You are currently viewing the stories for February, 2011

Monkey In The Middle

by 02/28/2011
Neighborhood: All Over, Rockaway, The Catskills

“You from Long Island?” Danny, from Brownsville, Brooklyn, grilled. Before I could qualify myself, he turned to face the rest of the kids on our bus, and announced, “The skinny kid is loaded.” We had just left Chinatown and were cruising north, along the Hudson River, to sleep-away camp in upstate New York. My fellow […]

The Three Women

by 02/28/2011
Neighborhood: Union Square

“There’s three women in your life that will always be there,” he said. He had just sold me three pairs of socks for my daughter, and after he took my five-dollar-bill was ruffling through his wad of money. We were on the sidewalk across the street from Manhattan’s Union Square, and it was a warm […]

Have I Heard of You?

by 02/28/2011
Neighborhood: Chelsea

Have I Heard of You? By Peter Wortsman The following encounter between the late William Packard (1933-2002), poet, playwright, teacher, and publisher of the literary journal The New York Quarterly, myself, and a postal worker, took place at the Chelsea Station Post Office in the 1980s. I immediately recognized the man in front of me […]

My Life Among The Pedicabbers

by 02/20/2011
Neighborhood: Midtown, Times Square, Uncategorized

I usually hate Times Square. At its best it is a bunch of light bulbs on steroids, marquees on acid and fluorescence on speed. But no real light penetrates this galaxy as reflected milky ways of neon; garish, overpowering signs and streaming advertisements all compete to be the best travesty of the sun. While light […]

Renting The House of Usher

by 02/20/2011
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope, Uncategorized

The Doctor and I weren’t hung-over, since we were still drunk from the night before. That morning we ventured out to the western fringe of Park Slope to view this mysterious townhouse that Anya had bought. Along with Harris, friend and fellow casualty of the previous evening, we staggered down 4th Avenue under the steely […]

The Asian Bug

by 02/20/2011
Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad

The Asian bug has bitten my younger son Jesse. I don’t mean the flu that comes around every several years and gets blamed on that continent. No, he has been smitten by the mysterious East, and, like Marco Polo, fallen under the spell of the Orient. He is dating an Asian girl. Not that there […]

The Singing of God Bless America By A Woman Condemned To Death

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: Lower Manhattan

Throughout the 1950s Stan Novick was locked up at least four times in “The Tombs,” Manhattan’s now-closed city jail and holding cell on White Street. Pictures from that time show “The Tombs,” now torn down, as a Dickensian sort of place with looming towers and small windows. Photos of Stan Novick at that time show […]

Hemmed In

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: Midtown

This is a story about my grandmother, who was young in Manhattan in the 1920s. Speakeasies, nightclubs, drop-waisted dresses, bobbed hair, cloche hats, waist-length strands of dime-store pearls. Even for a middle-class workaday office girl like Frances Thornton, those were heady times. She was among the first of the gals in her office to bob […]

1981

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: East Village, West Village

Everyone on the scene thought operating an after-hours club on top of a 14th Street theater was a good idea and Arthur Weinstein opened the Jefferson on New Year’s Eve 1980. During the week the loft was home to Arthur, his wife, daughter, and best friend, Scottie. On the weekend hundreds of revelers unwilling to […]

The Whip and The Bonnet

by 02/14/2011
Neighborhood: Financial District, Uncategorized

For a long time I used to go down to Pearl Street at the bottom of Manhattan. It was around the time that I had started writing a book about the famous case of the man and the woman who had disappeared from Pearl Street in 1997. The book led to the street and, in […]

Getting to St. Martin

by 02/07/2011
Neighborhood: JFK/LGA

It was my biggest disappointment in recent memory. I slumped in a blue plastic seat at the JFK terminal to absorb the shock while my plane to sunny St. Martin took off without me. I couldn’t believe I had let my vacation slip through my fingers. I had remembered to pack everything—the sunscreen, the bikinis, […]

Don’t Cry for Me

by 02/07/2011
Neighborhood: Prospect Heights

I was standing at the platform waiting for the Q Train in the deep underbelly of the Atlantic Avenue station. I shouldn’t have been there. It was a Sunday afternoon and if everything had gone according to plan, I should have already reached Prospect Heights off the 3 train, if only the trains were running […]