You are currently browsing the stories about the East Village neighborhood
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 […]
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 […]
Get Busy
by Damian Van Denburgh 05/22/2012Neighborhood: East Village
My friend Flip didn’t read, he told me, because he was all about music. Slick, shiny, high-gloss music. Nothing got him more excited than discussing “production values.” He’d play dance remixes for me and practically conduct them as some new version of an awful song stomped and restomped its way through a cathedral-like reverb chamber […]
Aspirational Items
by Claudette Bakhtiar 12/11/2011Neighborhood: East Village
It was the mid-90s. I had just graduated from college and had no job but wanted to move to Manhattan anyway. I thought I could manage on what I had in my savings account for a few months until I found a job but whatever apartment I got needed to be cheap. I scoured the […]
To Mars And Back
by Parth Vasa 08/02/2011Neighborhood: East Village
The painting of a luxury building marked one of the walls of Mars Bar. It was in grey and black and in dull city lights it looked like a building out of a Batman comic. Above the door a sign read “Thank you for the memories.” It was the Friday before Fourth of July weekend. […]