You are currently browsing the stories about the Midtown neighborhood

Advanced Poetry

by 07/03/2022
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Midtown

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 […]

Manhattan Street Locator

by 02/27/2022
Neighborhood: Manhattan, Midtown East

In the Manhattan telephone directory “white pages,” there used to be a page that came just before alphabetical listings of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Along with a list of Post Office addresses and a map of City zip codes, it featured the Manhattan Address Locator.  A simple looking table, it performed a kind of […]

Kaddish in the Time of Covid

by 05/16/2021
Neighborhood: Berkshires, Midtown

What is it about anniversaries? Is it that the earth is again in the same place relative to the sun, and that we are occupying the same spot in the cosmos? You were here, but differently. Something has changed from when you were at this position before: you got married; planes hit the twin towers; […]

A Breaking Point

by 02/16/2020
Neighborhood: Midtown East

Bellevue was a dark castle in my childhood imagination. In grade school, long before I knew that my own mother had once landed there, my classmates and I spoke of Bellevue in a chilled whisper, as the place you’d end up in if you lost your mind. A straitjacket and a padded cell would be […]

Spice World

by 01/19/2020
Neighborhood: Midtown, Theatre District

My daughter Hazel, after ten years of listening to what her parents wanted to hear and wanted her to hear, found music that neither her father or I could lay claim to, pop music designed for girls her age: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera. We’d taken her to see Bob Dylan at Jones Beach […]

Ashok’s Shop

by 06/09/2019
Neighborhood: Midtown

For twelve years there was a convenience shop I frequented in the Manhattan office building where I work. It was a cramped place, essentially a hole in the wall with a door attached to it, at the back end of the lobby. The sign on the door said Headline Newsstand, but as newspapers gradually disappeared […]

The Bloody Stranger

by 01/27/2019
Neighborhood: Midtown, Subway

I moved to this city from Akron, Ohio in August 1971, and by the Summer of 1972, I was starting to wonder if I could actually make it here. I wasn’t earning enough to have my own apartment and still found the pace of the city overwhelming. I was certainly not going to head back home, […]

Karma is as Karma Does

by 01/06/2019
Neighborhood: Midtown, Port Authority

The sun was gone, blotted out by the Port Authority’s roof. I disembarked into the effluvium of the upper tunnel and made for the gate. From there, clacking escalators, one flight after another, shunted me toward the bottom floor, the subway level. The vendor stalls had all been shuttered, and the soles of my shoes […]

Goodbye, 48th Street

by 07/17/2018
Neighborhood: Midtown

For my son, Silas, it was Mimi’s Pizza on 84th and Lexington. Approaching the corner location and discussing the toppings we’d put on our slices as we did every Friday on our way to his grandmother’s where he would be dropped off to spend the night, we saw not only that the gates were pulled […]

The Cult of the Algonquin Round Table

by 06/23/2018
Neighborhood: Midtown

Accessible only by stairs and freight elevator, the thirteenth floor of the Algonquin Hotel contains a laundry room, an office used by the housekeeping department, and a few rooms of storage. No bon mots have been recorded there. “It was so cluttered,” Manuela Rappenecker, the hotel’s General Manager since 2014, said of her first trip […]

The Camera and The Audience

by 04/25/2018
Neighborhood: Midtown, Times Square

It’s a summer Sunday in New York and my father and I take the subway to 57th Street. We’re going to a movie called My Fair Lady. The movie is about a lady who wears old clothes and then fancy clothes, and goes to a ball where everybody loves her because now she’s pretty. As we leave the theater, […]

New York! Just Like I Pictured It, Sorta. Well, No.

by 03/16/2016
Neighborhood: Hell's Kitchen, Midtown

Stepping outside the slightly threadbare art deco hotel lobby—which I refused to perceive as anything but Busby Berkeley glamorous—I melded into the midtown throng. While no one looked like Holly Golightly, I was not going to be disappointed on my first day in New York City. Not if I had any say in the matter. […]