You are currently browsing the stories about the “All Over” neighborhood.
I took the train to school alone. My Brooklyn friends didn’t live along the 2 or 3 lines, plus I’m somewhat hostile within the first hour of waking up. The commute was like a prolonged orchestral swell. The first leg of my trip, sprawled across a few of those '70s sunset-toned seats, the sounds of the subway – muted by [...]
After roaming through decades and neighborhoods on my journey across the site, I wanted to end my stroll with five stories that capture the city in all its chaotic glory—frustrations, intimacies, absurdities, and joys alike. Together, they suggest something larger than New York itself: how we live with imperfection, how we carve meaning from fleeting moments, and how joy manages [...]
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 [...]
Did you have a favorite place in New York that’s no longer exists? I interviewed people about spots in the city that were special to them but are now gone. Ellen is 70 years old and was a lawyer. Henry Kaplan: What's your favorite store in your neighborhood that shut down or closed? Ellen: That is a very easy [...]
Some stories are about place. Others are about time. But every so often, I come across stories that feel like they’re trying to catch something slippery inside a person—a moment of becoming that might also be a moment of unraveling. This week, my walk through Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood kept circling back to the same pulse: the uneasy work of figuring [...]
While exploring the archives of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, I stumbled upon three lovely stories all written before I was even conceived. In the first story, The Doormen Watching Over Me, the writer Meredith Boylan describes her relationship with her doormen in Tudor City. When I was younger and fantasized about one day living in New York, I had a specific [...]
(This essay is adapted from a talk given by the author on May 28, 2025, at the Salgamundi Club at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.) In 2012, I was in a bar with my friend John O’Connor. His 2024 book The Secret History of Bigfoot got some rave reviews. You should read it. Anyway, after [...]
New York is a city of extremes—extreme weather, extreme rent, extreme dreams, and just as often, extreme disappointment. As I wandered through the stories in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood this week, I didn’t land on a clean takeaway like “hope” or “loss.” Instead, I found something messier and more human: a kind of nervous laughter that lingers after the punchline fades. Each [...]
Excursion #2: Public Bodies, Private Meetings In my second walk through the neighborhood, I was reminded that the personal and political don’t just collide in headlines. Sometimes they brush up against each other in a spa room, a Starbucks, or the shoulder of a stranger on the subway. This time, my excursion took me through three very different stories, all [...]
This year is the 25th anniversary of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. Our fantastic new intern Zoe Kalaw has been rummaging around the site and finding connections and stories that resonate. Over the next month, she will be offering her thoughts on what she has been reading as well as providing video reflections on our Instagram page. --------------------------------- Excursion #1: Between Polarization [...]
The Honeymooners - Part 1 - Before I moved to the apartment on the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery, before I had a child, before Danny, my husband, and I separated, we lived at 305 East 6th Street, between Second Avenue and First Avenue. I was pregnant, and we'd decided that we needed a larger apartment. Another factor [...]
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 [...]
It was January 2022, almost a year since my breakup. The air was chilly and filled with Omicron. I'd reached my limit of stoical solitude and turned to OkCupid. My profile, I hoped, would present as light, clear, and open. I used phrases like, "Bundling up and dining outdoors these days." Read: I'm risk-averse but adaptable. Read deeper: I'm self-protective [...]
“So, when you’re not here at Barney Greengrass serving smoked fish, you’re a writer, eh? That’s interesting. Interesting. We should talk. I have a big idea. We’ve got to talk, yeah.” These weren’t the first words Dr. Jonathan Zizmor had ever spoken to me, but they marked a transition in our relationship from my simply being his server to something [...]
Before the interwebs, it required more ingenuity to get noticed. That’s why I conjured up my “underground poet” scheme in the early 90s. I was already a published poet by then, and at a huge art show at the Javits Center two of my framed one-liners were purchased by a French art dealer. When he compared me to Marcel Duchamp, [...]
Illustrations by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman __________________________ A contemporary take on the medieval bestiary, featuring the actual and apocryphal creatures that share our constricted urban space. The following is the first installment in a series of observations on urban fauna, text and image gleaned from the lifelong perambulations on asphalt and cement by two native New Yorkers, a father-daughter team, author [...]
Last month on the subway, somewhere near the Rockefeller Center / 47th-50th Street stop, I looked up from my phone and saw, across the aisle in the mirror seat of mine, a woman, maybe in her late 60s, whose style was startlingly close to my stepmother’s. She had the same short, tousled haircut—although her hair was grey, while my stepmother’s was [...]
One afternoon this summer I was on the subway. All was normal. Well, except that we are in a pandemic, which makes venturing down into NYC’s netherworld -- one with poor ventilation and tons of non-mask wearers – feel like I am putting my life in my overly sanitized hands. It all seemed surreal. The recent crime surge in New [...]
When you sit down on a weather-worn bench in New York—one that is dry and bone colored—it feels like you’ve stepped out of your body. You’ve left a building, a crowded café, stepped off of an accordion bus, or out of a bodega. It’s a pause where you take a cigarette break even though you don’t smoke. Never have. Yet, [...]
It was not so long ago that I would ordinarily drive into Manhattan from my home in Park Slope. However, I had a rule that I wouldn’t take my car to anywhere above 23rd Street. About five years ago, because of an increase in traffic, I moved my boundary to 14th Street. But recently, things have gotten so out of [...]
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 like Keanu Reeves in "Bill [...]
I moved to this city from Akron, Ohio in August 1971, and by the Summer of 1972, I was starting to wonder if I could actually make it here. I wasn't earning enough to have my own apartment and still found the pace of the city overwhelming. I was certainly not going to head back home, but it felt as though [...]
On the evening of April 17, I was waiting for the train like always, far enough away from the edge—standing sideways to brace myself from that wildebeest who might push me onto the tracks. I waited and looked for the train to arrive, as if staring would make it come faster. It never works. We all do it. Like pressing [...]
We want to read your true New York City stories. We are interested in a wide variety of topics, including those involving deli meat, baby powder, and graffiti. We're looking for essays that go beyond a quirky anecdote or a beautiful vignette. Tell us why this story—and this city—matters to you. Past truth-tellers have included Michael Cunningham, Tom Beller, Bryan Charles, Said Sayrafiezadeh, and Phillip Lopate. (more…)
On the subway Thursday morning, a man sat beside me, with his wife or girlfriend (no ring) standing over him. He was about 35, with long wavy hair pulled into pony tail, and a scraggly beard — kind of a 21st-century beatnik look. She was done up like a character from My Cousin Vinny — jet black hair in a [...]
The New York of the 80’s was not a town that met you halfway. It stopped well short of that, just looking right through you. It really didn’t give a damn what happened to you, daring you to ride the subway late at night and then picking your pocket and laughing about it afterwards. It was nothing like the New [...]
The day before my birthday was beautiful. It was one of those clear summer days in New York that somehow evades the typical humidity and the sun’s unbearable heat. Instead of roasting everything beneath it, the sun proudly showcased New York’s beauty. The pink and purple flowers on the High Line unfurled themselves towards the sky in euphoria and their [...]
I am writing this on the laptop you stole from me. Remember? No of course you don’t. What an asshole you were! I had gone back to New York to visit my father at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Head Trauma Unit (he had fallen and bashed his brains in on the way to see Sondheim and I swore up and down [...]
The week before I pried myself away from New York and moved to Japan to teach English, the New Yorker carried a tourism advertisement for the rural island where I’d be heading: “For travelers who have seen and experienced Tokyo, Kyoto, and other hot spots in Japan, and who are inclined to venture off the beaten path, Shikoku should top [...]
New Yorkers of a certain age who dig hoops can tell you that there is a lot of Jewish DNA in the city game. Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, an instructor at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, but the game’s popularity really took off early in the 20th century in the settlement house gyms and schoolyards of [...]
Friday, September 9, 2011. My friend and neighbor Judy the Therapist and I ponder the upcoming 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. On that terrible day, Judy and a young couple from my building had just picked up the morning paper at a news stand around the corner; they saw the first plane hit. Another friend [...]
May and the city rejoices in spring, in light and color, in the sheer goodness of life and its improvements. Spring shows us that things do indeed get better; it’s not all decline — old buildings sparkle, trees quiver in green, mundane streets are remade as pageants. However, let’s not get carried away. Sure, it’s encouraging to see the tulips [...]
Long lines at Whole Foods in Union Square again. It feels like the Russian bread lines, but no, it’s another snowstorm shopping spree. I’m not the only one anxious about running out of food—even though the streets are always plowed before my stomach growls uncomfortably. Everyone is complaining. Too cold, windy, snowy, sleety, Too much lashing out about de Blasio’s [...]
Affordable housing. For most New Yorkers the term is an oxymoron. Niklas and I moved to the West Village when we got married a few years ago, a romantic notion if not an especially realistic one. In the beginning we joked that we could live on love. But a sandwich is also nice sometimes. As freelancers living in an overpriced, [...]
I have always lived near subway stations that are above ground, meaning that many of my days have begun by standing in the cold for a few minutes waiting for the train to roll in – the 1 at 125th Street, then the F at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brooklyn. During the winter months, when the train doors [...]
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