You are currently browsing the stories about the “Greenwich Village” neighborhood.
In 1971 I took a class taught by Ralph Ellison, author of ‘The Invisible Man.’ It was my last year at the Washington Square Campus of New York University. In those days there was also a Bronx campus. Wannabe hippies, like me, went downtown. I was a little nervous about graduating, because most of the famous people who went to [...]
Our doorman, John, wants an exercise bike for the lobby. I can imagine him on the bike, next to the sign that reads, “All Guests Must Be Announced.” Instead of greeting me, he would be riding the bike. Instead of buzzing the intercoms, the wheels would be churning and the perspiration on his brow would shine. Gray sweats would replace [...]
Since my boyfriend, Alexis, injured his shoulder playing pick-up basketball, he’s been watching games from the sideline. Usually he’ll just stop for a couple of minutes, en route to wherever he—or we—are going. If a pick-up buddy says, “What’s up?” he’ll sometimes give them one of those street-hugs, where they grab each other’s hand and bump chests. Then Alexis will [...]
My love life is typical in most respects. My relationships all have a beginning middle and end. With me it just happens that this all takes place in the span of a week. I don't like to waste time. Day 1: My last affair began on a dark and stormy night. It was a Wednesday and I had planned to [...]
I had that week off from work. I hadn’t yet taken a summer vacation and figured that, like thousands of other New Yorkers, I would get the hell out of the city during that time. I’d walk in the August 29th protest march, make my sentiments known, and then hit the road. But as things turned out, I couldn’t leave. [...]
I hadn't planned on adopting a piano. Long ago I sold my family piano to a neighbor; I rarely touched it and like most New Yorkers, we needed the space. Young and eager for cash, I never predicted I'd later feel guilty. Besides, a piano tuner called my spinet, whose keys my mother's and brother's fingers had caressed, a cheese [...]
The rain smelled like spring. It was different than winter rain. We got caught in it, my friend Sharon and I. She asked the guy at the counter to taste a falafel to see if it was good enough. She had just been to Israel and knew her falafel from her ass, she told me. He had trouble understanding. “Taste?” [...]
Last week I was leaving my building when I saw my doorman Frank carrying two black guitar cases through the lobby. He was followed by a man who looked very similar to Elvis Costello. I live in the West Village in Manhattan, so every man looks like Elvis Costello. Later that evening I asked Mario, the other doorman, – was [...]
The man sitting on the locker room bench looked like he was asleep, but he was merely exhausted. Sweat coursed down his massive torso and dampened the white towel tucked around his waist. His stomach, of which he was always aware, spilled over the towel and rested on his thighs. In two weeks he’d lost seven pounds, most of it [...]
The peculiar thing about these 360 degree images is that when shooting in low light, or when there is a lot of movement, individuals can blur to the point of being non-existent. My friend calls these barely present people "ghosts." An example can be seen below. Never mind the couple making out passionately (when they stopped kissing they began walking [...]
On the Wall Reading Series at Cornelia St. Cafe welcomes Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Readers include: Elizabeth Frankenberger Debbie Nathan Gerald Howard and Annie Bruno WEDNESDAY APRIL 23 6:30pm Cornelia St. Cafe 29 Cornelia St. (for directions, go to www.corneliastreetcafe.com)
Day 14. U.S. troops four miles from Baghdad. It was 9 PM and I was out of Breathe Right strips. If I don't have Breathe Right strips I can't sleep soundly, so I put on my coat and my orange button that has a photograph of a very sweet looking little Iraqi girl and the words, "Stop the War on [...]
The late great comic Bill Hicks once said, famously, apropos the first gulf war: "I find myself in the unenviable position of being for the war -- but against the troops." Nobody that I've heard has come up with a similar corker this time around, a line which can sum up the personal confusion and official hypocrisy so succinctly. There [...]
There are some guys whose pattern is to realize a supposed deep love once they know a woman doesn’t want them. Maybe that explains me and Cristina. Maybe guys like me can't love at all, so we mask our loveless souls with occasional dream loves, pure in their unobtainability. We safely suffer limited devotions at the alters of impossible bitches. [...]
We're walking through the Village, it's freezing, and we're trying to find a place that has both good hot chocolate and is a good place to breast-feed. It's not easy. I have nothing to do with the breast-feeding (having no breasts), but I feel responsible for finding the location to do it in. The place should be warm, with comfortable [...]
In 1991, I was a student at New York University, working at a bookstore, and this woman came up to me out of nowhere and basically asked me to come audition for her film. She was a casting director for this PBS Masterpiece Theater thing. The part was for a quote-unquote "little person." I'm four foot six, and they were [...]
Lately when I go for a walk I make a vow not to walk under any scaffolding, in protest of there being so much of it these days. Two minutes later I realize I'm walking under scaffolding. One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer and realized it had [...]
I don’t like show tunes and don’t really understand how any one does. But the idea of piano bars intrigues me the same way pick-up basketball games and gay sex clubs do, as a place where men get to play with strangers. So when my mus ical theater friends Jim and Andy invited me to Marie’s Crisis, I went along [...]
World Gym, upstairs, is fresh with creamy white paint and music, while beat-driven, played at an appropriate level. There are the requisite scantily clad Spandexed women and the scantilier clad hyper-muscled men. But there is a civility, a sense of propriety, a lovely calm to this gym that the trendy joints are lacking. Downstairs, however, the music from the boxing [...]
I don't think I thought of Eli every single time I walked down lower Seventh Avenue, but I may have. His parents' West Village brownstone had been a shrine to me in high school insofar as Eli, himself, had been a god. When passing it back then, I craned my neck at the upstairs window and said whatever magic words [...]
In the summer of 1980 I was living on East Fifth Street and First Avenue with Alpha Lorraine and I was eighteen, feeling not so much on top of the world as right in the middle of it. Alpha was a new friend and when Yves, my French dancer friend from when I was a dishwasher at Food Restaurant, went [...]
About a week after the WTC attack we began to hear weeping from the apartment next door. It came to us in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping, a small, very private sound that forced its way into my thoughts until I found myself lying awake listening to it. Its volume rose and fell, as weeping usually [...]
I saw summer turn to fall on the median of the West Side Highway where I stood waving my American flag, holding up hand made thank you signs, saluting the rescue and recovery workers. The crews, coming from long shifts, appreciate the support. When they pass in their various vehicles, (fire engines, police cars, ambulances, motorcycles, army trucks, heavy rigs, [...]
Since September 11, it's been especially surreal and sad to see our skyline. Though I was never particularly enamored of the Twin Towers - I prefer the Flat Iron and Chrysler Buildings - it's devastating to see that they're gone. Several times this summer, I hung out by Battery Park City, where they would loom over the landscape. My girlfriend, [...]
"Gotta Knit," is on the second floor of a walk up on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. I heard about it from my girlfriend when she waltzed in the door one day and said, "I’m back from my knitting lesson," all breezy and matter of fact. "Your what?" I said. She told me about "Gotta Knit!" and all the women [...]
All photographs and captions by Ricky Powell Mike. No shirt, a slight paunch (new), a lot of tattoos. Green, mostly, with some red. A dragon that snaked over his arm and shoulder, other stuff. He’s getting old. Or older. Still the belligerent, bemused, pug face, though, wondering what fun the playground might have to offer. It’s a face full of [...]
He looks like someone's grandfather. We are, after all, in Washington Square Park, in a playground fueled by the energy of cooped-up city kids desperate to climb plastic treehouses, while their parents, grandparents, and nannies watch on. Slightly stooped in a well-worn but tidy blue blazer, he smiles as he admires the children. My five-year-old daughter likes him. So does [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
I am--and I do not necessarily advise this--walking through the meatpacking district in a miniskirt. Pastis and co. not- withstanding, this area is one of my favorites in the city—- one of the only remaining places where, when the clubsters hail their last cab, the trucks still rumble up and haul in their real, tangible, old-fashioned, actual blood-and-guts commerce. At [...]
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