You are currently browsing the stories about the Bowery neighborhood
The Candy Box
by Susan T. Landry 06/24/2023Neighborhood: Bowery, West Village
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 […]
Looking for John Belushi
by Susan T. Landry 08/07/2022Neighborhood: Bowery, SoHo, Tribeca, Union Square
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 friends that we […]
Michael Jackson’s Father
by Susan T. Landry 07/04/2020Neighborhood: Bowery
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 […]
The Polaroid Photo
by Susan T. Landry 03/22/2020Neighborhood: Bowery
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 […]
Love and Letters at a Bar Downtown
by Kaarin Von 04/14/2019Neighborhood: Bowery
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; […]
The Tax Man
by Susan T. Landry 03/31/2019Neighborhood: Bowery, Upper West Side
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, […]
The Landlord’s Uncle
by Susan T. Landry 02/24/2019Neighborhood: Bowery, Lower East Side
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 […]
Good Humor
by Jacob Margolies 12/06/2013Neighborhood: Bowery, East Village, Lower East Side
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 […]
Fighting For What
by peter nolan smith 07/01/2013Neighborhood: Bowery
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 […]