You are currently viewing the stories for November, 2006

Water, One Dollar

by 11/24/2006
Neighborhood: Financial District

Mohammad B. Miah is a small man. He stands about five feet tall with his red and white and black leather hi-top sneakers on. He lives in Astoria, Queens, and he wants to know whether I work for the city. He motions in the direction of City Hall. “You have a job?” he asks. “I’m […]

In the Year 2000: Jeff Greenfield and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

by 11/24/2006
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

On Election Night two weeks ago, I was laying on my couch whiling away the hours, aiming to stay awake until I could officially note that my homestate was instrumental in saving the State of the Union. (I made it to 3 a.m., but it wasn’t Rocky Mountain solid until the next afternoon anyway. Give […]

Dom’s Wife

by 11/24/2006
Neighborhood: Astoria, Queens

When you live in an apartment building, you never know who the hell is gonna move in next door. I remember being in my late teens when a Greek family moved out two doors down and an older couple took the apartment. The guy’s name was Dom and he fixed televisions for a living. A […]

TIM is MONY

by 11/16/2006
Neighborhood: Boro Park, Brooklyn

(The original title “Time is Money” was shortened in the interest of saving both time and money.) “Time is money,” my ex-wife used to say. Of course she said it mostly when she wanted me to go out and get a second job, and she said it usually from a reclining position on the couch […]

A Tree Dies in Brooklyn

by 11/16/2006
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

There was once, just a few weeks ago, a tree outside of my bedroom window. I am not even sure what kind it was – maybe Oak, maybe Maple. (In New York you don’t really bother to know the names of trees, birds, and flowers, and it issomething you feel guilty about.) I liked this […]

Cold Storage

by 11/16/2006
Neighborhood: Chelsea

I’ve always preferred to do things the hard way, without anybody’s help. For the first five years my husband and I lived in New York, half our things were in storage. The other half were crammed into a 280-square foot apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement building overlooking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The place […]

[Moses]

by 11/10/2006
Neighborhood: East Village

I scrolled through last Saturday’s call log on my cell phone to find his number. I hadn’t saved it on purpose, never thought I’d be dialing it. Weird, I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy. It wasn’t a crush or anything (the thought of romance with anyone Y-chromosomed made my stomach turn), but I had […]

Only customers come down here: Hell’s Kitchen in 1986

by 11/10/2006
Neighborhood: Clinton

So I found myself on the corner of 45th St and 8th Ave, having arrived ten minutes ago in New York City, October 4th, 1986. I was pretty much sitting in the center of the biggest glut of seed you could find per square inch in any city in the world. Wide-eyed crack heads floated […]

The Blind Leading The Blind: In the Dark ’77

by 11/10/2006
Neighborhood: East Village

Four of us had gathered for dinner in a room above a popular bar on University Place on a swampy and airless Manhattan night. We were all twentysomething professionals, friends from the business side of the music business. Hannah worked for a British artist management firm, and Dina managed PR for a small American record […]