You are currently viewing the stories for “August 2025.”
Self-portrait as a carpenter, wishing to be a photographer, 1981, in my studio. ___ As the Labor Day holiday approaches, I’ve been thinking of all the jobs I’ve had since I turned 24 in 1971, the year I began trying to “make it,” that is support myself, as a photographer in New York City. Between 1971 and 1989, I worked [...]
There I was, dancing in a flash mob in front of the iconic Red Stairs, next to the TKTS booth in Times Square. “Welcome to New York”—Taylor Swift’s song about inspiration and possibilities—boomed from a loudspeaker perched on a nearby bench. It was four days after the 2024 presidential election, and I was still grief stricken about the inconceivable results. [...]
The year was 1950. I was five years old. There was barely room for my mother, much less me, when we moved into my grandmother’s small, crowded apartment on the 9th floor in the Ansonia Hotel on 74th Street and Broadway, where my mother had lived before marrying my father. When she and my grandmother moved after my grandfather’s death, [...]
Vincent “Chin” Gigante-------- Sometime during 1976, a few weeks after his uncle disappeared, my acquaintance Xavier Eboli paid Vincent “Chin” Gigante a visit. He had known The Chin all his life. More than friends, they were famiglia. An Eboli had married a Gigante, a Gigante had christened an Eboli baby, and the two families took turns sponsoring confirmations. Which is [...]
Do you have anyone in New York City who you are worried about running into? I interviewed people and asked them who they least want to see. Courtney is a sometimes playwright and is in her 50s. She lives in Fort Greene. H: So, who is the person who you least want to run into in New York City, you [...]
Born and raised in New York City, I spent my formative years dwelling above 110th Street. As a tot I lived with my mom and grandmother in the Lenox Terrace, but in 1967, when I was 4, we moved to 628 West 151 Street. Living in a two-bedroom first floor apartment with wood floors except in the bathroom and kitchen, [...]
Back in the day, well, sometime in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was as far-out and far-right a president that the human mind could contemplate, you could still afford to rent your own apartment in Park Slope, and not shared with 15 other roommates, even though you were neither the employee nor scion of a hedge fund. I was living [...]
