You are currently viewing the stories for April, 2019
The Spirit Tree
by Peter Wortsman 04/28/2019Neighborhood: Jackson Heights
Rising, miraculous, precariously leaning in front of the attached one-family, red brick house in which I grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and for years thereafter when my widowed mother was the sole remaining occupant, a towering fir tree loomed twice as tall as the roof and climbing. Having felled all extraneous timber and reduced […]
Old Lefties: An Oral History
by Paul Buhle 04/21/2019Neighborhood: Brighton Beach, Co-op City, Lower East Side, Ozone Park
Editor’s Note — These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old […]
Love and Letters at a Bar Downtown
by Kaarin Von 04/14/2019Neighborhood: Bowery
I work at a bar on the Bowery. Drunk people are funny. Also incredibly forgetful. Here is a list of some of the strange things we have found at the bar at the end of a long night: a single shoe; an antique baby stroller (it looked like the stroller for Rosemary’s Baby); a banjo; […]
World Series
by John Reidy 04/07/2019Neighborhood: Flushing, Shea Stadium, Woodside
When I was thirteen years old and in the seventh grade, I loved to go to Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets. I loved baseball and would sneak into the ball park all the time. When the Mets were on road trips, I practically lived there. It was my stadium. I would sit […]