You are currently browsing the stories about the “Red Hook” neighborhood.
Okay, I admit it. I once wrote and recorded a full-length country album. I know, I know – it was a foolish thing to do, but it got me thinking about the nature of non-fiction. The album was arranged as timeline – a chronology of mental and emotional events that took place over a period of about six months. Because [...]
The cafeteria is gently buzzing with chatter and fluorescence as I enter PS 27 on Nelson Street in Red Hook. Along the western wall of the room, volunteers are seated at a long row of tables with signs for electoral districts taped to the wall behind each one. Examining the reminder I received in the mail, I find the table [...]
I've lived in my apartment in Park Slope for about seven months now, yet somehow I've entirely neglected getting curtains for the windows in the living room. It never really occurs to me that this is a problem unless I'm home during the afternoon on a sunny day. At night, I like the uncovered windows ... the streetlights outside, the [...]
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. [...]
June 14th 2006 3:30 pm Philadelphia "Who are these fucking people? They've been following me for years. Why the hell are they bent on exposing me as goddamned fraud?" I did a little research of my own and was disturbed to find that they were not only my closest friends, but my family as well. I called New York from [...]
On a day of contradiction last February, my wife Kim and I test drove a mini-SUV through a few of the less heralded 'hoods. The sun was brilliant, cutting through the brutal cold and lighting up the harbor with an intense glare off the snow and the ice floes, a simultaneously bone-chilling and body-warming type of day. It was one [...]
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 [...]
