You are currently browsing the stories about the “Lower East Side” neighborhood.
The following series traces the shifting face of downtown New York City—a place of ghosts and grit, memory and reinvention. Born and raised in downtown Manhattan, artist-illustrator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman renders the city she calls home with quiet intensity, her delicate drawings capturing the rhythms of streets both remembered and imagined. Some scenes emerge from lived experience—lingering with friends outside [...]
It wasn’t easy for us to dress for Thanksgiving. Basically, we had interchangeable wardrobes in two sizes: Levis, BVD tees and plaid flannel shirts. Occasionally, I wore a leotard or a 1950’s thrift shop sweater, but there was nothing formal enough for dinner with his family in Queens. So, we dropped by my parents and in my old bedroom closet [...]
Cars and Crimes and Trains My wife (we weren’t yet married at the time) had a fairly new ’81 Toyota Starlet stolen in Brooklyn. We took a city bus to the police precinct to report it stolen (no over the phone reports back in those days). Halfway there, we insisted that the driver stop the bus, because there on the [...]
Kate and Harold Shapinsky A little boy sits on the wood floor. In a small room with a rocking horse in the corner. A stuffed teddy bear is on his pillow. There is a small soft blanket, the one he holds at night, in a chair. The smell of the room is comforting. Twenty years later, standing in the middle [...]
As my plane landed at JFK, the third day of Hanukkah gave way to the night before Christmas. Wise men and Maccabees, manger and menorah, holy night and holy light all merged on the taxi ride to Brooklyn for a winter holiday vacation visit with my sister Rivka. Fortunately, there was room at the inn; she had recently acquired a [...]
During the summer of 1978 I worked as a Good Humor man. I would push a cart from the Good Humor depot, located at 3rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, on the Lower East Side, to Exchange Place in the financial district of lower Manhattan, where I would sell the company’s offerings to traders, office workers, messengers, or anyone [...]
Beasties Charles St Shuffle I was scrolling through Twitter after midnight a couple of weeks ago when I read that the photographer and New York personality Ricky Powell had died. The news hit me because as kids we’d spent a lot of time together at the 14th Street Y in afterschool programs. Biddy Basketball and Sportsman’s Clinic, and the intensely [...]
I began using cannabis regularly in 1968, when I was about 14 years old, and since then have had innumerable encounters with dealers. The ones I will write about here are the dealers with whom I had long-term relationships. With cannabis becoming legal in so many places, there’s not much future left in the business for individuals who operated on [...]
[caption id="attachment_10184" align="alignleft" width="519"] Untitled by Harold Shapinsky[/caption] Twenty New York blocks gets you a mile. Back in "our time," a motley crew of urban youth crossed the Manhattan landscape with that formula in our heads. We understood distance. We got time. We lived the algebraic formula of Time x Speed = Distance. If we started peddling our bikes at the [...]
I’ve been accused of many things, but never of false modesty. You’d have to be pretty old to remember the catchy TV ads that the long departed Braniff Airways used to run. They hired celebrities like New York Jets star quarterback Joe Namath to recite one line: “If you’ve got it … flaunt it! Evidently Braniff did not quite [...]
Anton and Lelo were scared. They had seen them every day at the bar where we work for the past several months—lurking in corners, hiding behind shelves, disappearing into cracks in the walls, into drains, into boxes. Not roaches. Not rats. Ghosts. It was practically an infestation. A ghost infestation. I wanted to laugh with Anton. Every time he [...]
Editor’s Note -- These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old leftists were octogenarians when Buhle [...]
The door to my apartment building is the color of the rough red wine men drink in small towns in Italy. In fact, Mr. Chinnici, who lives in my building, might look at home in a café in a Mediterranean village, drinking claret from a water glass. He wears a sooty, mushroom-colored cap; the whites of his eyes are [...]
Got to pick these kids up. Oh why did we start a stupid car pool? Maybe car pools made sense in the suburbs of 1972 but…in Williamsburg, 1994? Still, it beats trying to get four five year-olds from Brooklyn to Avenue D in Manhattan by subway and bus. One big problem is our car. I don’t know how we even [...]
Some prescribe the medicine of looking forward not back; don’t dwell on the past they advise, move along. Usually a proponent of such sentiment, I found it diminished when my attention was redrawn to an almost forgotten tale that I’d penned about my early life in New York. A story of the kid fresh off the boat, told by a guy [...]
They say everything happens for a reason. Construction began on the World Trade Center in August of 1968. Some months before that when I was in the second grade, our teacher, Miss Spellman, handed out a Weekly Reader, an eight-page magazine with short articles designed to encourage the habit of reading in elementary school students. The only story from [...]
Last night, I dreamed about my mother. She was floating over the threshold of my room, a sweet smile on her face.In her raspy voice with its crazy Brooklyn accent, she said, “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, darling. Look how long your hair got.” Because even in death, Mom was all about hair. My mother was the [...]
I’d already seen the apartment several times-- once with Joey and the other time with the two Jeffrey’s. The two Jeffreys were thinking about moving out of their apartment in the East Village and wanted “something more fun and interesting,” which is another way of saying “we’re going to fuck your schedule in the ass for the next week, and [...]
On Match.com, Ken’s moniker was “Dull.” He wrote that among his favorite things were office carpeting, spam, and waiting rooms. “I bet he lives in one of those storage units off the highway,” my friend Meg said as she read over my shoulder. My own profile was styled after Nancy Drew. Hair color? Titian. Hobbies? Motor boating, driving too fast, [...]
New Yorkers of a certain age who dig hoops can tell you that there is a lot of Jewish DNA in the city game. Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, an instructor at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, but the game’s popularity really took off early in the 20th century in the settlement house gyms and schoolyards of [...]
“Here, going? Here, here!” The woman says to the drive and points to the paper in her hand. “This bus is going to Rockaway Beach!” The bus driver looks at her and answers. The woman doesn't seem to understand and starts to talk to the bus driver in Chinese. The bus driver looks puzzled and shakes his head. “Should I go [...]
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 took me in to see [...]
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 years in a roach infested [...]
October 1915 - Shackleton's ship the Endurance crushed by ice after drifting for nine months. October 28, 2012 - 7:30 pm: Shearer hikes two blocks from residence at 90 Hudson St., #6B, to Hudson River with stated goal of checking out storm surge and keeping feet dry. Forced to wade through three feet of water at foot of Harrison Street, [...]
Thanks to the valiant efforts of Neighborhood contributor, Rob Williams, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Reading Series is back in the Lower East Side! The monthly reading series will premiere this month at 7 PM, Thursday, February 21 at Dixon Place - 161 Chrystie St (between Rivington and Delancey), and be on the third Thursday of every month. (more…)
It was like the prom. Only it wasn’t the prom. It was Hurricane Sandy. All the anxious preparation, the heart slightly aflutter, the pure angst and nervous excitement all at once. What to buy in advance, who to spend the night with, hell, even what to wear. It was Monday afternoon on the Lower East Side six hours before the [...]
Many things are curated in this day and age. Google will happily refer you to “a curated book,” “curated digital apps,” “a curated list of televised soccer games,” a “meticulously curated” fixed-gear bicycle boutique in Paris, and “a curated set of grooming products.” A curated door, such as can be found at 27 Ludlow Street in New York’s Lower East [...]
MR. BELLER’S NEIGHBORHOOD READING SERIES HAPPY ENDING in the Lower East Side Friday, September 23, 8:00 PM A Free Evening of Non-Fiction In The Lower East Side. Reading on September 23 will be: Rob Williams - Bear Patrol Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s Nathaniel Page - Spanked The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out About The Readers... Lily Shen [...]
I stumbled bleary-eyed out of my building still hours before the sun would rise over the East River. Allen Street was black and still. The bars were closed and the morning rush hadn’t yet begun. The homeless slept soundly in the street-median park. Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish with a bowl cut and [...]
On a brisk bright February afternoon, father and baby daughter entered the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street. A planned Cobble Hill Cinemas screening of Duck Soup the month before had been canceled due to a single-digit temperature (sorry Groucho, Daddy really wanted it), so this was to be the four-month-old infant’s maiden moviegoing voyage. The Wednesday matinee was part of [...]
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 [...]
With Illustrations by Carlo Quispe I don’t go to Dr. Dave for check-ups, just when something goes wrong. And something is wrong today. I suck down the last hit of my cigarette and stub it beside a mural of spray-painted camouflage that covers part of Dr. Dave’s corner office on Clinton and Stanton. A sign—red cross inside a white circle—hovers [...]
The front of the White House wasn’t that bad. The reviews online had been awful but perhaps they’d been hasty. The doors were bright blue and no place with bright blue doors could be that bad. I heaved my suitcase over the step. At the train station, a frat boy had tried to help me with it. “Jesus Christ, how [...]
My partner and I found an apartment with one bedroom—one more bedroom than either of us had in our old places. The new residence did not, however, have a bathtub. The bathroom—an extension of a hallway that also served as the kitchen—was too small for a tub. The space left for a tub measured about three feet by three feet. [...]
I don’t know what I’m doing here. It is a Thursday night and I am in a tiny Lower East Side theater at a dress rehearsal for the play I’m in where I am going to take all my clothes off. Now, generally, I don’t act and do not, by any means, take all my clothes off. This is how [...]
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