You are currently viewing the stories for December, 2022
Carroll Street
by Joan Kydd 12/18/2022Neighborhood: Gowanus, Park Slope
In 1979, when my boyfriend Bob bought the house, Park Slope had not yet exploded in a frenzy of gentrification. But change was on its way. Young professionals from Manhattan, starting families and priced out of Brooklyn Heights, were establishing themselves, transforming 7th Avenue with upscale specialty stores and busily renovating neglected brownstones with woodwork […]
Bronx Pinocchios of the Borscht Belt
by Eugene Barron 12/10/2022Neighborhood: Bronx, The Catskills
My home base in the 50s was Wyatt Street, essentially, a one-block middle class Jewish enclave in the East Bronx. Theirs was a few miles away, on Fox Street in the South Bronx, then a tough area of mostly poor Jews, Italians, Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Our paths were unlikely to have ever crossed, except […]
Washington Square, A Place Apart
by Peter Wortsman 12/03/2022Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village
On January 23, 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan, poet Gertrude Dick, and three actors from the Provincetown Playhouse broke into a hidden spiral staircase in the Washington Square Arch and ascended to the summit. They dangled Chinese lanterns and red balloons, fired off toy cap pistols, and galivanted until dawn, whereupon, with Bohemian […]