You are currently browsing the stories about the Manhattan neighborhood
A Simple Procedure
by Mai Tran 01/13/2019Neighborhood: East Village, Featured, Greenwich Village
I am 21 and in the heat of my first New York summer, when I decide to have a four-centimeter rod inserted into the meat of my inner bicep. About the size of a matchstick and made of a material I can’t pronounce, it will release progestin directly into my bloodstream, preventing eggs from leaving the womb and […]
Karma is as Karma Does
by Jeff Loeb 01/06/2019Neighborhood: Featured, Midtown, Port Authority
The sun was gone, blotted out by the Port Authority’s roof. I disembarked into the effluvium of the upper tunnel and made for the gate. From there, clacking escalators, one flight after another, shunted me toward the bottom floor, the subway level. The vendor stalls had all been shuttered, and the soles of my shoes […]
In a galaxy far far away: The East Village Years
by Rupert Martin 12/09/2018Neighborhood: East Village, Lower East Side, Murray Hill
Some prescribe the medicine of looking forward not back; don’t dwell on the past they advise, move along. Usually a proponent of such sentiment, I found it diminished when my attention was redrawn to an almost forgotten tale that I’d penned about my early life in New York. A story of the kid fresh off the […]
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. […]
Cupcake Overdose: Magnolia Bakery & Me
by Duane Scott Cerny 11/17/2018Neighborhood: Featured, West Village
The New York Times real estate listing read, “An enchanting Swiss Chalet Penthouse Studio. Imagine waking up to the sweet aroma of Magnolia Bakery…” Oh, great, I thought. A constant smell. Who wouldn’t want that? The bakery meant little to me. After having spent three years trying to buy an apartment in Manhattan, I had […]
Small Rooms
by JB McGeever 10/27/2018Neighborhood: Manhattan
There’s plenty of porn here, stacked neatly beside a DVD player, polished, spray-tanned bodies that fail to arouse. Opposite the flat screen TV is a small couch, a loveseat really, but I prefer to stand. The entire space is laughably small, more janitor’s closet than state of the art fertility clinic in Manhattan. “Down the […]
He Was No Angel
by Baye Mc Neil 10/07/2018Neighborhood: Manhattan
One day, back in the early 90s, I came pretty close to being on that list of unarmed black men dead at the hands of New York’s finest. I was a full-time college student at the time, and holding down a full-time gig at a department store in midtown Manhattan. My co-worker, a Colombian cat […]
Summer of ’68
by Kate Bernadette Benedict 09/30/2018Neighborhood: Castle Hill, Lower Manhattan, South Ferry
As the 6 train chugged past grimy buildings in dicey neighborhoods, I felt I was being safely transited through vast danger zones. In those days before air conditioning, the train’s windows were kept open, so the amplified sound of screeching brakes and rumbling wheels was a constant assault. Mature ladies fanned their dripping faces with […]
The Therapist Who Was Always Late
by Raanan Geberer 09/24/2018Neighborhood: Bronx, Chelsea, Co-op City, Upper West Side, Washington Heights
As a young man in my mid-twenties in the late ‘70s, I was in a precarious state. I had just failed miserably at an attempt to work at a job on the west coast and was back with my parents in Co-op City. I was on the list for a civil service job at the […]
Asians Coming Through
by Mai Tran 09/02/2018Neighborhood: East Village, Union Square
The first time I was called a chink was in New York City at the beginning of my freshman year of college. Having grown up in Irvine, California, America’s seventh safest city, where boba cafes were as common as Starbucks and Korean BBQ was the only thing to do on a Friday night, I was […]
The Final Summer of My Father’s Life
by Steven Goldleaf 08/25/2018Neighborhood: Lower Manhattan
The final summer of my father’s life, I worked for him as a runner, making food deliveries at his restaurant. He and I weren’t getting along too well. I had just turned seventeen and my mother had died the previous winter, either one of which would have meant a strained relationship, but the combination was […]
One Wheel, Two Towers
by Raphael Lasar 08/19/2018Neighborhood: Lower East Side, World Trade Center
They say everything happens for a reason. Construction began on the World Trade Center in August of 1968. Some months before that when I was in the second grade, our teacher, Miss Spellman, handed out a Weekly Reader, an eight-page magazine with short articles designed to encourage the habit of reading in elementary school […]