You are currently browsing the stories about the “Bowery” neighborhood.
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; [...]
The bathroom was small, at first glance appearing to be a large closet that opened off the kitchen. A beautiful nautilus shell, almost a foot long with a pale-pink pearlescent chamber, had been placed in the bathtub. The tub itself was deep and old-fashioned, made of heavy porcelain; the wall behind it was protected with waterproof wallpaper depicting faded tiles [...]
The Blues Brothers: Dan Akroyd and John Belushi It may be ever-present, this sense that we are teetering on the edge of apocalypse, but these days it seems the custodians of volatile and otherwise crazy behavior are on a whole new level. I won't pretend that when I was in my 30s and running around on weekend nights with my [...]
When my son and I moved to the Bowery in the late 1970s, we took our place alongside the slow-marching parade of men and women who moved through those streets like ghosts. Some were devoid of identity and shape and earthbound spirit; others were vivid and sublime. A black man, a vagabond who trolled the streets with a pirated shopping [...]
I have an old Polaroid of Dolores, Roni, and me. I was finally painting my kitchen, after not dealing with it for years. There’s a stepladder slanting diagonally across the snapshot and I am in the center, sitting on the bottom rung, a glass of wine in my hand. Dolores is vamping toward me from the left, looking directly at [...]
I work at a bar on the Bowery. Drunk people are funny. Also incredibly forgetful. Here is a list of some of the strange things we have found at the bar at the end of a long night: a single shoe; an antique baby stroller (it looked like the stroller for Rosemary’s Baby); a banjo; a dog; the image of [...]
It was tax time, April 1989, the cold and merciless spring a further insult to what had been a turbulent year for me. I’d been struggling with sobriety and was trying to bounce back from a failed romance. Some days, I felt like I walked through the world with my skin turned inside out, raw as a newborn. On [...]
The door to my apartment building is the color of the rough red wine men drink in small towns in Italy. In fact, Mr. Chinnici, who lives in my building, might look at home in a café in a Mediterranean village, drinking claret from a water glass. He wears a sooty, mushroom-colored cap; the whites of his eyes are [...]
The week before my high school graduation, I wandered into the Good Humor ice cream garage on East 3rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, just a block from my apartment. I was looking for a summer job. A friend of the family, a college kid named Keith, was working the books there, and he took me in to see [...]
Everything happened quick in CBGB's subterranean toilets. The release of body waste was rivaled by magic-markering a band’s name atop the thousands of previous honorees in the toilet’s hall of fame and while the inhalation of cocaine or heroin in the stalls was more popular than shooting up dope or speedballs, sex within the battered stalls was a cherished memory [...]
