You are currently browsing the stories about the “Chelsea” neighborhood.
Avant Gardener/Brooklyn Mirage 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 best friend [...]
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 price of my poetry [...]
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 state Department of Housing and [...]
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 time I ordered the same: [...]
-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. But in 1975 there we [...]
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 rebellion. A drama I could [...]
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 destination, Beth Israel's Karpas [...]
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, for example—or making any commitments [...]
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 sadomasochist dungeon. Megan, my spanker, [...]
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 on the package pickup line [...]
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 league, on my team was [...]
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 rink on a weekend afternoon, [...]
“Do you know--” “Of any sports bars around here?” I interrupted. The towering man paused, chapped lips parted in a bewildered grin revealing white teeth caulked with white material. “You looking for one too?” “No,” I said, “you asked me that last week.” We stood this December afternoon on 22nd off 6th. Last time, 19th and 5th. He smiled a [...]
Even the janitor’s wife has a perfectly good love life and here am I, facing tomorrow, alone with my sorrow, down in the depths of the 90th floor.  --Cole Porter It may not have been the 90th floor, perhaps the 30th or 40th. The exact number is foggy in my memory, but the rest of this “strange interlude” dances before [...]
I troll craigslist searching for traces of my ex. He dates trannies and the dregs of society. I had lunch with him the other day and I said, "Hey Luke, did you put this ad up?" "Oh my god! How the hell did you know!" I wanted to say, it’s really not that difficult when you date someone for nearly [...]
I've always preferred to do things the hard way, without anybody's help. For the first five years my husband and I lived in New York, half our things were in storage. The other half were crammed into a 280-square foot apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement building overlooking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The place was short on closet space, [...]
I’m at the opening of Least Wanted, a collection of mugshots, many of them enlarged, from the 1930's through the early 70's. The young and the bad are beautifully indignant in black and white, and I could stare for hours at the badass mug of a 17 year old boy caught rioting on the streets of Denver. His hair splays [...]
I had never gone to the Frying Pan—the restored boat/event space docked beside the Chelsea Piers—before last week. It was one of those places that I’d almost been to a bunch of times, but never actually made it. I nearly didn’t go that night, either, but I’m glad I did, because I think I ended up there under perfect conditions, [...]
A guy on my street, let's call him Eddie, is probably thirty-eight, only two or three inches shorter than Wilt Chamberlain, with a sort of pirate's crook nose and a Russian infantryman's sinewy musculoskeletal system. He doesn't seem to mind the smell of trash. I know this because he's my trash man. He used to live somewhere far beneath my [...]
The woman comes into the New York restaurant where I work and is reading a poetry magazine. “Say,” I say, “is that some sort of poetry magazine?” “Yeah,” she says. “I like Billy Collins,” I say. “Yeah?” she says. “Yeah,” I say. “But don’t you think Poetry is Dead, kinda?” “Not really,” she says, and she gives me facts and [...]
Between 10th and 11th avenue, on the north side of 18th street sits the Roxy night club which, on Wednesday nights, houses a medley of characters whom appear to have been pickled by time. Wednesday at the Roxy is "disco night." Everyone is on roller skates. The speakeasy secrecy of this sub-culture scene contaminates one with an air of stagnation; [...]
I am not from New York, nor have I ever lived there; the result, mostly, of not being a multimillionaire, nor having friends who are multimillionaires. I was living in Philadelphia, New York's embarrassingly second rate little brother, and had traveled up to "da big city" for the day with my girlfriend, to peruse potential art galleries for her paintings [...]
For several hours one afternoon last week, the unremarkable interior of a midtown hotel room was transformed into a kind of cat fantasia for the nineties, featuring some of the more exotic and genetically up to date entries in the Ninth Annual Cat show, which was recently held at Madison Square Garden. Cats were perched on chairs and couches and [...]
The Mail and Express reported appointment as a patrolman cost $300, promotion to sergeant, $1,400, and advancement to captain, $14,000. Policemen made back their investments by taking bribes. As Luc Sante observed of Big Bill in his book Low Life, "It was well known that he was corrupt; he in fact admitted as much quite readily." By 1891, Devery was [...]
An odd thing happened during game two of the Knicks' first round play-off series, against the Indiana Pacers. With a little under six minutes left in the third quarter, the Knicks were fighting there way back from a 10 point deficit, when Anthony Mason made a spectacular reverse dunk. The Pacers immediately called a time out, and the crowd, understandably, [...]
Right up until the time men started to stop wearing hats, the city was woven together by a network of pneumatic tubes that connected post offices and major buildings. A letter took seven minutes to go from Manhattan's 32nd Street to downtown Brooklyn through this Pneumatic Tube System, or PTS. Making use of the city's subterranean foundations, the tubes ran [...]
Because I work in Norwalk and live in Chelsea, whenever I have a bad day mixed with a bad drive home mixed with not being able to find a parking space, I usually stop by Billy’s Bakery for chocolate cupcakes. They ease the pain. So I’m leaving Billy’s recently with my cupcakes and I see a woman who looks like [...]
I was walking down the steps to the downtown train at West 23rd Street & 7th Avenue. I heard a trumpet being played and someone singing. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I see this guy sitting on a bench facing me as I was slipping my Metrocard through the turnstyle. He seem to be around 70 [...]
After my boyfriend and I broke up, I was lonely so I put an ad on Craigslist. What is it about a man that makes him think sending a picture of his private parts is going to turn a woman on? A little mystery and anticipation is a great thing. I put the ad under "women seeking men." Hoping to [...]
In New York City, you never know who might inadvertently teach you an impromptu life lesson. Maybe the local bagel maker gives you insight into your love life, or a phrase uttered by a cab driver changes your outlook, at least for the duration of the taxi ride. One recent Saturday, I encountered one of these situations in the most [...]
(Following is an excerpt from “Chapter 15: Prelude to Battle” of "Now is Not a Good Time," a book-in-progress about (among other things) progressive patriotism, the antiwar movement during the first term of the Bush administration, and one woman’s attempt to learn to love her country and its people—if not its government—in complicated and troubling times. The setting is a [...]
On the far Northern side of a vast concrete enclosure, we had been divided up into two parallel rows at either side of a narrow barricaded space and Jason, our Arresting Officer, stood between the two rows talking about sports, TV, and how he was looking forward to his retirement. Jason was a 23 year old beat cop from Staten [...]
Apartment hunting in New York City is like dating: in the search for the One, you’ll inevitably run into countless disasters along the way. While my romantic relationship has been the model of stability for once, buying my first Manhattan apartment was like looking for love all over again. The idea of settling down gave me the chills, but after [...]
Vladimir Putin stopped by a gas station in Chelsea on Friday afternoon on his way to a visit with President Bush. On hand to greet him was Senator Charles Schumer. The gas station had received a make-over--new paint, new sign. It had once been a Getty, but like all the Gettys in the city it has been transformed into a [...]
I was sitting on the floor of my older sister's East Village apartment helping her pack up her things, when I found her diary. She was in the kitchen wrapping plates and bowls in newspaper, so I thought I’d take a break out of eyesight and read a few pages. I went up the steel ladder to her tiny lofted [...]
Apartment-house neighbors don't go bad suddenly, like winter avocados. You get an alarming sense of them as soon as they appear. A week after my upstairs neighbor Thad moved in, we were already engaged in a mortal vendetta. I've shared walls with annoying people, but this character was off the charts. His schedule was bizarre, and his habits were strange. [...]
« Older Entries
