You are currently browsing the stories about the “Williamsburg” neighborhood.
Did you have a favorite place in New York that’s no longer exists? I interviewed people about spots in the city that were special to them but are now gone. Ellen is 70 years old and was a lawyer. Henry Kaplan: What's your favorite store in your neighborhood that shut down or closed? Ellen: That is a very easy [...]
Red leather and chrome trap my eyes. I could be in the kitchen washing dishes or helping my mom cook dinner. Maybe walking home from my best friend Lynda’s house or reading a book in the backyard. When I think about the white Cadillac, I feel happy. When the Cadillac is parked in the driveway next door, I pay attention. [...]
On a blistering August afternoon in 2012, I visit my childhood neighborhood in Williamsburg after a 50-year absence and approach a teenage girl who sits on a wooden shipping crate in the front of a house on Madison Street. I’m standing in front of a wrought iron fence that forms a boundary between us. She tells me that her name [...]
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 don’t know how we even [...]
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 [v. experience intensely], and Scandinavian [...]
Lola is whining. I open the door to the dark hallway so she'll stop, so she'll know I'm here. The sunlight reveals a brown present she's left already, its odor mixing in with the faint smell of cigarettes. It’s hardening. I'm not going to clean it up. She's not my puppy. The open bedroom door illuminates the Husky’s crystal- blue [...]
Rollo lived at the corner of Madison Street and Broadway. He was taller and stronger than my father. Rollo would lie down on a bench in his front yard and lift dumbbells every morning. His breathing was heavy, his forehead glistened with sweat. He had large arm muscles and a big chest. His hair was trimmed close on the sides, [...]
"No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” — Elizabeth Bowen There’s a man across the street. He’s seventy-five, maybe eighty years old. He comes out of a red door in the apartment building kitty-corner from my own, a green [...]
Affordable housing. For most New Yorkers the term is an oxymoron. Niklas and I moved to the West Village when we got married a few years ago, a romantic notion if not an especially realistic one. In the beginning we joked that we could live on love. But a sandwich is also nice sometimes. As freelancers living in an overpriced, [...]
*This story is written from the perspective of the author's former roommate. The names have been changed but all events happened as stated. Andy is being a serious cocksucker and holding onto my money. He won't give me any. He says it's for my own good and that I'll just go and spend it on drugs. He's right, but it's [...]
Every Spring, tennis players in New York City who want to play on the city courts have to buy a tennis permit. The Parks Department doubled the price this year to $200 for an adult permit. Seniors only pay $20 . If I can pass for 62, I’ll save $180. I'm unemployed. The first time I tired to pass as [...]
My younger sister, Chola, a second grader at Our Lady of Good Counsel, is chosen for a special part in the school play. My sister is real cute and the Sisters adore her. Chola loves Sister Romona and gave her a candy necklace for Christmas. She helps Sister Romona erase the blackboard every day and bangs the erasers together in [...]
