You are currently browsing the stories about the East Village neighborhood
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 was […]
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 […]
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 […]
Katya
by Eliza Berman 08/09/2013Neighborhood: East Village
Yellow police tape stretched across the doorframe of Apartment 5. I had walked past this door every day for the last two years, past its tortured wood, pockmarked like the cigarette-burned arms of its inhabitant. The door was so battered, a neighbor told me, from all the times Katya’s parents threw her out and all […]
Can I Get This To Go?
by Sofije Brija 07/02/2013Neighborhood: East Village
As someone who was born and raised in the famous “city that never sleeps,” it comes as no surprise that I have suffered from insomnia since the age of thirteen. Not a believer in medicinal sleep aids, I experimented with every natural sleep remedy suggested by friends, store clerks and of course, the internet. I […]
Date One
by Lea Thomas 06/28/2013Neighborhood: East Village
He gives me a blow by blow while I wait: “might be like 10 min late or so,” and “taking the ACW from 42nd to 14th,” and “2 blocks away.” He is 20 minutes late by the time he makes an appearance. Cute, I think. Tall. Thank you, dating gods. Though I wish he was […]
Below 14th
by Jacob Margolies 05/30/2013Neighborhood: East Village, Lower East Side
In the summer of 1984, I sublet an apartment on East 3rd Street between Avenue A and B, about one hundred yards from the building in which I had spent the first 18 years of my life. I’d been away for six years—the first four at a small college in the midwest followed by two […]
15 Seconds With Andy Warhol
by peter nolan smith 06/09/2012Neighborhood: All Over, East Village, Midtown
When I was a kid, Campbell’s Tomato Soup almost tasted home-made, especially if milk was added as suggested by the directions. Everyone ate it in 1964. The rich, the poor, the in-between and twelve year-old boys like me, so I was pleased to read in LIFE Magazine that a New York artist had painted large […]