You are currently browsing the stories about the “All Over” neighborhood.
I went to Penn Station to snap a picture or two and perhaps in the process imbibe a feeling for my grandmother, Bubby, who went there ten years ago (this month) to catch a train... I didn't know Bubby growing up. She and my dad had a fight when I was 2 and didn't speak for the next 15 years. [...]
Like most martial artists of my generation, I dreamt of being the next Bruce Lee--or in my case, the "white Bruce Lee." The difference is I went out and did something about it. As a result, I've actually performed in a dozen or so films (yes, I use that term loosely). The first chop-socky flick I ever did was called [...]
I found "Timmy's Potty" laying on the carpet beneath our bed this morning. It's a toilet training video that my wife purchased for our son about a month ago. It was odd to see it again. I remember the day my wife brought it home from the hippie bookstore. More specifically, I remember how she and I watched it together [...]
I just got back from Uncle Dick's funeral service out in Cortez, Colorado. I didn't know Dick alive, but I got to know him pretty well during his memorial service, and then later staying at his house while Cheryl’s mother tied up some of his personal affairs. From all traces Dick was an authentic man’s man; he grew wheat and [...]
P> My boiler broke in February, after the pedestal sink on the second floor of my home gave way and tipped over, thanks to an aging sixpenny nail. The upstairs bathroom quickly filled with water and began seeping through the gaps in the floor’s tile grout. The ceiling of my kitchen, on the first floor, starting leaking in spots where [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper 1971. When I was still a student and first visited New York City, the couple at whose place I was staying suggested we take a walk to the piers near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. While we were crossing the roadway there, where the signs clearly prohibit pedestrians from crossing, a policemen who saw us [...]
Writing you from the 'monsen memorial public library' in Naknek, Alaska. Fantastic little joint--the librarian is a long black-haired tlingit (pronounced 'klink-it') woman who just let me use her computer. there are about five other patrons in the stacks, among them, a longshoreman whom i know named 'al'. Outside, the fine smell of salty air and wet tundra is fighting [...]
At the time I was working at Brooklyn Academy of Music (still am, actually). I was 26 and living with my now ex-wife in the Bronx, in a place called Co-Op City. Co-Op City is a place just like all the other "Co-Op Cities"; a bunch of highrise type buildings built outside of the "ghetto" neighborhoods. They were built for [...]
My mother taught me to fear rats. She still shudders when she recalls the rat-infested tenement overlooking the Harlem River in the Bronx that my Czech refugee family called home when we first arrived in America, in 1970. Strange crunching sounds could be heard emanating from the hollowed walls of our apartment, and after a neighbor proudly showed my mother [...]
Once upon a time there was a drawing of a man and his dog. It was by William Steig. It was what the distinguished artist produced when we asked him to draw something that we at the Neighborhood could use as a, a, a.... (it's to the right)... something. A Logo is the word I am hoping to avoid. For [...]
First of all, and please note that this preventive axiom applies to many long and painful life detours, never take a job that you hate, particularly when it happens to be with a large company where people refer to working in their offices until 11:00 p.m. as “staying late” and recount it—“I could just relax. Everything flowed. I could have [...]
There are some songs that if heard in the right situation might push you to the brink of something horrid. Some of these situations are real, some are fiction. Tim Rutili: 1."Whoop There it is," rapped over by a Melrose Park wedding DJ with a cordless mic as the dance floor was heating up at my cousin's wedding. 2. "Summer [...]
As the country endures its day of paranoid scuffling, maudlin wallowing, and commercial 9/11 reality-tv overdose next week, I will be manning the phones at a major newspaper conglomerate. Because I’m the temp. Looking for work post 9/11 has been an utter joy – armed with not one but two Masters degrees and skills, as one of my “counselors” describes [...]
I moved to New York City, a naïve T passenger from Boston, in October 2000. In line with its puritanical ways, the Boston subway system, better known as the T, was all color-coded simplicity. The subway map could be masterfully replicated by any seven-year old armed with four crayons-red, orange, blue, and green, each line appropriately named by its respective [...]
The summer of 1957 left-hooked me. I should have seen it coming. Dad left on suspiciously extended business trips. Strange excursions, given his sedentary and lackluster job as an advertising sales agent for RH Donnelly. One day he even appeared outside our Flatlands apartment in a shiny cherry red Triumph, offering to take my girlfriends and me for a spin. [...]
It's not easy to ask for a picture from a fireman's widow or a mother who has just lost a child. That's the worst aspect of my high-pressure job as a member of the New York City working press. I step into people’s lives, often for less than an hour, usually in moments of great joy or sorrow. My job [...]
I step onto the 1 downtown train at 116th street every day and usually stand all the way down to Houston Street, where I get off for work. Sometimes I am able to balance and read a book as I hold on to a greasy pole. Other times, I am not so lucky; at five foot one, the long horizontal [...]
The A train rattles through the tunnel underneath the East River. It’s late on a Sunday night and the train is not very crowded. About ten customers are spaced equidistant on the seats. They stare up at the ceiling or down at the their feet. Doors at the end of the car click and slide open. A woman shuffles quickly [...]
On this past Tuesday, November 7th, just about every living room in America was its own small war room. Phones rang, people screamed at the television, and moods soared and plummeted (it is an absolute certainty that every single person who cared about the election experienced, on that particular night, at least one gigantic mood swing). Off all these war [...]
Passing by St. Mark's Bookstore, I hesitate and peer in, sizing up the window displays. I’m anxious about a fifteen minute gap in my color-coded schedule. Brown for my day-job, red for visual art, aquamarine for friends & family are the colors I assigned to the categories in my laptop’s organizer program. A few moments in a bookstore can absolve [...]
The John Kieran Trail in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx is cut through sturdy black locust and black cherry trees, their crowns bending the day's sunlight. As it veers towards the water, the trail mixes with wet mossy woods with willow branches hanging over the path like Rapunzel’s hair, patches of skunk cabbage and pitcher plants, and a feathery [...]
John Epperson is Lypsinka, but Lypsinka - the performace artist drag super star whose show, The Boxed Set, has been a smash hit at the Westbeth Theater since this past September, - is not John Epperson, or rather John is a lot of things in addition to being Lypsinka. John has agreed to keep a diary for Mr. Beller's Neighborhood [...]
Michael Chabon told us that The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (246-6080) was offended by this piece when it was first published in Civilization Magazine (Harper's reprinted it, too, and you can find it and a lot of other Chabon related stuff on his website, http://home.earthlink.net/~mchabon/). This seemed sufficiently peculiar that we called them up to ask why. But no [...]
So I paid $400 to St. Vincent's nursing school and took their EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) training course in February 1989. I went to class three days a week and I also had to do eighteen hours of rounds at St. Vincent's Hospital, which was like, total misery and insanity. Then I found out that getting your EMT license from [...]
To order at Amazon.com, click here. "Before and After: Stories From New York vividly captures the fissure of a place suddenly and utterly transformed... It's hard to imagine a more appropriate or more moving collection of voices." --San Francisco Chronicle This is a book of true stories about New York, written, for the most part, by the people for whom [...]
My wife and I had agreed that we didn’t want to know the sex of our baby. Sure, we had discussed the somewhat finite possibilities: My wife said she thought it might be easier to raise a boy in this bizarre world. Knowing a little about that one myself I wasn’t quite so sure. But I remember thinking that I [...]
I saw it all from a bench in the park, sitting next to some gathered pigeons and a pile of peanut shells. And nearby, across the street, a statue and an American flag. The man with the black hat and the enormous red-shirted gut was sprawled out on a bench and he appeared to be dead. Perhaps he was. A [...]
In 1992, I attended a reading in celebration of the publication by Leon Forrest of his fifth novel, the 1,135-page "Divine Days," at the long since closed Brentano's on 53rd Street in Hyde Park, Chicago. I took along my former girlfriend, a quiet, awkward jazz DJ with whom I'd had trouble separating. The crowd that night was made up of [...]
Last Friday the weather beckoned for some ice cream. I got a scoop (caveat: I am a messy eater. Caveat: I hate the word caveat) and walked down Ditmars, taking in the sights and sounds of my part of Queens. There were a lot of men out in muscle tee's talkin' tough and gesturing wildly w/their hands. Machismo overflowed like [...]
I have been in psychotherapy just over a year, and the whole experience at this point boils down to the single image of a young private school girl sitting two seats down from me on the cross town bus. She is accompanied by her Dominican nanny, who gazes absently out the bus window on to 96th Street as it crosses [...]
Part One Distinguishing true from harassing reports - some days, one in four - looms large for Emergency Children's Services (ECS), the city office that responds to child abuse and neglect throughout the five boroughs during the night, and on weekends and holidays. Fake reports are less of a problem for the weekday nine-to-fivers. But nights or weekends, people have [...]
Angie Xtravaganza This is the story of Angel Segarra, a Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx who became Angie Xtravaganza, doyenne of the drag world made briefy famous by Jennie Livingston’s acclaimed 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. Angel, neé Angie, died in New York City on April 6, 1993, at the age of 27. She died of complications from [...]
The House of Xtravaganza, like the House of Corey and the other houses, consists of a mother and a father and a big raucous band of "children": drag queens, butch queens (gay men who dress like men), transsexuals, a few real girls and one or two straight guys. The smattering of girls and straight guys notwithstanding, the houses are, essentially, [...]
Williamsburg residents Will Becton and Stephen Hoban spent much of November, 2001, riding the New York City subway system, recording the many ways in which other New Yorkers have chosen to deface the Britney Spears posters that for nearly a month were ubiquitous on subway platforms. In their first five outings, Stephen and Will collected numerous examples of defaced posters. [...]
Brisbane. I was back. I had enjoyed three eventful years in downtown Manhattan before deciding to spend the last months of 2001 on hiatus with my parents in Brisbane, Australia. Since moving to New York in 1998, I'd joked with friends at home that it was the Island of Dog Years -- every four weeks seemed stuffed to capacity with [...]
I was in Sister Mary Evangelista's fourth grade class when Mother John entered the room during our math lesson. We stood and were about to greet her with our usual, "Good morning, Mother," when with her Irish brogue, she abruptly instructed us to sit down. She whispered in our teacher's ear. Sister Mary Evangelista's eyes welled up and she told [...]
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