You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
From 2022 to 2025, before I moved to Brooklyn, I saw Dahlia on the SIM3C express bus from Staten Island to Manhattan seventeen times.1. Oh my god. 2. Oh my god! Again! 3. I’m so happy we have this. 4. Still good, yes, everyone’s good, thanks. 5. Only a few people still from high school, like, I don’t know, do [...]
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 [...]
I’ve had a lot of bad things happen in my life—but also so many good. I’ve visited places I never want to remember and others I’ll never forget. My first trip to the Circus Circus Hotel in Las Vegas? Unforgettable. A hotel with an indoor circus? For a kid, that was magic. And my grandfather’s backyard in the Dominican Republic, [...]
In 1991, Joe Chinnici, my landlord, offered me a cash deal if I would decline to renew my lease. The top-floor apartment at the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery had been my home for 13 years, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, before or since. In retrospect, I like to think that it was my true childhood home; [...]
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 [...]
The woman who would speak to us was older, long brown hair draped over her small shoulders. She sat across from an older man, sparse white hair running in a moat around the castle of his bald spot. They were engaged in fervid one-sided conversation that mostly involved the woman; the man did not look amused. My family had taken [...]
I took the train to school alone. My Brooklyn friends didn’t live along the 2 or 3 lines, plus I’m somewhat hostile within the first hour of waking up. The commute was like a prolonged orchestral swell. The first leg of my trip, sprawled across a few of those '70s sunset-toned seats, the sounds of the subway – muted by [...]
Look at me! I bolt through Battery Park City. The air is sharp in my chest, piercing wind stinging my skin. I listen to the leaves crackling beneath my feet and watch them swirling around me, caught in the wind. My cheeks are burning red, cold sweat runs down the side of my face. I am 11 years-old and am [...]
There I was, dancing in a flash mob in front of the iconic Red Stairs, next to the TKTS booth in Times Square. “Welcome to New York”—Taylor Swift’s song about inspiration and possibilities—boomed from a loudspeaker perched on a nearby bench. It was four days after the 2024 presidential election, and I was still grief stricken about the inconceivable results. [...]
The year was 1950. I was five years old. There was barely room for my mother, much less me, when we moved into my grandmother’s small, crowded apartment on the 9th floor in the Ansonia Hotel on 74th Street and Broadway, where my mother had lived before marrying my father. When she and my grandmother moved after my grandfather’s death, [...]
Vincent “Chin” Gigante-------- Sometime during 1976, a few weeks after his uncle disappeared, my acquaintance Xavier Eboli paid Vincent “Chin” Gigante a visit. He had known The Chin all his life. More than friends, they were famiglia. An Eboli had married a Gigante, a Gigante had christened an Eboli baby, and the two families took turns sponsoring confirmations. Which is [...]
Born and raised in New York City, I spent my formative years dwelling above 110th Street. As a tot I lived with my mom and grandmother in the Lenox Terrace, but in 1967, when I was 4, we moved to 628 West 151 Street. Living in a two-bedroom first floor apartment with wood floors except in the bathroom and kitchen, [...]
My husband’s Manhattan apartment overlooks Fraunces Tavern—a three-story brick building with dormer windows and a columned portico. Apparently, George Washington said goodbye to his officers there at the end of the Revolutionary War. But now, as I sit in the deep windowsill sipping coffee and watching the bar revelers below, I see a horde of men in banana costumes filing [...]
It’s 2011. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. I’m trying to figure out how to pay the rent for my small, dim apartment in Washington Heights. I have two weeks to come up with it. I have no prospects. I’m sixty-six years old. Sitting there, I think that after thirty-five years living in New York City, I should [...]
Over July 4th weekend in 2019, I contracted a bacterial infection in my gut that could not be treated with antibiotics. The only possible medical remedy was to let it run its two-month course. The bacteria wreaked havoc on my small intestine, and I even became lactose intolerant for a period. After the infection resolved, I continued feeling weak and [...]
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 [...]
The following series traces the shifting face of downtown New York City—a place of ghosts and grit, memory and reinvention. Born and raised in downtown Manhattan, artist-illustrator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman renders the city she calls home with quiet intensity, her delicate drawings capturing the rhythms of streets both remembered and imagined. Some scenes emerge from lived experience—lingering with friends outside [...]
It’s 8:10 am, just north of Times Square, and soda cans, bottles, and discarded paper face masks are blowing around on the ground outside a grimy office building. The entrance is between a gentleman’s club and a boarded-up restaurant. I use a plastic key card to get inside the building and operate the elevator. Getting off on the ninth floor, [...]
My father and I emerge from the long green canopy and stand outside the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway where we live. It’s Sunday afternoon. 1949. Winter. A chill wind blows. I am four. My father wears his gray felt fedora at a jaunty angle, the shadow from the brim hiding one eye. That fedora with the grosgrain ribbon is my father. He’s [...]
New York is a city of extremes—extreme weather, extreme rent, extreme dreams, and just as often, extreme disappointment. As I wandered through the stories in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood this week, I didn’t land on a clean takeaway like “hope” or “loss.” Instead, I found something messier and more human: a kind of nervous laughter that lingers after the punchline fades. Each [...]
Excursion #2: Public Bodies, Private Meetings In my second walk through the neighborhood, I was reminded that the personal and political don’t just collide in headlines. Sometimes they brush up against each other in a spa room, a Starbucks, or the shoulder of a stranger on the subway. This time, my excursion took me through three very different stories, all [...]
In the beginning, there was a man who preached on the streets of my Upper West Side, Manhattan neighborhood. He was a Black man—actually, coffee-bronze would be a better description of his color. When I first became aware of him, he appeared to be in his early sixties, though he might have been a little older. It was hard to [...]
It wasn’t easy for us to dress for Thanksgiving. Basically, we had interchangeable wardrobes in two sizes: Levis, BVD tees and plaid flannel shirts. Occasionally, I wore a leotard or a 1950’s thrift shop sweater, but there was nothing formal enough for dinner with his family in Queens. So, we dropped by my parents and in my old bedroom closet [...]
I saw three different therapists my freshman year of college. The first’s name was Thiago. I visited him in a little shack where I sat on the edge of his couch gripping my tote bag and clicking a pen over and over again. Even before I began speaking, my eyes welled up with tears. I told him about my desire [...]
St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2009, promised to be another disaster for the Retail Collection of the Plaza Hotel. Hordes of green-clad spectators streamed down the escalator into the basement. Their eyes averted the luxury goods on offer, as their destination was the hotel’s public bathroom. Within the first hour, I had given directions to the toilet over a hundred times.“Why [...]
One day I sent a prayer from my terrace—Manhattan Plaza, 43rd and Tenth, 45th floor, facing the Hudson River, New Jersey, and the rest of the country—and aimed it roughly toward the object of, or subject of, the prayer, who was the one person in the world I should wish dead. His murder, I had planned for years. If your [...]
The butterflies in my stomach had made their annual visit. It was the first day of school after a summer camping in New Jersey and the Bronx with my aunt and cousins. The oppression of a Catholic school education was always tough to return to after a summer spent outdoors. Like a Marine returning from extended leave, I would now [...]
On the fourth morning of my visit, I clung tightly to the girl I loved while riding the C train. She had a warm Jewish face, silky brown hair, and an aura that reminded me of a coffee shop on a brisk fall day. I had spent the weekend staying in her apartment on the Upper West Side and felt [...]
image by Laurie Rosenwald When they say you have to love yourself first, before anyone else can love you, it’s just not true. I’ve had lots of boyfriends! And each of them has taught me something. From Joe I learned about architecture. From Steve I learned about music. From Anders I learned about art. From Gerard I learned about sadism [...]
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 [...]
I’ve been so harried and have brain fog from mold illness. For months I had been having neurological issues and going through medical tests, including multiple MRIs and a spinal tap. Finally, when my doctor asked if where I lived could possibly have mold, something clicked. The old HVACS were indeed moldy (from 1960). After testing both myself and my [...]
The First Thing You Do A man at the Public Library at Lincoln Center was looking at me. He told me he was an artist and asked if he could draw my portrait. The man insisted we take the elevator one floor down, rather than the stairs. I was nervous about being trapped there with him, but I went. In [...]
In the hip nightclub world of 1985 Manhattan, many people were ashamed to admit they were card-carrying members of the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, the unfortunate who lived in New Jersey and the outer boroughs but worked and played in Manhattan. Not me. I was proud to be included in that group, even at that moment of truth when my [...]
I was only thirteen years old when I decided that I must live in New York City. Fred Astaire made me do it. Watching his old films in the early 1960s on our local tv station while growing up in the Cajun Country of Southwest Louisiana, I saw a glamorous and sophisticated world far different than the folksy, rural one [...]
In 1981 I was working as a part-time super at 258 Broadway and taking graduate courses at NYU. For a time, in early spring, I was the only person living in the eight-story building. It was being converted from offices into co-op apartments, and the real estate company wanted a super for security and to be available for new owners [...]
Trainer Teddy Bentham (in suit), Pellone, and Manager Tommy Ryan (Eboli) ____________________________ I did not expect him to answer the door in his underwear. He was sixty-something, and I was seventeen and lacking direction. My father had just died, and high school was about to end. Instead of thinking about college, I wanted to be a boxer, like the ones [...]
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