Recent Stories

• The Shtetl Next Door

  by Penina Warren 09/26/2021

  On the first of the month, I visit Benjamin Benowitz. Ben lives three blocks north and three avenues east from the apartment I rent.  The lobby of Ben’s’s building reads like the lobbies I have seen in movies about New York old money; all ostentation with marble and central air.  The walls in my own […]

• A Box of Slides: Staten Island at Home and Abroad

  by David Allen 09/19/2021

  Early in the pandemic, I started posting photographs from my wanderings in Staten Island. Old storefronts, tugboats on the Kill, old signs from long extinct businesses…whatever caught my eye.  In response to one post, I got a DM from a guy called Richie. He said he liked my posts, recognized a lot of the buildings, […]

• The Fence on Madison Street

  by Flo Gelo 09/05/2021

  On a blistering August afternoon in 2012, I visit my childhood neighborhood in Williamsburg after a 50-year absence and approach a teenage girl who sits on a wooden shipping crate in the front of a house on Madison Street.  I’m standing in front of a wrought iron fence that forms a boundary between us. She […]