You are currently browsing the stories about the “Cobble Hill” neighborhood.
I am learning to drive for the second time. On Sundays, I take classes at “Learn-Rite,” a school in Flushing. The school boasts a neon blue sign illustrating a yellow car and red stop sign. The graphics' cheap branding displays cartoon-like pictures as if to reassure students that this endeavor is simple, achievable, and above all, happy. The whole ordeal [...]
I’ve always wondered about the strange symbiosis that forms between dog owners and their dogs. For dog lovers, the word pet fails to suffice. But the dog walker may speculate: is it an equally co-dependent companionship, where partners receive and transmit comparable levels of appreciation and affection? Or is it asymmetrical—an over-identification on the part of the human to blur [...]
New Yorkers have a different relationship to celebrity. You can't swing a cat in this town without hitting a big shot, so we are more restrained or dismissive or tolerant when famous people materialize. And we are exposed to them at an early age. My first celebrity encounter was in 1984. I was playing frisbee on the sidewalk with my [...]
If you never saw Columbia Street before 1960, you missed a lot. The street is still there; the sidewalks, the street sign, but the stores, the people, the charm are all gone. That strip of avenue is unrecognizable, now lined with barrack type housing and no character at all. The house where I was born no longer stands. 11 Woodhull [...]
My wife and I live on the ground floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill. Freak luck. I'd never last the brutal NYC housing quest, let alone land in such a choice spot. But just when we resolved to move out of my brother's spare matchbox bedroom years back, a friend with connections gave us an inside line on [...]
When the previous resident of my apartment, who was still living in it when my girlfriend and I viewed it for the first time, told us that the funeral home downstairs hardly ever held services, the effect on me was less than palliative. Jenna nodded thoughtfully in the way real estate shoppers are prone, apparently already aware of the macabre [...]
Every English teacher needs a café of his own, and my weekend joint for nearly seven years has closed. The Fall Café frothed its final latte in early December. I hope my students understood why their last batch of essays was returned later than usual. Signs of the café’s demise were written everywhere, literally. Last July, a chalkboard appeared in [...]
You didn't say no. You never said no. You wouldn't even think of saying no. So, when he arrived at the door of my tenement apartment at 1AM, unexpected, unannounced, I didn't say no. I let him in, against all my instincts. "Hi. I was at the community center. We just finished working. We were painting and doing construction. I'm [...]
Mark is a sweet loser, Mark is a horny loner, Mark always complains about life. Mark is an artist who hates to draw. Mark likes women and is hurt by their coldness. Till late 90's he would wear Miami-style printed shirts, his hair was long and wavy. Back in those years he had sharp-toed pleated white Italian shoes and linen [...]
In today's times of rapid change and major chains, it is a comfort to walk to the shopping area of my neighborhood, Court Street, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and see my four favorite stories still doing business in this highly competitive market. I have lived here over fifty years, and these stores remain intact with little interior and exterior change. The [...]
"I'm a sponge for everyone else's emotions," says Amy, a bartender in Cobble Hill, "but I feel like I can't release any of my own." It's a Saturday night after the World Trade Center disaster and though it's only six o'clock, the artsy hipster-ish Smith Street hangout is pulsing and loud. The Replacements' "Here Comes a Regular" is playing on [...]
