You are currently browsing the stories about the “East Village” neighborhood.
It was 10:33 p.m. on a Monday night in 2016. I had just received an email saying that my long-awaited queen-sized bed frame from Amazon had arrived and was waiting in the package delivery room directly above my basement-level East Village apartment. I was dead tired after only a few hours of sleep the previous night and about to go [...]
My first trip to New York as an adult was around a year ago. I went for only three days (to walk Peter Do’s Helmut Lang show) and was put up just off one of Times Square’s endlessly linear streets, in a VERY large hotel, constructed with long metal beams stretching endlessly into the sky. Stepping out of the taxi [...]
Eddie Boros' Tower of Toys, 6th St. and Avenue B (2008) --- I was walking along East Second Street in the East Village when I saw a man brushing out his long curly hair as he walked toward me. He stopped, pulled a clump of hair from the brush and let it go in the breeze. Not a huge fan [...]
It’s a Friday night in 1994, and I’m with my friend Ann on our way to Veniero’s in the East Village. On most Fridays, we both waitress at a local Mexican restaurant, but we have this night off when our restaurant is shut down by the Department of Health because the ceiling over the smoking section is collapsing. At a [...]
September 10, 2001, was a rainy day in New York. There was precipitation throughout the afternoon and early evening. 0.5 inches. The warmest day of the month. Humid and wet. I exited from my East 10th Street apartment at 9:00 a.m. and headed toward Veselka’s on 2nd Avenue. My breakfast of a bagel and coffee came to $2.11. I gave [...]
Hare Krishna Tree, Tompkins Square Park ----------------------------------------------- On Labor Day weekend 2021, I give my body to the ticks that live in the tall grass underneath the Hare Krishna tree and think, not freshly, of dying. It is the first clear morning in New York since the previous Saturday. Hurricane Ida has been steadily barreling through the Northeast and, after [...]
ROUND ONE: JAY Walking out of the crowd, my ears are still ringing. It’s late. I’m more than tipsy, but I haven’t felt tired in hours. I bounce down the stairs that lead from the East Village dance floor and head to the bar. There, I shift my weight around on the balls of my feet in my black knee-high [...]
Yesterday afternoon my long journey from Sriracha, Thailand, ended with the 747’s touchdown at JFK in New York. I hadn’t slept much on the flight and jet lag threatened to seize my body and soul, as I unpacked my bag at my Fort Greene apartment. Sleep crowded my vision, but the writer Bruce Benderson was celebrating his birthday at his [...]
Riot police faced off with squatters and anarchist protesters in Tompkins Square in the 1980s. I once had an experience that answered for me the question that haunts many males of the species: am I tough enough to hold my head up with the great warriors in history – those who fought at Armageddon, Troy, Marathon, Lepanto, Austerlitz, Gettysburg, Stalingrad? [...]
I wondered if a movie could produce the same terror decades on, even if I’d worked hard to forget the plot and its disquieting images. Like the severed ear lying in a field—a waxy dead thing, crawling with ants. And Dennis Hopper, huffing into a mask. Isabella Rossellini’s red mouth in eerie close-up. Not to mention the gory ending. Decades [...]
I loved my fifth-floor tenement apartment on 6th Street in the East Village. At the time, I was in my early twenties and could fly up those stairs The railroad apartment had two fireplaces, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. In the winter, I couldn’t wait to get home to start a fire in my brick fireplace [...]
It was quite an operation. Lookouts on walkie-talkies patrolled the roofline, and a scout on a bike pedaled up and down the block, combing 7th Street between Avenues B and C. A guy in a ski mask stood guard at an open window on one of the apartment building’s upper floors, ready to service the growing line on the sidewalk [...]
23 minutes away from the East Village, Manhattan, and Hua Tang’s mascara has already snowballed beneath her lashes. I don’t look any better — glancing at my window reflection, I register, my resemblance to the racist portrayals of Chinese people in 19th-century American comics. My eyes are swollen to the point where my field of vision is reduced. The Uber [...]
When I was a teenager, during the second half of the 1970s, I pretty much lived in Washington Square Park during the summer. I sometimes joke that in some ways I was raised there. In some ways that is not so funny. Yippies, Jesus Freaks, drug addicts, tourists, and street performers were my friends and neighbors. My actual friends were [...]
They say it takes a village…to raise a drunken man out of the gutter. I discover this is true while crossing First Avenue at 6th street in the East Village. After throwing on an inside-out sweatshirt and flip-flops to visit the corner fruit stand, I see someone lying in the street near the curb by Dunkin’ Donuts. As I get [...]
The late afternoon, graying quickly, was sweet with surprising warmth. Days such as this wouldn't come again for at least a month. A reward, it seemed, for surviving another dank and joyless February in New York City. My birthday was in March, and even at my age, I looked forward to the day with a childlike sense of hope, as [...]
I started writing these for my dear friend and frequent collaborator, the jazz saxophonist John Ellis. We both live in Village View, a Mitchell-Lama Housing Complex in the East Village, one building over from each other. When COVID hit, I started sending him material – “rough cuts” that we might eventually work on together to turn into songs. At least [...]
