You are currently viewing the stories for October, 2012
Doormen For Romney
by Basil Totem 10/25/2012Neighborhood: Upper East Side
September 2012 - In anticipation of an Occupy Wall Street march up Park Avenue, I am polishing the brass poles of the canopy and humming The Internationale. Although my employers, the bankers and traders who live in this elegant pre-war co-op, are hostile to OWS’s call for higher taxes on the rich, I am among the […]
Crust, Mantle, Core
by Sara Lippmann 10/23/2012Neighborhood: Bay Ridge
A sinkhole is threatening to swallow up 79th Street in Bay Ridge. Police, fire, city workers are on the scene. Supposedly, the sewers had something to do with it.“The beginning of the end,” laments a longstanding neighborhood resident on local TV. He is wearing a trucker hat and gold chain and undershirt. Behind him, elders […]
The Love Seat (A Ghost Story)
by Thomas R. Pryor 10/21/2012Neighborhood: Yorkville
As a boy in the early 1960s, I’d go up my grandparents’ second floor apartment on York Avenue several times a week. Their hallway was lit by one low watt exposed bulb. The dark hall frightened me. Sometimes my fear was compounded when I’d hear fuzzy radio sounds coming from the usually locked basement. I […]
On Randall’s Island
by Candy Schulman 10/18/2012Neighborhood: Randall's Island
Why am I on Randall’s Island, shivering in a ski jacket, gloves, a scarf, and a blanket wrapped around me? It is 7 PM on a Friday evening, and I can see the Manhattan skyline lights flickering on. Normal people—sane people—are warm in bars, toasting pisco sours instead of facing blustering winds on Randall’s Island. […]
Hiding in a Transparent City
by Deirdre Faughey Davison 10/10/2012Neighborhood: Upper East Side
When I was fourteen, I auditioned for the School of American Ballet and was accepted. The school was too far from my home to travel back and forth everyday, so I lived in the dormitory at Lincoln Center during the week and travelled back to Long Island on the weekends. Every Sunday night, after a […]
It’s Not A Cult
by Zola Acker 10/10/2012Neighborhood: All Over, JFK/LGA, Letter From Abroad
“I have to get to New York” says the woman in front of me at the Portland, Oregon airport. “You don’t understand, I have to get there.” She repeats this urgently, in a slightly hysterical voice to a man in uniform behind a counter. I smile at her sympathetically. The flight to JFK has been […]
When the Therapist Lost Her Mind
by Raanan Geberer 10/03/2012Neighborhood: Gramercy Park, Stuyvesant Town
My wife Sarah and I had been seeing our therapist, Brenda, for years – both separately and as a couple. When I met Sarah, she was already seeing Brenda, who was then in training to be a psychiatric social worker after a long career as a high school social worker and Spanish teacher. After we […]
Doc Pomus
by Mary Shanley 10/03/2012Neighborhood: Upper West Side
My songwriter friend Robin called me with an opportunity to make some easy money, fast. She gave me the name and address of a friend of hers and, although I was pretty busy kicking drugs and booze, I jumped at the chance of making some money. I hopped the number two express on Seventh Avenue […]
Brooklyn Fields
by Samuel Howard 10/01/2012Neighborhood: Cobble Hill
New Yorkers have a different relationship to celebrity. You can’t swing a cat in this town without hitting a big shot, so we are more restrained or dismissive or tolerant when famous people materialize. And we are exposed to them at an early age. My first celebrity encounter was in 1984. I was playing frisbee […]