You are currently browsing the stories about the “Brooklyn” neighborhood.
Another morning at the Bedford L stop, reluctant professionals line the platform waiting, not saying much. Several dozen yards into the crowd, you hear screaming -- a high-pitched, angry sound -- against the tinny sound of recorded music. People closer to the commotion direct their attention towards the center of the platform, next to the bench; typically, this is where [...]
This recent snow made me think of my friend Glen Seator, who is dead. In January or February of 1996, there was a bad snowfall -- Glen and I were very good friends then. I was living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, next to the BQE, and Glen was about two miles south of me, right next to the Manhattan Bridge. [...]
It's been one year since I moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant from Fort Greene, where I'd live for about fifteen years. Like most change, uprooting myself was uncomfortable, but not nearly as painful as I thought it would be. I remember telling people that if I ever moved from Fort Greene, I'd be moving out of New York because there was no [...]
There is a man who looks just like Hemingway who lives on India Street in Brooklyn in a building called the Astral, a dismal place with huge arching windows to remind you of its past glamour as an apartment building for international sailors (Mae West is said to have been born there). He lives right above a woman named Maria [...]
Across the street from the MOMA’s big, new, blue home is The Factory, a mall/office space building unremarkable for its commerce—but more than remarkable for its sculpture. The 5,000 square feet of floor, wall, and ceiling were, until recently, covered in a dense and quirky collage, made from fifty tons of recycled industrial garbage: bathtubs, water pipes, rebar, boilers, cogs [...]
The other day I got an email forward from a friend, an occurrence that typically happens more often than I brush my teeth in a day. As forwards go, it was all right. It lacked the berserk brilliance of the recent “Every Time You Masturbate God Kills a Kitten” forward, but at least it also lacked the strident grandiosity in [...]
In the beginning, there was a brownstone with a crackled façade and a ground floor apartment for rent. I took the tour. Hardwood floors, a tiled fireplace, and a country kitchen. But the rooms didn’t get much light. I wanted sunlight, the kind that slid from four windows into the diamond-bright bathroom, the kind that did not reach the window-free [...]
This is a re-appreciation of Alfred Kazin's classic Brownsville memoir, "A Walker in the City." Published in 1951, the book captures the summer of 1932 before he went off to college. Some books practically walk on their own, as if borne from the streets they describe. None, perhaps, leaps from their pages quite as emphatically, as lovingly, as Alfred Kazin’s [...]
New York City and the US Navy have a relationship that goes right back to the very beginning of the Navy. This is to be expected for a city that is this country's major Atlantic port. From 1801-1966, the principle site for the Navy-New York relationship was in Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Its three big piers show up [...]
As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, much of my life was based on routine. Some I couldn't avoid, some I depended on. Tuesday nights we ate veal cutlets pounded thin by my mother, then breaded, fried and served with a splash of lemon juice. Fridays we had Nona's pizza, rolled out on the flour-covered wooden board on the kitchen [...]
We had such great plans. We wanted to kiss off the second millennium, and this goal directed our New Year’s Eve itinerary: a matinée of the "Rocky Horror" stage show (the icon for which, of course, is the juicy pair of lipsticked lips), dinner at Lips (a West Village drag-queen restaurant) and drag-queen extraordinaire Lypsinka's late show with a midnight [...]
The city issued the “gridlock alert” days as far back as November and Mayor Giuliani encouraged all of us to utilize mass transit. At the same time, he gave cryptic warnings of "zero tolerance" for all motor vehicle violations... So it’s December 21, the last full weekday before Christmas Eve, as well as one of the aforementioned gridlock alert days. [...]
On Friday September 28th, just after the sun had gone down, the remaining glow of the day was fighting the oncoming storm clouds moving in from the southwest over Jersey. The day had been gloomy and the light had been pearly gray throughout the afternoon. The air was cool and summer was clearly over. Coming over the Williamsburg Bridge from [...]
It is a month after 9/11 when I first hear about Dags in the Palestinian grocery store, on Columbia Street, next to the Red Hook housing projects. I am on my way tenants' patrol - a group of five of us (on a good day) that wears orange NYCHA jakces and is supposedly keeping out the drug dealers. Mostly, we [...]
A favorite phrase of my mother’s, those early days in Brooklyn, was “See you later, Alligator.” She would send my brother Wally to play with his friend next door. And she would leave me with Fanny, the so-called cleaning lady, a monolithic black woman who took perverse pleasure in threatening to scrub my mouth with Joy. When I complained about [...]
The family practice doctor I go to probably would not want to be in this piece, so let’s just say that his last name sounds like a company that makes really good frozen blintzes, or soup that, when you stick the plastic bag in boiling water and cut it open, the pearl barley and mushrooms taste as rich as a [...]
My first inkling of an attack on the Twin Towers came from the Fed Ex man delivering a packet. He rang the doorbell around 9:15, and when I started to sign for it, he said, shaken: "Did you hear what happened? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You can see the black smoke from here." Indeed, looking down [...]
I'm on a jam-packed rush hour 4 train headed to Brooklyn and am lucky enough to get a seat. I'm reading my book and the guy next to me says, "Is that your bag?" and points under the seats. I look down and see a large, square-shaped canvas bag. "No," I say. So he asks the lady next to him, [...]
Ten days had passed since 9/11 and I found myself heading toward the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. This is where I watched events unfold on 9/11. It was a quiet Friday morning, a dozen or so people sat along the benches gazing out toward the strangely familiar yet suddenly unfamiliar skyline. To my surprise, numerous memorials had grown up along [...]
For years I’ve been answering the questions: “You live in New York City? Like, right in New York City?” I live in Brooklyn Heights, but this is a distinction meaningful only to those with 100- zip code prefixes, so I would say yes and try to explain. It wasn’t what they thought, I would say, it’s not a swirling mass [...]
She tells me that Mary has burned out. I look at the girl, at her tatooed cheek, and I'm a little confused. She nods at the "Immaculate Heart of Mary" prayer candle I'm holding. "Oh," I say. "Thanks." She leans forward and relights my wick with the flame from her own perfect, white taper. I'm suddenly embarrassed. "This was all [...]
"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 [...]
The weekend after the World Trade Center collapsed, I went down toward the Promenade to see what was left of the skyline. The Promenade is a walkway at the edge of the Brooklyn Heights bluffs where you can see all the landmarks of the city at once, from the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building. When I got [...]
I was in the shower when our building shook! My wife yelled out and I ran out of the shower and saw that the second tower had been hit. It was then we knew that it was a terrorist hit. It was so difficult to fathom. I decided I wasn't going to let a terrorist change my life and my [...]
The story unfolded quickly, but with the usual peculiar sense that we are always on the verge of being at the end of the event. We always think that what we can fathom is all there is to fathom. Like during a blackout, when our first thought is always, "Oh! My lights are off." For all of us yesterday, following [...]
Far from the Zagat's feeding trail crouches a small, fluorescent-lit restaurant in Midwood, Brooklyn, halfway between Park Slope and the sea. Its name is the Olympic Pita Corporation, but rather than the Hellenism which the word "Olympic" implies, the restaurant is firmly for and about Israel. On a typical winter weeknight, Jews of varying levels of observance fill Olympic Pita's [...]
So such of my life then was seasonal. As kids we had yo-yos, marbles, water pistols, pea shooters and box scooters, and appeared in the street with whatever the change of weather called for. Now it was carpet gun time. I was the best carpet gun maker on the block -- in the whole neighborhood -- except maybe for Frank [...]
I was born in a moviehouse in Brooklyn, New York in the middle of the 20th century. I can swear only to the Brooklyn and 20th century parts. But whatever hospital records say, the moviehouse part seems equally likely because I grew up with all the common symptoms of placental exposure to such places. That is to say, I was [...]
The night was thick and hot and I was done playing, ready to go home, but Dan persuaded me to have one more beer with him. He looked like a cartoon character: large head, square matinee-idol hair and perfect shiny teeth. I had lost my match; he had won. Dan was bright and funny and he was feeling garrulous, as [...]
I first went to the northernmost point in Brooklyn after reading an article in The New Yorker about the oil spill there – 17 million gallons, half again as big as the Exxon Valdez – which at a geologic pace, made its way from a long gone Standard Oil holding tank in the eastern part of Greenpoint, to the aquifer [...]
Lost And Found: Stories From New York, the latest anthology from Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is now available at the following online booksellers and at your friendly neighborhood independent bookstore. Powells Amazon Barnes and Noble Lost and Found, Volume II of the series, is a mosaic of voices, drawing on the diverse experiences of such New Yorkers as a frequent [...]
Newer Entries »
