Recent Stories

• Random Encounters Underground 

  by Train Operator X 11/10/2019

  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 […]

• There Really Was a Mafia on the Upper West Side

  by Thomas H. Haines 11/03/2019

  In the early 1960s, as a recently married City College professor the closest I’d come to the Mafia was in movies and newspaper articles. Back then, New York City was rocked by Mafia scandals as investigations revealed that the police and other municipal unions were cooperating with mobsters in numbers rackets, loan sharking, business shakedowns, […]

• Interlude

  by Jeanne Dickey 10/27/2019

  In the midst of a particularly grueling winter, I met Wren on OK Cupid.  Unlike my slim, brown-skinned fiancé who had deserted me the week before Christmas, Wren was bulky, with a ruddy complexion and pale blue eyes like my father’s. The day after my third date with Wren, my father died of congestive heart […]