You are currently browsing the stories about the Greenwich Village neighborhood
Selected Observations on Urban Fauna
by Peter Wortsman 05/15/2022Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Manhattan
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 […]
Joanie and Luddy in Greenwich Village, 1967
by Sharon Watts 05/23/2021Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Massapequa
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, straight […]
How is Your Mother?
by Jennifer Marcus 09/06/2020Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village
“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, […]
Nostalgia for the Norm
by Peter Wortsman 05/10/2020Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
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 […]
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 […]
Dancing in the Dark
by Helen Mandlin 10/13/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Upper West Side
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 […]
Kings
by Andre-Naquian Wheeler 08/31/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
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 […]
Kant’s (Revised) Critique of Judgement
by Kaila Allison 05/16/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
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 […]
On the Train in Winter
by Ryan Lejarde 02/08/2014Neighborhood: Across the River, All Over, Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, Downtown Brooklyn, Gowanus, Greenwich Village
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 […]
Newt The Rare Book Man
by Ben Nadler 01/27/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Uncategorized
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 […]
Washington Square Park
by Jacob Margolies 01/26/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
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 […]
My Washington Square West Apartment for $900 a Month
by sarah andrew 01/17/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
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 […]