You are currently browsing the stories about the “Greenwich Village” neighborhood.
Vincent “Chin” Gigante-------- Sometime during 1976, a few weeks after his uncle disappeared, my acquaintance Xavier Eboli paid Vincent “Chin” Gigante a visit. He had known The Chin all his life. More than friends, they were famiglia. An Eboli had married a Gigante, a Gigante had christened an Eboli baby, and the two families took turns sponsoring confirmations. Which is [...]
Did you have a favorite place in New York that’s no longer exists? I interviewed people about spots in the city that were special to them but are now gone. Ellen is 70 years old and was a lawyer. Henry Kaplan: What's your favorite store in your neighborhood that shut down or closed? Ellen: That is a very easy [...]
Trainer Teddy Bentham (in suit), Pellone, and Manager Tommy Ryan (Eboli) ____________________________ I did not expect him to answer the door in his underwear. He was sixty-something, and I was seventeen and lacking direction. My father had just died, and high school was about to end. Instead of thinking about college, I wanted to be a boxer, like the ones [...]
I didn’t know that my father was a bad driver, a reckless and dangerous driver, until I was in my mid-twenties. During my childhood, in the 60s and 70s, my father drove a white Cadillac El Dorado. He saw himself as a player, and he traded it in every two years for the latest model. The caddy was a boat. [...]
We moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1980s, and at every landing of our fifth-floor tenement walk up there was a nose-full of tantalizing smells. This was in the very Italian section of the West Village, full of tenements that we called “V.I.V’s” or “Vertical Italian Villages.” The older folks, who sat out in front, chatting and fanning themselves in the [...]
Image by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman On January 23, 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan, poet Gertrude Dick, and three actors from the Provincetown Playhouse broke into a hidden spiral staircase in the Washington Square Arch and ascended to the summit. They dangled Chinese lanterns and red balloons, fired off toy cap pistols, and galivanted until dawn, whereupon, with Bohemian [...]
When I was a teenager, during the second half of the 1970s, I pretty much lived in Washington Square Park during the summer. I sometimes joke that in some ways I was raised there. In some ways that is not so funny. Yippies, Jesus Freaks, drug addicts, tourists, and street performers were my friends and neighbors. My actual friends were [...]
Photo by Ajay Suresh (Wikipedia) Joel had told me his mother was in town for the week visiting, as parents often will when their children are going to expensive colleges in the heart of New York City. But I didn’t think his mother’s visit was going to be relevant to me, until he invited me to go to the MoMa [...]
Ants by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman. Insects The following is a contemporary take on the medieval bestiary, featuring descriptions and characterizations of the actual and apocryphal creatures that share our constricted urban space. This second installment is devoted to insects. Stomped, smoked out, asphyxiated, and trampled underfoot, they elicit a degree of fear and disgust disproportionate to their size. Quietly going [...]
Hanging out in Washington Square Park Joanie finished bending over the ironing board, her freshly-washed hair nice and flat. She pulled the plug out of the socket, wrapped up the cord, and looked in the mirror and smiled. Her own natural curls would be given free rein in a few years, but right now she wanted to match the long, [...]
“How is your mother?” they’d ask with a friendly smile. The stationery store manager with the club foot from whom she bought her cigarettes, the Eurotrash guy at the shoe store with whom she spoke German, everyone at the Jefferson Market. The shopkeepers up and down Sixth Avenue loved her. She made them feel special, interesting. “Fine,” I’d say. “I [...]
Observations in the Vale and Vector of the Virus It’s late. And again, I survey the silence, inverting wakefulness and sleep. Again, in place of dreaming, I listen to the refrigerator humming. The construction site that had been growing like a giant metal bean stalk outside my window, down the block, has suspended activity, its girders rearing midair untrussed. Who [...]
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 thickening the cervical mucus. There [...]
In 1974 I was twenty-five. I’d just left my secure job as a kindergarten teacher. The job: compliments of my, Bubbie, who was always yelling, “Get security. Be a teacher!” Deciding to leave the job? That was compliments of my Women's Consciousness Raising Group. Every woman in the group encouraged me to leave my job and follow my passion to [...]
The blaring music is only background noise to my mumbled senses. Effie slaps a card down on the cheap plastic table N.Y.U. has inside every dorm room’s kitchen. Effie says some number and the four of us (Effie, Eleanor, Duke, and I) have to take a drink. It seems like for every card Duke and I have to take a [...]
I’m quite sure I could have killed the whole lot of them. I’ve drawn too many skull and crossbones on the margins of my handouts. It’s difficult for me to concentrate on the enthralling discourse on Lacan because I am too disturbed by that Babushka girl and her heinous turtle-neck (not artistic, just embarrassing). Does anyone really give a shit [...]
I have always lived near subway stations that are above ground, meaning that many of my days have begun by standing in the cold for a few minutes waiting for the train to roll in – the 1 at 125th Street, then the F at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brooklyn. During the winter months, when the train doors [...]
I spent my nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first years standing on the corner of West Fourth Street and Washington Square East, selling used paperback books off of a folding card table. This was ten years ago, when West Fourth Street was still full of booksellers. Many of these men were smart lunatics with poor social skills. They had a hard time getting along [...]
I have a friend. For the purposes of this story, let’s call him Monte. When I was a kid there were lots of guys in the neighborhood named Monte. Now I don’t know anyone with that name. From the time he was 13, just after his bar mitzvah when he first had a few bucks in his pocket, until he [...]
L. Monroe Looking to rent to current student. 900/month utilities included, 12 month lease, 1500 sq. ft. The apartment is on Washington Square West, above John Sexton, sheltering Jude Law, haunted by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. A piece of hair is glued by sweat down the side of my face, the end of the strand habituates itself onto my [...]
I’m on the E train and a child who isn’t mine is leaning her head on my left shoulder. She is sleeping and I don’t quite know what to do yet. Her mother is to her left daydreaming, completely unaware that her daughter’s head has shifted onto a stranger. I decide to let her rest. She looks so peaceful and [...]
Hello Friends, In a semi-related but separate project I am working on, I am creating posts for the Greenwich Village History blog. As I have always considered Mr. Beller's Neighborhood to be a living, breathing history of contemporary life in New York City, it seems a natural side-project and it is also a requirement for the Creating Digital History course [...]
The scruff on the back of my neck was getting long, so I decided it was time to head over to Supercuts on 10th and University and get a trim. There’s nothing special about this specific Supercuts; I’m sure the hundreds or thousands of other Supercuts around the country provide the same mediocre haircut for the same standard price. But [...]
For thirty-five years its posture has been folded into a deep curtsy, dormant over a hanger, as if waiting for a curtain call. After that one moment in the spotlight, it’s never been worn again. Unless we consider fleeting fantasies of varying scenarios I’ve had over the decades that flash-forwarded to, well, the age I am now. Sixty. I am [...]
It was my second time on the NYU campus (I will pause here, long enough for some self-important student to roll his eyes: “We don’t have a campus,” as if the word is a smarmy, sordid curse); it was my first time there alone, and I wore the trademark face of an awed tourist. Open-mouthed. Wide-eyed. Forgetful of the impoliteness—even [...]
Annie was the whitest, white girl I ever did see. A walking anemic, she looked in perpetual need of a blood transfusion. If she were to walk through the halls of the high school dragging an I.V. pole with a bag of blood hanging off the top, I don’t think anybody would have batted an eye. I met Annie in [...]
It had always been an in-joke between us. I was the one who hailed the cab. “Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with [...]
She: I want to buy you a good book for your birthday. He: What would I do with a book? Buy me a new body! --Conversation overheard between a man and a woman. When I think of second-hand books, I think quite literally of anonymous fingers reaching out to me from beyond the grave. I can practically smell the stale [...]
In the spring of 1980 I was a cocky new teacher of English as a Second language, fresh from education grad school, with innovative pedagogy that I couldn’t wait to try out on students. My first job in New York was a gem: "Vocational ESL." It was funded by the feds and I'd gone to the French Quarter in New [...]
I had seen psychics in the past, but I was watching my budget. I needed some guidance but my usual clairvoyant’s fee of $150 was too steep. So when Mia suggested an angel reading at $40, it was just the check-in I could afford. Mia was an early adopter of different healing modalities. She’d vet the experience first, report back, [...]
This was the first year we had joined the Westchester Youth Soccer League, and the urban parents on our daughters’ travel team were business executives, academics, social workers, and creative directors—just like they were. Some of us had left our parents’ Westchester or Long Island suburbs to raise our children in the “inner” city of Greenwich Village. We’d heard stereotypes [...]
When you lose someone so important to you, who feels larger than life, sometimes you act a little crazy while going through the grief. Maybe it is to counter the silence and life's unfairness, but at the time, your actions can feel magically vibrant. This is one of those stories. The day was St. Patrick's Day 2002 and I drove [...]
Of all the streets in New York, 12th Street is the one with which I most identify. I’ve never actually lived on it, but it has threaded its way through my life and clung there. The street represents both some of my best and worst times. Not all of 12th Street, which runs from Avenue C to the West Side [...]
She looked like a collection of spheres stuck together to represent the female body. Round little torso, round little head, protruding chipmunk cheeks like those on the marionettes on that TV show “Spitting Image.” Dark little eyes that glared from some bottomless well of anger and pain. Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. Behind her back, everybody [...]
“If you could be anything in the world and talent and money weren’t an issue, would you still be doing what you do, or something else?” My husband posed this question in an attempt to liven up a rather staid Upper East Side party one night. The gathered Wall Street wizards, lawyers and M.B.A. types thought about it. “Exactly what [...]
Thursday, Sept 10th: The St. Mark's Books Reading Series presents a reading from "Lost and Found: Stories From New York," featuring Sam Lipsyte, Bryan Charles, Betsy Berne, Debbie Nathan, Courtney Coveney, and Thomas Beller. @ Solas Bar 232 E. 9th Street (between 3rd and 2nd Aves) 7:30PM sharp ** Monday, Sept 14th: The Saint Ann’s Review Reading Thomas Beller and [...]
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