You are currently browsing the stories about the Chelsea neighborhood
The Price of Inclusion
by Jack Lancaster 10/01/2022Neighborhood: Chelsea, Fire Island, Greenpoint, Meatpacking District
I didn’t get invited to go to Fire Island this year, which makes me feel like a gay pariah. I’m painfully aware of this after watching the movie, Fire Island. I loved it, but it reinforced my feeling that I lacked a queer community, and notably, one with a summer share in the Pines. My […]
Chelsea Clinic, October 3, 1995
by Daniel Nester 06/23/2019Neighborhood: Chelsea
It took two weeks for my first HIV test results to come back. Naturally, as I waited, I thought I was going to die. For two weeks, I ate Ben & Jerry’s and sang along to a Discman on the streets of Manhattan. I spent each night on a different barstool and serenaded strangers about […]
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 […]
“I Got You”
by Omri Bezalel 08/07/2016Neighborhood: Chelsea, Manhattan
There’s a corner store in Chelsea that sells the best deli meat I’ve ever eaten. I found it when I moved to New York from Israel six years ago. My apartment was a block away, but even after I moved to the Upper West Side, I kept taking the 1 train to the store. Every […]
The Tape
by Martin Kleinman 04/26/2016Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Chelsea, Jackson Heights, Manhattan, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Sunset Park
-1- Once upon a time, there existed a New York City economy where a young person fresh out of college could, with a straight face, think in terms of “building a career.” Imagine such optimism. The notion of “career” seems so trite now, forty-plus years on, so immaterial, in this age of downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring. […]
COFFEE, MY FAMILY
by Amauta Marston-Firmino 06/14/2014Neighborhood: Chelsea, Washington Heights
It had become a habit that week—reading Richard Rodriguez’s “Brown” on the A train, riding a gradient line between the ochre of Washington Heights and the powdered white walls of NYU. I reveled in holding the book upright, spine stiff, and the bent paperback cover like a sail at full mast. It was a silent […]
Facing The Day
by Judith Luongo 06/25/2012Neighborhood: All Over, Chelsea, Gramercy Park, West Village
On the first Wednesday of every month for the past year, my walk east from Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue where I teach, to the corner of Eighteenth Street and First Avenue took about twenty minutes. There are intriguing neighborhood changes along the way but I was usually lost in thought. I would arrive at […]
My Friend, The Fire Chaplain
by Kathleen Crisci 09/11/2011Neighborhood: Chelsea, Uncategorized, Washington Heights
I met Mychal Judge in the spring of 1985 when my boyfriend, Javier, and I decided to get married. As a lapsed Catholic, estranged from the Church for over a decade, I was tormented with guilt and worry, yet I wanted to have a church wedding without having to account for prior errant ways—our daughter, […]
Spanked
by Nathaniel Page 07/08/2011Neighborhood: Chelsea
WHAP! The paddle hit my ass. The first time I recall getting spanked, I was four. I had stolen a box of matches and lit a fire behind my house. My father spanked me down the hall. The last time I recall getting spanked, I was 25. I was in Paddles, New York City’s main […]
Have I Heard of You?
by Peter Wortsman 02/28/2011Neighborhood: Chelsea
Have I Heard of You? By Peter Wortsman The following encounter between the late William Packard (1933-2002), poet, playwright, teacher, and publisher of the literary journal The New York Quarterly, myself, and a postal worker, took place at the Chelsea Station Post Office in the 1980s. I immediately recognized the man in front of me […]
Three Basketball Vignettes, 2001
by Thomas Beller 06/03/2010Neighborhood: Chelsea, West Village
1. March 25th, 2001 Basketball City Chelsea Piers There Were Horses A pick up game at Basketball city. Cold Sunday afternoon. The academy awards that night. Dreading them. Miserable but psyched about the game. We ended up playing four on four full court. On the other team were the guys I play with in my […]
Trolling Whores for Coke: How to Get Started
by Kent 03/17/2010Neighborhood: Chelsea, Washington Heights
So you’ve got the wife and the kids. You’ve got and are just barely hanging onto, the co-op in the chic enclave, you’re so middle-aged. Some men, finding themselves adrift in a wood in their middle years, go to the gym: I troll whores for coke. After you’ve seen the horrors of Chelsea Pier’s ice […]