You are currently browsing the stories about the Clinton neighborhood
Scarlett Ghosts
by Quilty 10/28/2011Neighborhood: Clinton
In a small basement theatre on West 50th Street and 8th Avenue I once photographed Scarlett Johansson accepting the Theatre World Award for her performance in “A View From The Bridge.” When she got to the part in her acceptance speech where she thanked Arthur Miller, the shutter speed on my new Nikon mysteriously slowed and […]
Celtic Memories – Whispering Hope from the Past
by Maura Mulligan 10/22/2009Neighborhood: Clinton
When I was growing up in the west of Ireland in the fifties my grandfather gifted me with stories about Samhain, (pronounced, SOW-in) now known as All Hallows Eve or Halloween. Samhain, a Gaelic word, meaning “end of summer,” signaled the coming of winter and the beginning of the Celtic New Year. “In the olden […]
Mayfair Boys Club & Barbershop
by Zachary Levin 08/31/2007Neighborhood: Clinton
If not for the classic red, white and blue rotating stripes on its barber poles, the Mayfair barbershop on 39th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues might go unnoticed among its garish neighbors. Fabric stores clutter the view, along with the other big business in the area: Porn. The sex shops and “XXX” theaters easily […]
Only customers come down here: Hell’s Kitchen in 1986
by Roger Sewhcomar 11/10/2006Neighborhood: Clinton
So I found myself on the corner of 45th St and 8th Ave, having arrived ten minutes ago in New York City, October 4th, 1986. I was pretty much sitting in the center of the biggest glut of seed you could find per square inch in any city in the world. Wide-eyed crack heads floated […]
Bonfire of the Remedies
by Andy Christie 06/28/2006Neighborhood: Clinton
My mother’s narrow little medicine chest is a joke to her. It’s quaint. It’s for amateurs. She keeps her medicine in the kitchen cabinet and the kitchen drawers and the candy dishes. Her canisters for coffee and flour and sugar are filled with Lipitor and Propranalol and Prozac. She could collapse from overmedication at any […]
Men Threw Balls To One End, Then Back Again: Scientology
by Kurt Rademacher 06/15/2006Neighborhood: Clinton
Jake’s girlfriend broke up with him, so he started driving and turned up eleven hours later at my apartment. We were the kind of friends who’d been close once but who didn’t speak often anymore, owing not to any particular falling out, but to the passage of time and a mutual inability to put any […]
The Shave
by Joseph Scalia 05/21/2005Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Clinton
My father was a man of few words. Not because he was the strong silent type, but rather because, in the twenty-three years that we spent together, it was my mother who did most of the talking. He had few opinions, my father, which he mostly kept to himself, and my life was too full […]
Knicks Notes: The Golden Age of Losing
by Hal Sirowitz 12/04/2002Neighborhood: Clinton
The more games the New York Knicks won the more they raised the ticket prices. I could only afford to see them at Madison Square Garden if they continued to have losing seasons. I’d buy a ticket from a scalper. Instead of charging more he’d sell it for a fraction of what it was worth, […]
Dead Rat Walking
by Jean Strong 09/10/2002Neighborhood: Clinton
I electrocuted a rat early this morning. It was approximately 2:20 am. There were no eyewitnesses. I heard the electrical noise. It was a sustained bug-zapping sound that went on for a good thirty seconds. I knew immediately what was happening when I was startled awake. I just listened, victorious, with a great feeling that […]
Love and Loss at Neocon
by Ashley Shelby 04/06/2002Neighborhood: Clinton
The city was crawling with carpet salesmen and industrial designers and Formica representatives and stadium planners, and no one outside of the Javits Center even noticed. I wouldn’t have noticed either if it hadn’t been for my friend Amy, who had flown into New York from East Lansing, Michigan, to attend the NeoCon Interior Design […]
Hot Summer Day
by Jenni Olson 02/17/2002Neighborhood: Clinton
Staying at a disheveled hotel in Midtown across from Madison Square Garden, I call and ask her to meet me at the restaurant downstairs for breakfast. We haven’t seen each other since she moved away three years ago and have only spoken on the phone once (when she called to flirt with me after leaving […]
The Doctor From Norfolk, Virginia
by Brook Hauser 01/20/2002Neighborhood: Clinton
During the summer, approximately 25 to 35 students occupy the brownstone at 305 W. 29th St. and Eighth Avenue, a few blocks from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. I’m living on the third floor, flanked by the kitchen and the staircase; paying a weekly rent of about $200 for a single room with a […]