Joseph Samuels
Bio
Stories
Yorkville 1960s–A Neighborhood in Transition
From Yorkville about high-rise, immigrants, Mr. Softee, railroad apartment, stoop, street games, Upper East Side, YorkvillePublished on: 06/06/2021
Although my family moved out of Manhattan when I was 12 the City always drew me back like a magnet. My family's roots run deep in New York. Four of my maternal great-great-grandparents left Ireland in the 1840s to escape the potato famine. They not only found a better life in New York, they found life! My paternal grandparents left Poland in the 1890s and settled in Blackstone Massachusetts, upon their death at an early age, my father and some of his siblings moved to Brooklyn. As the oral story teller of my family I recently started to write them down. I have many more to tell, and hope some may appreciate them as I do.
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 […]
Illustrations by AurĂ©lie 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 […]
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 […]
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