You are currently browsing the stories about the “Brooklyn” neighborhood.
For decades my libertarian desire for privacy kept me lining up with the teeming hordes of commuters at the Verrazano and Throgs Neck Bridges because I didn’t want “them” to know where I was going to or coming from, and how often. But eventually, against my better judgment, I silenced the screaming voices in my head and I succumbed. Though [...]
A tree grows in Brooklyn, and snow falls. Both are scarce, as were friendships on Madison Street. My only friend was a girl my age whose single mother was a police officer. Only once was I invited to her house to play. It was a row house like mine with three long rooms: windows in the front and a fire [...]
Our hands had not touched--other than to acknowledge each other’s presence or successes--in over thirty-five years. Now his open right hand lay by the side of his softly draped figure, a whisper’s distance from where I was sitting. A curtain, walling off a roommate, shadowed us from the bright day. “Remember how we agreed I’d tell you when something major [...]
My family has a particular vulnerability, a fatal relationship really, with public transportation. Aunt Aneila, running to catch a bus, was hit and killed by a post office truck on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn long before I was born. “Mowed down like a dog,” my mother used to say. Uncle Donald had a heart attack and died on the subway [...]
We weren’t exactly seasoned foragers. I had only been foraging in the city a few months before I met Neil, who lucked into it the Saturday he rode his bicycle in Prospect Park and found our group picking field greens. But we had come into it in the same way—we were both dealing with break-ups and finding edibles offered some [...]
The second time I met Michele she wore a similar get-up as the first. She showed up at my office to pick up her set of apartment keys wearing a pink and blue Indian floral tank dress layered over green army pants with the fly held together by safety pins and bright orange clogs. Her henna-ed brick red hair with [...]
Before the City got so strict about it, Brooklyn used to be flooded with fireworks every summer. On the Fourth of July the little blue pieces of paper from firecrackers built up in drifts on the street corners in Kensington where people spent the whole night setting them off. Not me, though. I was in front of our house with [...]
At the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Bond Street about a quarter of a block ahead of me, three young men waited at the crosswalk for the light to change. Two were dressed in thug-casual regalia: sneakers, baggy pants, baseball caps askew, and hoodies up to obscure clear lines of sight to their faces. The third wore only the cap [...]
My best friend Rebecca's birthday present this year was two tickets to see the Mets at Shea Stadium. After a bag search and full-body metal-detector sweeping, we made it to our seats just in time to sit out the national anthem. I like to get to a ball game on time, if only for the pleasure of publicly showing my [...]
I’m watching a documentary on the Sundance Channel, Sex In a Cold Climate—the source material for the fictional film, The Magdalene Sisters—and I’m having a flashback. It’s 1936. I’m six years old in St. Joseph’s boarding school in Monticello New York. My mother is ill and recovering from an operation for “lady problems.” About fifty years later, I learned the [...]
The author's childhood home in Greenwich. (Photo by Alexis Rockman) Even after we all were married, with children of our own, my siblings and I would celebrate Mother’s Day in Greenwich. If the weather was good, we ate sandwiches with our mother and father on the porch, watching our children run together, and split apart, calling, screeching, and laughing as [...]
The Diner in Williamsburg is a 21st century institution now, I guess (just celebrated its tenth anniversary)—you can get arugula there! And the rest of their food is good too. It’s pleasant at their sidewalk tables if the weather’s fine, though you have to watch your step if you don’t want to trip over two dozen artists. Me and Jean [...]
Mormon Church in Sunset Park (Photo by Patty Lee) As people rush in and out of butcher shops and bakeries on Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue, He Zhanglao tries to get their attention. He speaks in clear Mandarin, and listens carefully to their replies. But he’s tall and blond, and sticks out in this part of Sunset Park, home to many Chinese [...]
When I was a kid in Brooklyn, in the Sixties, the “candy store” was the local hangout, the crossroads of the neighborhood. Actually, these ubiquitous institutions were a combination of soda fountain, luncheonette and newsstand. We probably called them candy stores because as kids the candy we bought there was the center of our culinary universe, or just because they [...]
I remember now that we took the R train from Court Street to 75th Street in Bay Ridge. I thought how ironic it was to be returning to Bay Ridge, from which I had fled for my life, to seek enlightenment. But my sponsor, Ellen, assured me that I could chant for anything, ANYTHING, fulfill my personal desires and create [...]
Photo by Cannon Kinnard The faded green sign at 1700 Bedford Avenue that reads “NO BALL PLAYING” has had tenants of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field Apartments laughing at the irony, as they walk across the street to Jackie Robinson Park to play ball. This is the former site of Ebbets Field baseball park; home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1957, when [...]
Numerous fissures and cracks can be observed on many buildings along the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. This quiet, upscale neighborhood, less than a half-mile north of Prospect Park, goes about its daily business with little notice for defects in a city so rife with fissures, cracks, potholes, etc., all symptomatic [...]
A couple Sundays ago my husband and I played pool, something I haven’t done in years. I’d been invited to an appreciation party for volunteers of the Old Town School of Folk Music, a Chicago institution that recently celebrated it’s 50th anniversary. I’ve never attended an OTSFM volunteer party, but this one took place about two blocks from my house, [...]
There was McCawley’s and its blinds that hadn’t been cleaned in decades. One block over was Connie’s Corner where Chris the German bartender would always announce, “I know your family, Nolan,” cause we lived around the block and Chris served my parents, aunts, uncles and all. On the next was Val’s, used to be Casey’s, where my father went with [...]
“You’re blocking the whole fucking street, you’re a total asshole!” The woman in the road screamed at me. But she only knew one of my attributes and that hardly qualified her to give a generalizing narrative to all of the other onlookers. I agreed to move my vehicle but she was the bitter, lingering sort. I wasn’t sure if she [...]
“I probably should have done this ten years ago.” This was the theme that ran through my mind when I replayed the decision to leave my profession and take up teaching at the age of 49. But then getting out of the garment business was no easy feat. I felt like The Godfather’s Michael Corleone trying to escape from the [...]
A friend told me recently, at a small dinner party at her and her husband’s brownstone, that she’d once been throttled on the subway. The train car, she said, was packed. For balance, she raised both arms into the air and held onto the metal bar above. A man stood behind her, she said, and placed his hands on either [...]
Billy Hederman and Eddie Babicke started the migration. So I applied and with their tepid references, “He’s OK, Bob,” I was hired. I was now an official busboy in the Prospect Park zoo cafeteria. Others from my working class Catholic parish adjacent to the park signed up as well. Mo Maloney was assigned to the carousel where he would collect [...]
My landlord George fled communist Armenia at a young age. Whenever I have occasion to talk with him in the hall he is infallibly cheerful and quick to offer words of encouragement. “How a you doing?” he asks me, “is beautiful day but must still be working, what can do.” He shrugs at the day’s obligations. “Yes, yes,” I agree, [...]
Her daughter tried dozens of rehab clinics and treatment programs. After awhile, Olga says, they blurred into a familiar pattern: “program, back, program, back.” “Back” meaning: back on heroin. Olga, who asked that her and her daughter’s names be changed for this story, came to New York City with her family in 1997, refugees from the former Soviet republic of [...]
At the tender age of seventeen, I discovered that tigers were not in fact yellow and brown, but are rather orange and black. It never did much harm, my color deficiency, nor did it prevent me from getting my own way. It certainly never interfered with my love life. However, by no fault of my own, one opportune incident was [...]
Somehow through life’s twists and turns, I’ve come to live in vegan-shoe-wearing Park Slope and own a miniature wirehaired dachshund named, well, er, Pixie. Her full AKC designation is Tiny Tails Pixie Dust. Abridged or unabridged, her name is pure embarrassment, though it’s not my invention. At least I can say she came with her silly name. Pixie was bred [...]
I went out with my friend Dylan last night. We met in 2003 on the internet. Tried dating, but were better friends than anything. He was the first person I met when I moved back to New York and looking to date. I had left because my husband was killed in the World Trade Center. Dylan and I went out [...]
There is nothing more terrifying than finding a well-fed bedbug in your bed at 1 a.m. It’s even more of a rude awakening if the source of this bedbug can be traced back to a one-week stand you met through an online dating site. It all began last spring when I turned my attention to a new phenomenon for me: [...]
Through the cinder-block walls of the roller rink, the beat leaks out onto Empire Boulevard. Inside, it’s two steps from the door to the rail of the rink where the skaters sail towards you, past you, and away, rounding the curve and bouncing to the beat; as they cruise down the far straightaway there is a sign: Empire #1 Birthplace [...]
We had already lived in New York for a year when we discovered the park. A year since my husband and I moved from New Jersey to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, a year since the most awfully timed disaster of the loss of a family member to brain cancer. That the family member was a dog, my best friend and [...]
Feraz and I are on the prowl in Red Hook. We drive slowly over wet cobblestone streets by the old wharves, past crumbling warehouses and parks bright with new grass over to Beard Street, where the silver frame of a new IKEA is going up. Two construction workers wave us over. “Have you caught ‘em yet?” the stocky one asks. [...]
It was Richard M. Nixon who said it best when he uttered those immortal words: “I am not a crook!” For the record, he also said, “I have never been a quitter,” just before he resigned the presidency back in 1973. So go figure. I have always thought of crooks as cartoon burglars wearing Lone Ranger masks breaking into places [...]
The visible landscape of Brooklyn Heights is much the same as it was in my childhood, which is a large part of why I moved back to the neighborhood after almost twenty years. Every so often, someone stops me on Clark Street to ask directions to the subway station. It always takes me a second or two to understand that, [...]
We always arrived at least a half hour early to the hot concrete schoolyard with its two sad hoops. There were loads of us, boys and girls from six to the teens, waiting for PS 154 vacation playground to open and its counselors to throw out the softballs and bats, the volleyballs and pink spaldeens for the games that would [...]
There has always been something about the change in seasons, something that has stirred me to make changes in my life. I was married in winter and divorced in the spring, started a new job in fall and quit in the summer. That’s probably why it was in the beginning of winter when I decided that I had finally had [...]
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