandon, as though it were a joke really, and he was teasing her. She had children, […]
Juvenalia
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
On the southwest corner of 2nd Street and Avenue A is a nameless bar (its patrons refer to it as “2A”), and it has on its second floor large picture windows through which one can survey the goings on in the neighborhood. Across 2nd Street is a wide patch of sidewalk where a street vender […]
Invasion of the Caucasian
by Denise Campbell 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Fort Greene
Sitting in my first floor apartment window, people watching, it hits me (hard) that three out of the last five people who had just passed by were white. “When did this happen?” my daughter who had been out of the country for over a year asked in astonishment. It was her second day back in […]
Chicago Has Its Merits
by Ryan Kenealy 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Chicago has its merits. For example: my apartment has a large garden in the front yard where I am sequestered if I wish to smoke because of my girlfriend Bertie’s so-called allergic reaction to cigarette smoke, which she has failed to show any scientific documentation for, but that’s another story. It could be 15 degrees […]
Robert Longo On Shooting And Movies
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Robert Longo–the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker–is in the habit of referring to himself as “Longo,” just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, “This is Longo,” and […]
Love and Money at Sun Lin Garden
by Tom Diriwachter 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Chinatown
It’s common practice for a bar/restaurant to save their first dollar and hang it on the wall. Sometimes it’s framed. Other times it’s taped. But it’s up there for luck. Or at least celebration. A sort of diploma from the school of capitalism. Some businesses even save their first dollar bill, five dollar bill, ten […]
I Hate New York, I Like Beijing
by Mike Connelly 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Chinatown
I am one of those people who can’t stand New York. The first time I was in New York I was mugged by a young Hispanic man wielding a Phillips head screwdriver. It was long ago, I was young, and not about to give him $20, all the money I had. We went into a […]