You are currently viewing the stories for November, 2019
Special Needs
by Peter Margolies 11/24/2019Neighborhood: Kips Bay, Manhattan, Murray Hill
From 1966 to 1969 — grades 1 to 3—I attended the Adams School. Occupying three separate buildings, in the East 30s near Lexington Avenue, it was a “private school” for roughly 400 students aged four to 21 facing learning or emotional challenges. In reality, the school received most, if not all, its funding from the […]
Child as Parent
by Greg Gerke 11/17/2019Neighborhood: Park Slope
Isn’t it fitting to think of Wordsworth when raising a baby? “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”—best to cut the poem there. He authored so many other polished pieces about childhood and how the mind changes when growing up and old, crowned by the great koan-like first line of The Immortality Ode, “The child is […]
Random Encounters Underground
by Train Operator X 11/10/2019Neighborhood: Subway
Flushing Ave. on the M The train stops and the doors open, except one door panel is cut out (locked closed, to prevent it from opening). A tall, skinny, black dude on the platform tries to board the train and, wham! He walks right into the closed panel. He steps back and catches his breath. “Whoa…,” just […]
There Really Was a Mafia on the Upper West Side
by Thomas H. Haines 11/03/2019Neighborhood: Upper West Side
In the early 1960s, as a recently married City College professor the closest I’d come to the Mafia was in movies and newspaper articles. Back then, New York City was rocked by Mafia scandals as investigations revealed that the police and other municipal unions were cooperating with mobsters in numbers rackets, loan sharking, business shakedowns, […]