You are currently browsing the stories about the “Lower East Side” neighborhood.
On Saturday night I walked from my apartment on the Lower East Side over to Housing Works in SoHo. It was a little after 8:00 at night and my intention was to spend a few pleasant hours drinking coffee and reading Grapes of Wrath. It was also a way to give my wife some time to herself in the apartment, [...]
Recently, driving with my grandmother to meet family for dinner at a French restaurant on Lafayette, mouth watering in anticipation of filet mignon, I bemoaned the fate of the once urban wasteland, now over developed, over exposed Lower East Side we had both grown up in. As I ranted she nodded, indifferent to the hipsters in suede boots weaving through [...]
On the train on the way home, I scan the occupants of the car, playing Wildly Inappropriate Matchmaker, my favorite daydream. For the purposes of this exercise, I settle on a tall woman with black hair tied back tight, librarian glasses slipping down her nose as she reads a copy of Finnegans Wake. I want to put her with the [...]
It is a cool, dry August evening and I am in a windowless room at 111 Centre Street. I leave New York, the city of my birth, in less than a week. Yet, through a series of escalating events, I choose to be here, stubbornly clinging to the dream of winning back a minor sum of money with the help [...]
On May 20th, while most of the city was watching the Yankees and Mets slug it out for "Best Team in New York Baseball" bragging rights, just beneath their feet, a different sort of battle was being contested inside the Brooklyn-bound J train. The whole car, even when stationary with its doors open onto a platform, was rattling from the [...]
I felt like I owed him something, even if I couldn’t say what. It wasn’t money. I closed my eyes like a dead man and gave those coins to the nuns on the corner. My brother is a music publisher. I’m not really sure what this means, but I’m proud. People always ask about it. It’s not the usual thing [...]
6:30 A.M. I’ve only been able to sleep about six hours because there are three bars downstairs which close at around 3 A.M. It’s just getting light. I’m in a corner apartment on the 6th floor overlooking Orchard and Stanton Streets facing South and East. The morning sky is streaked with indigo, pink and brown. I close my eyes hoping [...]
Today it hit. I woke up with the usual thought—coffee. Despite the heat that caked my mouth like cracked paint, my craving kicked in immediately. I rolled out of bed and as I walked toward the kitchen it suddenly hit. My heart was broken. The heartbreak had been triggered the week before but the realization, like a sluggish messenger inadvertently [...]
On the southwest corner of 2nd Street and Avenue A is a nameless bar (its patrons refer to it as “2A”), and it has on its second floor large picture windows through which one can survey the goings on in the neighborhood. Across 2nd Street is a wide patch of sidewalk where a street vender can usually be seen selling [...]
The Mercury Lounge is a well-known venue for live music. All sorts of distinguished and screwed up and talented and untalented musicians have played there since the place was founded in 1993. It's been home to a great deal of rock music. Previously it was home to a different kind of rock. Before it was The Mercury Lounge, the space [...]
Chicago has its merits. For example: my apartment has a large garden in the front yard where I am sequestered if I wish to smoke because of my girlfriend Bertie's so-called allergic reaction to cigarette smoke, which she has failed to show any scientific documentation for, but that's another story. It could be 15 degrees and I'll be outside shivering [...]
This passage appears in the novel, The Sleep-Over Artist. Alex hadn't really believed that Katrina would agree to visit him in New York, and so he threw himself into the task of convincing her with a kind of easy abandon, as though it were a joke really, and he was teasing her. She had children, after all, and couldn't just [...]
12/31/00 It is the last day of the year at 8:30pm. I have just finished vacuuming, changing the sheets, and spraying the duvet with “Sweat Pea” pillow spray to make everything clean, cozy and refreshing on this wintry cold night. Tonight I am at home and alone, happily so, dancing around my apartment with dust rag in hand to the [...]
About Daniel Bell. Illustration by Milton Glaser In a recent letter to New York Magazine, an innocent lass from California asked, "What is an egg cream?" and was answered by The Underground Gourmet that like the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Holy or Roman, the egg cream contains neither egg nor cream but is simply a combination of [...]
Robert Longo--the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker--is in the habit of referring to himself as "Longo," just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, "This is Longo," and when we called back we [...]
“If you want to tell a story – start telling it. It might come out OK. It might not. At least you tried – better than leaving it in the fridge of memory. Sooner or later, like all man-made things, fridge will stop working and all goods will rot.” --Some guy on the steps near Ganga in Varanasi, India 1. [...]
I woke up feeling cold this morning and the clouds were fighting their way in between the bedroom blinds that were left open in the middle of the night. I found my body naked and bent and I thought about Nicole Du Fresne and her star quality blonde hair and blue eyes and perfect teeth and I wondered how her [...]
On our weekly descent into hell last night, we stopped at Nino’s for a slice. You can tell the New Yorkers from the By-Way-Of’s through a brief surveying of pizza eating technique; New Yorkers fold. You learn this at a young age. Hopefully, someone at some point in your upbringing takes you aside and shows you how. Or else you [...]
Living on the first floor of a tenement can have its advantages—no multiple flights to walk up at the end of a tiring day, or to stumble up after a long night. During the summer, the first floor always remains the coolest, so I don’t feel like I will die a broiling, stuffy death unless I install and run an [...]
Gooning / n. / the random beating of an unsuspecting victim, usually by a goon gang Usually when I cross the Williamsburg Bridge this late at night I'm thinking, “This would be the perfect place for a random act of violence.” But this particular time the thought didn't occur because I was engrossed in a cell phone conversation—that is, an [...]
The spray-painted image of Tony’s tightly clipped mustache and smooth fade is beginning to show its age — but his dark eyes still stare out intently from the wall at indifferent passersby. This is still the Loisaida, he might boast: Spanglish for the Lower East Side. Tony’s pupils are guarded, harboring the memory of the violent episode in 1993 that [...]
The high ceiling lofts feel more SoHo than Lower East Side, though the view of Seward Park High School to the north and tenement bricks from the terraces facing south easily reorient you. This freshly painted blue building gracing Grand Street between Essex and Ludlow Streets originally housed a piano showroom and warehouse before the Sunray Yarn factory took it [...]
I pointed them out to you just a few weeks before you left. They were a couple–a man and woman--a few years older than us, maybe in their late forties, traipsing along the sidewalk in that odd way they had of walking–taking funny little unbalanced steps, but steps that moved them hastily along nonetheless. Neatly dressed, yet incongruous: the man [...]
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is located at 97 Orchard Street. From the outside, it appears to be no different than any of the other buildings on the street, save for a plaque proclaiming it to be a National Historic Landmark. On the inside, it is a different story. Through painstaking research of the former inhabitants of the tenement, [...]
He is a pop artist of modest fame. I know he once designed a Barneys window display, and I think he paints murals for Unicef. Beyond that, I know very little about him. Aside from what he looks like naked. It began innocently enough: I was stumbling home in an uncomfortable pair of shoes when he approached me from behind, [...]
Late last year the 78-year-old filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas debuted his new diary film. The title, awkward but precise, is, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." Its running time is around five hours, so it can only play once in an evening. On the first night of its run, Mekas held a little [...]
I heard that Jack died. I take that back. I heard he was killed. I take that back too. I heard he was put to sleep. It was one of those pieces of information that had a hell of a lot more resonance for me than it did for the person who told me. In fact, the person who told [...]
Ann Magnuson begins her new one-woman show, Rave Mom, standing in a hotel room in Las Vegas, high on ecstasy, staring at the radiantly naked form of a young, blonde man with "the body of a surfer." He reaches out to touch her, and though Magnuson refrains from describing what happens next, peals of another kind of ecstasy follow. She [...]
There is a cohesive community of would-be slam poets, could-be greeting card writers and should-remain computer programmers in New York City, and they meet at various open mic nights around town. I happened upon one of these amateur slams when a friend of mine admitted to being a closet writer of poems (she wasn’t sure if she could actually call [...]
Early 1980's. Alphabet City. Segments are airing on national TV about drugs, guns, general life-threatening disorder. Yet, still and all, it's where the artists live. Coax a cab east and try your luck. On Avenue B, half-windowed buildings. Puerto Rican mafia guys lurking. Street lights, but they do little more than rattle and buzz. Rats. You carefully watching your footsteps [...]
One would be inclined to describe Jen Miller's 5'3'' frame as pixyish, were it not for her very strong self- identification with another sort of sprite. Miller, a 29-year-old Lower East Side performance artist, would love to wake up one morning to find she'd become an elf. Barring that unlikely miracle, she'll have to settle for wearing her prosthetic elf [...]
Jon Voight he was not. But the Midnight Cowboy rides again in the Big Apple. It was twilight, late April, 2001. A cool breeze blew from the East River as I waited for the Manhattan bound J train at Marcy Avenue. The J ferries passengers, mostly working folks, across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan. On the Brooklyn [...]
One night the owner of Sweet and Vicious, Hakan, hurled a block of ice the size of a softball and hit me in the temple. I was in the middle of pouring another drunk girl a Cosmopolitan. It was a Saturday night, and the bar was absolutely packed. Her mouth flew open, revealing a piece of well-chewed gum. I froze, [...]
On Saturday, August 6, 1988, I was possibly even more abstracted than usual, because it was well nigh midnight before I realized that I had neglected to eat dinner, and that the refrigerator contained nothing but half a jar of horseradish. So I set out for a greasy spoon on Second Avenue, in the heart of the sidewalk market district [...]
In 1969 I took some time out from New York to slow down and try to patch it up with my husband, Lee. I called him in New Mexico and he sent me a ticket to Albuquerque. The last time I had seen Lee he was scuttling down Macdougal St. glowering over his shoulder and lugging a pillowcase full of [...]
I was sitting in my 4th floor fire escape window on a hot summer afternoon, watching the sparse street life on 3rd St., a few people sitting around on our buildings stoop, a couple of guys had lawn chairs, a few guys standing outside the bodega...like that. Mine was a junky/hippie building, yeasty like the rest of the neighborhood, shit [...]
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