You are currently browsing the stories about the “Financial District” neighborhood.
My husband’s Manhattan apartment overlooks Fraunces Tavern—a three-story brick building with dormer windows and a columned portico. Apparently, George Washington said goodbye to his officers there at the end of the Revolutionary War. But now, as I sit in the deep windowsill sipping coffee and watching the bar revelers below, I see a horde of men in banana costumes filing [...]
In the hip nightclub world of 1985 Manhattan, many people were ashamed to admit they were card-carrying members of the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, the unfortunate who lived in New Jersey and the outer boroughs but worked and played in Manhattan. Not me. I was proud to be included in that group, even at that moment of truth when my [...]
Group of Four Trees by Jean Dubuffet/photo by Elizabeth Benedict Near the southern tip of Manhattan are a modern masterpiece and a trove of public sculptures by major 20th century artists that are hiding in plain sight. The first one that came to my attention – and the one that has my heart – is 43 feet high and painted [...]
Friday, September 9, 2011. My friend and neighbor Judy the Therapist and I ponder the upcoming 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. On that terrible day, Judy and a young couple from my building had just picked up the morning paper at a news stand around the corner; they saw the first plane hit. Another friend [...]
I'm not the girl who woke up from another one-night-stand. But I could be, in the view from the Sephora window. It's raining: The dull Saturday too-early morning pitter-patters against the makeup counters; my nerves, pounding on the exposed brick. I feel like a quasi-well-dressed spy. Partly because "quasi" is the word that won me scrabble last night and partly [...]
I am a New York City booster. And I travel its streets with all its positives and negatives crammed into my head, coloring everything I do, everything I see, everything I feel. I am very familiar with the city. And I love the sheer unpredictability of it, the Mad-Hatter kinetic energy. The zany atmosphere, the zany people, the zany sense [...]
Once upon a time, when I was a teenager working as a bike messenger, I would stop midway across Central Park, somewhere along the North side of the Great Lawn, and take a break to regard the skyline along the park's southern edge. I was always hoping to see signs of new construction. This would have been around 1980, when [...]
Two days after the Occupy Oakland police raid, where an Iraq War vet was shot in the head with a police projectile and hundreds more were sprayed with tear gas while they were sleeping, I get a text from Denise as I’m wrapping up dinner with some friends at Teresa’s Diner in Brooklyn Heights: Show the police and the world [...]
Whenever I go to a party or I am introduced to people I don’t know, they invariably ask me what I do. “What do you do?” And I always tell them, “I am an elevator operator.” I say that I drive an elevator in downtown Manhattan. The reaction to my announcement varies. Some people smile politely and then move on [...]
I first visited Occupy Wall Street on a chilly evening in the middle of October. A few hundred people were gathered near the eastern steps of Zuccotti Park for the nightly meeting of the General Assembly. On the steps a young man was shrieking inaudibly. A few yards away, a jackhammer was being applied to a hole in the middle [...]
For a long time I used to go down to Pearl Street at the bottom of Manhattan. It was around the time that I had started writing a book about the famous case of the man and the woman who had disappeared from Pearl Street in 1997. The book led to the street and, in time, I became very fond [...]
He began calling her everyday from Scotland. Once she heard his voice she couldn’t get enough. The first time she spoke to him she was working at home writing up a press release for one of her authors. She forgot all about work. He emailed her the day before from an online dating site saying that he was coming over [...]
I had gotten a summons for jury duty. Or should I say yet another one. I was afraid of those tall, gloomy, impersonal Wall-Street-area buildings full of people in somber look-alike suits. Jury duty was some sort of gulag. Stripped of rights. Where was the joie de vivre? What about poetic justice? Besides, I wasn’t feeling any great affection for [...]
A young woman dressed in a leotard was dancing in City Hall Park today. The sun was brilliant and warm, the fountain flowing with water and the soft sound of an alto sax in the background. I felt nurtured in the sun, and great joy looking at the voluminous colors of spring tulips in luscious, full bloom. The young dancer [...]
It was 60 degrees this morning so I decided to do some of my work in City Hall Park. The park was relatively empty. I was reading my magazines and enjoying the outdoors when I began to hear this loud screaming. Living in NYC, you get used to this kind of sound, so I continued on with my reading, but [...]
Mohammad B. Miah is a small man. He stands about five feet tall with his red and white and black leather hi-top sneakers on. He lives in Astoria, Queens, and he wants to know whether I work for the city. He motions in the direction of City Hall. “You have a job?” he asks. “I’m a writer,” I say, waving [...]
At the height of the scandal over the inventions in James Frey's “A Million Little Pieces,” I was thinking about “Westchester Burning” by Amina Wefali. “A Million Little Pieces” is about a man and his addiction. “Westchester Burning” is about a woman and her marriage. Any resemblance between these two very different books is limited to whatever slim overlap there [...]
The pivot of this story is not the state of generic poverty that I found myself in upon entering New York. You don't have to be poor to be thrown in jail, but it helps. I had broken some sort of levee on the China Town bus between Philadelphia and New York. That morning I had woken up next to [...]
I met him in Starbucks while drinking a cup of coffee. He didn’t look like the kind of man that frequented Starbucks. He was reading a newspaper and I sat down at the table and chairs next to him. Even sitting down he seemed very tall; his hair was neatly shaved off his head, and he had a small graying [...]
An "incident" had occurred at the group home where my younger brother lives with five other men and three women who all have mental retardation. His supervisor, more amused than upset, followed procedure by notifying me and beginning an investigation. Fred, a 103 pound, 5’2” 52-year-old man, was discovered standing with his roommate of two years in their tiny room [...]
I, along with the rest of the catering staff, had no idea that the party that evening was for a billionaire when we arrived at the loading dock of the old Cunard Shipping Building by Battery Park. All the details had been kept hush-hush until the last minute. Only when all 70 cater waiters and bartenders were gathered in the [...]
I was riding downtown on a 1 train after basketball with two of the players from the game, Nick and Tom. Tom and I are both 6-6 and had spent the previous ninety minutes beating the crap out of each other on the basketball court. We were much like the fox and the sheepdog in those great old Warner Brothers [...]
I decide to slip out of the office to see the sun set. I look at my watch. It is a ten minute walk from my office to the west side highway. My heels slip off my feet as I put on a pair of winter boots and fetch my coat and earmuffs from the employee closet. I am missing [...]
The young musician met the older musician after a concert. It was in a building just south of Wall Street, a part of the city that morphs into a ghost town on late weekend nights. The concert space was run by an organization dedicated solely to the arts and therefore was unheated despite the brutal January cold snap. Audience members [...]
It was my first day and Beth, who worked in the cubicle across from mine, was talking on her cell phone about sex. I was doing the kind of mindless work that provides a perfect cover for eavesdropping. I kept my eyes on the insurance forms I was stapling and got to know her a little. It seems she’s been [...]
Along about now, dozens of shaggy guys prowl the streets of New York, looking for a new barber, wondering where and from whose hands their next haircut and a shave are going to come now that the State Barber Shop has closed and Giorgio Campli retired. George left for Italy a few weeks back. There, he’ll live off his social [...]
1. Well, that’s it, Noppi, I’m up early again, I can’t sleep. My throat is killing me and I’m coughing. I think it’s the smoke because everyone else has it too. The subways are quiet. People bump into each other and don’t apologize. A woman slips in through the closing doors and takes the seat beside me. Opens her newspaper, [...]
Being a bohemian Communist without a mutual fund, a 401(k), or any valueless dot com stocks to add to the oil drum fires the homeless gather around, I don't often find myself in the Financial District. But when I do, I get the biggest kick out of seeing white brokers, lawyers and computer guys lining up for the three-card monte [...]
Over the years, Kathy and I have spent weekends in Manhattan, taking advantage of lower hotel room rates and exploring the neighborhoods. One of the places we liked was the Marriott at the World Financial Center. It isn't there anymore. And we thought it was time to visit … we wanted to see the Columns of Memorial light for ourselves. [...]
The good old days: when you could look to farthest downtown Manhattan and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age; when urban blight—the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories, the vacant lots, the decaying piers, the alleys, the child’s endless treasure-trove of it all—was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a [...]
There is the sense that we are doing something wrong, Diana Wall and I, as we walk south from Franklin Street toward what is arguably Manhattan’s most compelling dig site, the hill of rubble that was, until recently, the World Trade Center. Wall is a New York-based archaeologist, whose book, "Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York," co-authored with Anne-Marie [...]
For more than 100 days members of New York's Fire Department, along with thousands of contractors, have been working in 12 hour shifts in the recovery effort at World Trade Center. With the subterranean fires finally extinguished and the last skeletal wall bought down last week, the work has taken on a new complexion. About half of the twisted steel [...]
I used to gloat about it. Somebody would ask for my work mailing address and I’d reply slowly, evenly, Two-World-Trade-Center. And then pause a beat, just for effect – seventieth floor. Seven –zero. That’s right. There’d often be a comment, sometimes even a gentle, "wow." My reply varied depending on circumstance or mood. Occasionally, however, I was dead honest. It’s [...]
