You are currently viewing the stories for the year “2023.”
Fireworks meant many different things to me as a kid. They were what you saw on TV when Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops performed the “1812 Overture.” Fireworks showed up over Popeye’s head if he kissed Olive Oyl or if Bluto punched him in the face. On special occasions, fireworks would be in the night sky when my dad [...]
There is a saying in New York City that you can either have a job or keep a car on the street. Garages in my neighborhood cost upwards of $700 a month, and street parking is free, sort of. I do not have a job, other than walking my two dachshunds, Henry Longfellow and Hanna, and playing the intricate game [...]
In the summers we would go to a cottage on the North Fork of Long Island, near Greenport. We rented the same one each year. It’s a great spot that my wife heard about from, well, I don’t remember where. She is always hearing about things, discovering ways for us to get away, do things, be a family, moving around [...]
It was around 1975 and I was maybe 8 years old. My $2 a week allowance worked well for my humble needs, and I didn’t necessarily want or need a job at that age, but my dad would ask me to run errands every now and then and let me keep some of the left-over change from the transaction. The [...]
I first met Ari Horwitz in front of a pizzeria near the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal in 1978. I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know, but Ari was about my age, mid-20s, and we seemed to have an immediate psychic connection. Ari, it turned out, lived with a roommate on Barnes Avenue near Pelham [...]
I am in my apartment in Woodside, Queens, reading C.S. Lewis. It is my first apartment that isn’t school housing, and I feel like a woman born again: reading, writing, thinking, manic with ideas and desires in a space all of my own. Though I am not Catholic- I’m technically Jewish but not in any personal way- I am fervent, [...]
Chestnuts bloom in Paris Memory undoes me. I am wistfully envious of folks whose past unfurls behind them with focus and drama, like a highway seen from the back of a childhood station wagon, or a vast Midwestern plain viewed from an airplane window above. The clarity of their vision, its narrative continuity and expanse, seem so exotic as to be [...]
Approximate Odds I hope I break even - I could use the money.- overheard at Aqueduct Early in 1972 I went to Aqueduct racetrack with my father and my Uncle Nick. They had the day off, and I had a new telephoto lens that I wanted to try out. I wasn’t doing much of anything back then besides occasionally driving [...]
In the fall of 1980, The Empire Strikes Back had already come out and while I was getting tired of my Star Wars action figures, I really, really, really wanted a Millennium Falcon spaceship playset. It was huge, cool and could fit my 3.75” action figures without issue. But at $29.99 it was expensive for a 12 year old kid with a meager $2 [...]
This is Part 3 of a three part story by Nina Camp. Read Part 1 and Part 2. The locksmith was a lean, twenty-something guy. He arrived on time and stood quietly outside our apartment door after I buzzed him into the building. Soft-spoken, with kind eyes, he brought a moment of problem-solving stability into my home. Alex was out. [...]
Phil Rosenthal This is Part 2 of a three part story by Nina Camp. Part 3 will appear on Thursday. Click here to read Part 1. I went into the theater, threw my coat across two seats to save them, went back out to the lobby and called Alex again. He was about to walk into his voice lesson on [...]
This is is Part I of a three part story by Nina Camp. Part II will run on Tuesday and Part III will appear on Thursday. The aim was to repair our wounded relationship. Nothing overcomplicated, our plan had just three elements. The first involved a man we’d come to think of as The Happiest Guy on Netflix. The second [...]
I’m headed to the elevator, working at my volunteer job in Lenox Hill Hospital, carrying patients’ EKG printouts, which I am supposed to distribute to various wards. Getting on at the basement level, I press the button for the 8th floor—the psych ward, which had been my temporary place of residence until I was discharged six months before. There are [...]
Bored on a pre-pandemic Sunday, I scan through Facebook’s dating app to see who liked my profile, and finally, someone interesting! Connie is heavily tattooed and only has three pictures (just one includes his face). Aside from a giant Yankees logo and “CONNIE” emblazoned on his abdomen, I can’t see many tattoo details and his profile is sparse. But he [...]
If you want to call me a cool kid, please do. You see, back in 1975 when I was seven years old , I visited Tribeca for the first time…with my mom and dad. We didn’t go to the Mudd Club or Artists Space or anything like that; instead we went to a factory just south of Canal Street. One Saturday [...]
The two apartments I rented, one after the other, in Astoria from 2009 to 2011 were on the same block of lower Ditmars Boulevard in modest buildings, under the faded dominion of the Hell Gate Bridge, within sight and smell of the East River, and across the street from the Kodachrome canvas of Astoria Park. In 2009, I shared a [...]
It was raining, and I was tired and drunk, well let’s say high, walking home at 3 AM from a party in Sunset Park when I saw a blown-out umbrella between two parked cars on 5th Avenue. I was about two blocks from my parents’ apartment on 40th Street. I was 23 years old and had returned to Brooklyn a [...]
The bathroom was small, at first glance appearing to be a large closet that opened off the kitchen. A beautiful nautilus shell, almost a foot long with a pale-pink pearlescent chamber, had been placed in the bathtub. The tub itself was deep and old-fashioned, made of heavy porcelain; the wall behind it was protected with waterproof wallpaper depicting faded tiles [...]
photo by ajay_suresh It felt glorious to look at Edward standing on the corner of Madison, knowing this would be the last time I’d have to look at him for a week. As he hugged me, the steam rising from the gutters around us seemed neither tawdry nor romantic, but ordinary. “I have a gift for you honey,” Edward said, [...]
Riot police faced off with squatters and anarchist protesters in Tompkins Square in the 1980s. I once had an experience that answered for me the question that haunts many males of the species: am I tough enough to hold my head up with the great warriors in history – those who fought at Armageddon, Troy, Marathon, Lepanto, Austerlitz, Gettysburg, Stalingrad? [...]
I wondered if a movie could produce the same terror decades on, even if I’d worked hard to forget the plot and its disquieting images. Like the severed ear lying in a field—a waxy dead thing, crawling with ants. And Dennis Hopper, huffing into a mask. Isabella Rossellini’s red mouth in eerie close-up. Not to mention the gory ending. Decades [...]
We moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1980s, and at every landing of our fifth-floor tenement walk up there was a nose-full of tantalizing smells. This was in the very Italian section of the West Village, full of tenements that we called “V.I.V’s” or “Vertical Italian Villages.” The older folks, who sat out in front, chatting and fanning themselves in the [...]
I have no idea where Bill came from, but one spring, sometime in the late 1970s, he showed up and started hanging out every day on our Ocean Parkway block in Brighton Beach. He was a white guy with a red haired, frizzy Jewfro, and he wore a denim jacket. Bill would stand out there on the block all day [...]
I loved my fifth-floor tenement apartment on 6th Street in the East Village. At the time, I was in my early twenties and could fly up those stairs The railroad apartment had two fireplaces, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. In the winter, I couldn’t wait to get home to start a fire in my brick fireplace [...]
I almost exclusively wear black no-show socks — mostly because I wear booties all winter or sneakers, neither of which warrant the obtrusive show of a sock. As such, I have ten pairs of basic black ones from Walmart, another four pairs of slightly different black ones from Duane Reade and one pair – my favorite – from a specialty [...]
Every now and then, someone in my apartment building posts a sign on the bulletin board next to the lobby elevators—often about something that was lost, or possibly taken by mistake, from either the laundry room or the lobby. Usually these notes are simple, straight-forward requests. A typical sign might read: “Lost in laundry room—pair of blue wool socks. Please [...]
Back then, I lived alone in a terrible apartment on the Upper West Side. I was twenty-six. After five years of shitty roommates, I’d decided to suck up the cost and make a go of it. The rent was $467 a month. This was actual money in 1985, which might be why I still remember the amount, when I’ve forgotten [...]
photo credit Dianne Washington Harlem Superstar: DJ Hollywood & the Birth of Hip-Hop This year the world is celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop culture. While it includes elements of break dancing and graffiti, most people’s first thoughts about the genre go to the rappers and DJs behind the music. It has been written that the soundtrack to the movement [...]
It was quite an operation. Lookouts on walkie-talkies patrolled the roofline, and a scout on a bike pedaled up and down the block, combing 7th Street between Avenues B and C. A guy in a ski mask stood guard at an open window on one of the apartment building’s upper floors, ready to service the growing line on the sidewalk [...]
Illustrations by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman The following is the third installment in a work in progress, Observations on Urban Fauna, a contemporary take on the medieval bestiary, featuring actual and apocryphal creatures that share our constricted urban space. Text and image are gleaned from the lifelong perambulations on asphalt and cement by two native New Yorkers, a father-daughter team, author [...]
At the Prospect Park station, I sit across from a Hasidic couple on a three-seater bench on the Q train. Parallel to them, in a wheel-locked stroller, is a toddler with unshorn blonde hair, dark eyes that reflect no light, and a suckling baby mouth. He has been dressed in a Canadian tuxedo of many layers: a miniature pair of [...]
The Buffalo Bills kicker Scott Norwood, missed a field goal on the last play of Super Bowl XXV, clinching the 20-19 victory for the NY Giants. The door to Cherry Lane opens with the barely perceptible “beep-beep” of the unarmed alarm, which makes the bartender look up as a man in his sixties, hair cropped against his balding scalp, walks [...]
“Careful with that!” I exclaimed to my new husband, Harry, as he carried my Art Deco stained glass window up the stairs to our new apartment. I had gotten the window, a gift from my parents, when I married Harry in 1967. We were both so excited to move into an apartment over a diner in the Meatpacking District, where [...]
When my mother and I returned to New York City in 1993 — following a short, confused stint in Dallas, Texas — we moved into an apartment on 83rd Street between York and East End avenues, in Yorkville. A few years earlier, at age seven, I had migrated to the city from Westchester County with my mother and her boyfriend, [...]
We always drank beer from stemmed glasses in Farrell’s. We were college kids, hair creeping down our necks, and we would meet in the crowded, gleaming bar in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace to plan the evening or the rest of our lives. Like our parents, we were from there—Holy Name parish—and attended local schools—Brooklyn College, St. John’s, St. Francis, ones that [...]
I grew up in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, during the 1950s, in an attached house between 48th and 49th streets. The houses had small gardens – front and back – with much larger communal gardens beyond our front yard. Small trees and flowering bushes were planted around the edges of two large square patches of well-mowed lawns, separated by two marble [...]
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