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The Darkroom
by Rachel Cline 06/30/2019Neighborhood: Clinton Hill, Midwood
I learned to write in seventh grade. Not to form sentences, but to know and use my voice on paper, and to hope I would be heard. It was 1969: Nixon was president and I had a new teacher: a 26-year-old draft evader named Robert Rusch. He was six feet four and, moreover, wore cowboy […]
Keith Haring in the Brooklyn Museum
by Dan Hubbs 05/05/2019Neighborhood: Brooklyn
I used to like Keith Haring’s stuff When you’d see It on the subway You’d look out The window as The train pulled In and see A space ship With a beam Of light on a Baby or A dog or Something And you’d smile Or see the ones with the Big muscle guy With […]
Old Lefties: An Oral History
by Paul Buhle 04/21/2019Neighborhood: Brighton Beach, Co-op City, Lower East Side, Ozone Park
Editor’s Note — These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old […]
The Ohio Convention
by John Reidy 03/03/2019Neighborhood: Greenpoint, Port Authority, Woodside
I ran into Dad’s room after hearing my name called. “Take off your shoes,“ he said. I wondered what the heck was going to happen now. That morning my mom had told me that I would be going to Akron, Ohio with Dad to see the people who caused his nightmares and screaming. His war […]
Naked City
by Clifford Thompson 02/10/2019Neighborhood: Central Park, Cypress Hills, Manhattan
For a time in the late 1980s, a local TV station in New York City aired late-night reruns of Naked City. The show, a black-and-white police drama set in New York, had originally aired from 1958 to 1963, the year of my birth. Those years were a critical period in the civil rights movement, and, […]
Car Pool, 1994
by Amy Rigby 02/03/2019Neighborhood: Lower East Side, Williamsburg
Got to pick these kids up. Oh why did we start a stupid car pool? Maybe car pools made sense in the suburbs of 1972 but…in Williamsburg, 1994? Still, it beats trying to get four five year-olds from Brooklyn to Avenue D in Manhattan by subway and bus. One big problem is our car. I […]
What the World Can Do
by Steven Goldleaf 12/02/2018Neighborhood: Coney Island, East Village
In the summer of 1973, my younger brother and I shared a basement apartment on East 12th Street in Brooklyn off Avenue J, a nice middle-class sort of area. We had lost our parents to cancer and a stroke, ten months apart, a few years before this, when he was fourteen and I was sixteen. […]
Mom’s Fondest Dreams (A play in one act)
by Jeff Loeb 11/04/2018Neighborhood: Williamsburg
SETTING: The time is the present. The location is a small, trendy Williamsburg retail establishment located a tasteful distance off Bedford Avenue, just across from P.S. 84. The legend on the door reads simply “leif” (for the benighted or initiates, the title appears to be a multi-valanced mixture of archaism [adv. OE gladly], urban slang […]
A Trip to Aqueduct
by Bonnie J. Glover 10/21/2018Neighborhood: Aqueduct, East New York, South Ozone Park
The day after I turned ten, my mother took me to my first horse race at Aqueduct. Hitting the regular numbers didn’t pay as well as the horses, and sometimes when Mama had an itch to gamble she couldn’t wait on the numbers man, Mr. Sheyanne, to come around. Besides which, she whispered to me […]
My View of Sunset Park
by Thomas Maschio 10/14/2018Neighborhood: Papua New Guinea, Sunset Park
Fifth Avenue entrance to Sunset Park My five-year-old daughter Claudia loves to go up and down the hills of Sunset Park on her scooter. We put her little crash helmet on and push her up the park hills, but she loves to go down them herself, having become an expert braker and master of turns. […]
Carlisle the Violinist
by Stas Holodnak 09/16/2018Neighborhood: Brighton Beach, Coney Island
On the Saturday evening of Memorial Day weekend, I found myself seated at a snow-white draped table next to a card featuring my first and last name in italicized letters. The joyous occasion was the wedding of a childhood friend. It was no different from the other weddings I’ve attended, except for a violinist, who […]
The Grindstone
by Jasmin Sandelson 08/12/2018Neighborhood: Fort Greene, SoHo
I was two weeks old the night we met in SoHo and you showed me how the world works. Back then, I still couldn’t sleep through the night. I’d lie face-up on the bed I’d bought from the last roommate, listening to the traffic on the BQE a block away. The cars whooshed all night […]