You are currently browsing the stories about the East Village neighborhood
Rootless
by Andy Bragen 05/19/2019Neighborhood: East Village
Sattley, California. Winter solstice 2016. We’re at my Aunt-in-law’s house, in the High Sierras, in the Egyptian room. Sphinxes, golden fabrics, a Nefertiti head. The rest of the house is faux Victorian, a modest ranch overstuffed with Costco products and kitsch. My wife, my toddler daughter, and I are curled up under an electric blanket […]
On Etan Patz and Walking to School
by Andy Bragen 03/17/2019Neighborhood: East Village
Etan Patz disappeared forty years ago, on May 25, 1979. I was seven then, in second grade, and right around that time, perhaps even that same month, is when I started walking home from school on my own. We lived on 4th Street and Avenue A, maybe three quarters of a mile from Grace Church […]
The Sultry Scent of Formaldehyde
by Peter Wortsman 03/10/2019Neighborhood: East Village, Queens
My memories of high school are burdened by two deciding factors: the absence of girls and my aversion to math and science, both regrettable, given the fact that the prestigious institution I attended, Stuyvesant High School—then still in its old digs, a venerable building on East 15th Street—was all boys and all about math and […]
A Simple Procedure
by Mai Tran 01/13/2019Neighborhood: East Village, Greenwich Village
I am 21 and in the heat of my first New York summer, when I decide to have a four-centimeter rod inserted into the meat of my inner bicep. About the size of a matchstick and made of a material I can’t pronounce, it will release progestin directly into my bloodstream, preventing eggs from leaving the womb and […]
In a galaxy far far away: The East Village Years
by Rupert Martin 12/09/2018Neighborhood: East Village, Lower East Side, Murray Hill
Some prescribe the medicine of looking forward not back; don’t dwell on the past they advise, move along. Usually a proponent of such sentiment, I found it diminished when my attention was redrawn to an almost forgotten tale that I’d penned about my early life in New York. A story of the kid fresh off the […]
What the World Can Do
by Steven Goldleaf 12/02/2018Neighborhood: Coney Island, East Village
In the summer of 1973, my younger brother and I shared a basement apartment on East 12th Street in Brooklyn off Avenue J, a nice middle-class sort of area. We had lost our parents to cancer and a stroke, ten months apart, a few years before this, when he was fourteen and I was sixteen. […]
Asians Coming Through
by Mai Tran 09/02/2018Neighborhood: East Village, Union Square
The first time I was called a chink was in New York City at the beginning of my freshman year of college. Having grown up in Irvine, California, America’s seventh safest city, where boba cafes were as common as Starbucks and Korean BBQ was the only thing to do on a Friday night, I was […]
Is My Arched Spine Still Pretty?
by Kit Zauhar 01/15/2016Neighborhood: East Village, Manhattan, Uncategorized, Union Square
1. I went into college with virtually no experience, so virginal I believed myself to smell of baby powder. Touching a boy daringly was grazing his shoulder. That was till I met him, a studio art student from England (a would-be dream for high school me). He pursued me in the somehow typical NYU way […]
Last Night at Mrs. C’s
by Jacob Margolies 04/16/2014Neighborhood: East Village
When we were kids, starting at about 15-years old, there was a bar we’d frequent on Fifth Street east of Avenue A, just past the Con Edison substation. It was called the Chic Choc, but we knew it either as Chic’s or Mrs. C’s. Customers addressed the woman behind the bar who owned the place […]
An Education on Avenue B
by Jacob Margolies 03/23/2014Neighborhood: East Village
In 1971, when I was 11 years old, my world was turned upside down when my parents decided to send me to a Jewish Day School on the Lower East Side. From grades 1 to 5, I’d gone to the Downtown Community School, or DCS as it was called, on East 11th Street. It […]
After the Graveyard Shift
by Coree Spencer 01/28/2014Neighborhood: East Village
Always wear a bag on your head if you don’t want people to bother you. I figure this out in 1989 while I’m working the midnight to 5am waitressing shift at 7A Cafe in the East Village. It is right across the street from Tompkins Square Park during the height of the riots. The park […]
Will Probably Be Late to the Party
by Marta Troicka 01/21/2014Neighborhood: East Village
I am apologizing to Michelle because I’m crying and I don’t know why. I’m not sad or anything, I’m actually having a good time. This is one of the first times that Michelle and I are hanging out outside of class, and we don’t know each other well yet. But tears keep running down my […]