You are currently browsing the stories about the “Bronx” neighborhood.
One of the great, underrated things about living in New York is meeting all those people who come from everywhere else. Not that Gotham natives aren’t a barrel of monkeys, but it’s cool that someone always seems to have a different frame-of-reference, a different slice of life about where they came from, which is my way of explaining why I [...]
Arriving at work for the night tour on October 29, 1974 I discover the firehouse to be as abandoned and silent as a cemetery at midnight, I was spooked by something but wrote it off to the approach of Halloween when in reality it was actually an omen. I am the first member of the night tour reporting in for [...]
[Patrick J. Sauer also has a website. --Ed.] The sense of smell is the most powerful reminder of past events. It’s the hardest sense to pin down, the hardest to define. A smell is never described as it is, only in simile form. It smells like burning leaves. You know, it smells wet, like...like...like a wet dog. That’s nasty, smells [...]
One thing Sambath Suen can’t abide is the cold. Until four years ago, Suen lived in Kandal, a Cambodian province that borders on Vietnam. Before that, he lived in Vietnam, where he earned his diploma, and before that he had lived in his native village, about thirty knots downriver from Phnom Penh, where he spent what Cambodians call “The Time [...]
Listen to this story: I always stop whenever I see “Lobster Bisque” on the soup menu, and I smile. That isn’t because lobster bisque is a particular favorite of mine. I never had much interest in “lobster anything,” unlike the people who rave about lobsters and have to order them whatever the cost, even though the menu may warn, “Lobsters [...]
It's 1978, the annual “summer offensive” is well underway and chaos rules the streets. The ghettoes are burning and there are more fires than there are units to fight them. If TV stars and politicians resided here, you could bet we would be operating with a full second alarm assignment but here in Hunts Point we will be lucky to [...]
“Seventy-eight years!” someone said, and there was that distinctive popping sound. I’d come for a tuna salad sandwich but now plastic cups of champagne were being poured and, in a democratic spirit, one was placed on the Formica counter in front of me. Before I could ask what was going on, the waitress came up and said they were out [...]
On my corner of 167th Street and Grant Avenue in the Bronx was a small grocery that sold “Appetizers”—dairy foods, pickles, milk, eggs, and fresh tub butter and cheeses in large refrigerated glass cases. The owners were refugees. From the War, my mother said. I was twelve and that War had ended fifteen years ago. One white-jacketed worker behind the [...]
The Mets are out of town. My childhood friend Jim wants to see a ballgame before he's tied up remodeling his Long Island house, which he estimates will take all of his free time May through October. He can't wait until the Amazins, his favorite team and mine, return from a trip to the West Coast and Atlanta, so it's [...]
Looking around for the lieutenant, I find him standing alongside the firehouse, staring down into a neat row of freshly clipped hedges. I hurry to his side and he tersely commands, "Get to work." Right then and there, my life changes forever. * For firemen, there is nothing more startling than a Verbal Alarm--the riotous banging of fists on the [...]
Arriving before the engine, with fire blowing out two windows on the third floor and people in the street yelling, "There's two kids in there" our asses are about to be kicked and there is nothing we can do about it. It's 1977, and Lieutenant Annello leads the way as usual. He is simply the best fire officer I have [...]
Inside the firehouse, sweeping floors, cooking meals and maintaining equipment are routine parts of the job. However when the doors go up and the rigs go out you have to be as flexible as Gumby, because you do not know what you are going to be faced with next. While responding to alarms, we always scan the sky for smoke [...]
A beaten body sat slumped on the back step of an anonymous pumper. We nearly walked right by Danny without recognizing him. Danny’s turnout coat was half open and covered with remnants of the building burning at the corner of Townsend Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway. His face and hands were black with soot. Steam seaped from his helmetless [...]
That morning I got up in the afternoon. My friend Micki came from 204th/Post Avenue, from her man's crib complaining about his small penis saying, "My baby brother's got a bigger dick than his!" And I had to get up and shower, leaving her in my room and I took the loofa with me because I scrub the dead skin [...]
Autumn has arrived and the cooler air has dampened but not ended the fires of this years "Summer Offensive." Somewhere the trees are changing color but here in Hunts Point it has been one of those days. We've already caught more work on this day tour than any company outside the ghetto will see in six months and the smoke [...]
Heath Avenue. I recognized the building right away. Public housing always stands out from all other domiciles. It looms, and, like a tall man, commands your attention. But when you look up, expecting to see his face, you see a blank outline, no distinguishing features. No nose. No mouth. No eyes. We parked on the side street around the corner. [...]
Oh man, he's going to die! I live 100 feet from Interstate 95 and from my living room window have an unobstructed view of this sea of vehicles. Having lived here many years the sounds of impending trouble are familiar. So when the horns started blaring it was a cue to look out the window and I did so, just [...]
Christ Zig, what did you do? Whenever I'm asked if the fire department had an effect on my personal life, those six words explode into my brain. It's a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon in 1977 at the Bronx zoo with my wife and three kids. The kids are riding a camel and shouting what all exicited kids shout, "Look at [...]
We were looking for the old oak trees, the ones rumored to be down by the shoreline. The day was already sweat-lodge hot, at 8 a.m., the seagulls circling lazily in the morning light. We stood in the parking lot, plotting our route; the sweat boiled up under our long sleeved shirts and long pants—protection against the legions of mosquitoes [...]
1201 University Ave in the Bronx is no place to live. The front door, lockless and crooked on its hinges, wouldn’t bar entry to dogs, rapists or the media. Austin Fenner, a reporter and a friend of mine, arrived there before me. We began patrolling the building together, staying away from the bucket boy’s apartment on the ground floor for [...]
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 [...]
Ask Bronx resident Keshauna Sanders, 12, what the most remarkable thing about Finland is and she’ll tell you: it’s the pizza. "They put ham on it!" she says. "And pineapple!" Her classmate Priscilla Mercedes concurs. "The food is real weird there," she says. "But the people are so sweet. When you’re in Finland, you get hungry at twelve o’clock at [...]
I was waiting at the doorstep of the Ranger station in Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx. I had been an Urban Park Ranger for about three months now, and this was going to be my first tour of the Croton Aqueduct Trail. I was leading the tour with my fellow Ranger, Rich, who was a neatly groomed man with sharp [...]
When I first working as ESL teacher twenty year ago I was be a little nervious. In that time I am more young than now, and when I turn around to writing at blackboard, I am think the students looking at my ass. But that a long time ago. Now my ass she is nothing for look. Today I am [...]
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 [...]
A sloppy silver and rose sunset is visible over the bunker-like structure of the Whitestone Lanes bowling alley, whose sign says: PLAY AMERICA’S GAME/75 LANES OPEN 24 HOURS 7 DAYS. Ahmadullah Raghbat, his uniform and sneakers in a polystyrene shopping bag, stands waiting for the bus. Raghbat is a young Afghani, and though he has lived in New York for [...]
It never occurred to me that Norman would chicken out and become a stool pigeon. He was aggressive, a good athlete, a gambler, (for baseball cards and streetcar transfers), a veteran explorer of our neighborhood and Crotona Park. He was a very persuasive talker, a take-over guy and besides, he loved banana and mustard sandwiches. It was his idea that [...]
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