You are currently browsing the stories about the Midtown neighborhood
A Breaking Point
by David Weiss 02/16/2020Neighborhood: 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 Amy Rigby 01/19/2020Neighborhood: 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 Jacob Margolies 06/09/2019Neighborhood: 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 Donna Bailey 01/27/2019Neighborhood: 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 Jeff Loeb 01/06/2019Neighborhood: 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 Julian Tepper 07/17/2018Neighborhood: 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 Ash Carter 06/23/2018Neighborhood: 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 Nancy Rommelmann 04/25/2018Neighborhood: 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 Sharon Watts 03/16/2016Neighborhood: 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. […]
Jersey Nights on Broadway
by Lisa Romeo 03/14/2016Neighborhood: Midtown
We saw Jersey Boys on Broadway not long ago, and it was a grand show, but of course we’re Italian-Americans from northern New Jersey, my husband and I, and our two boys, so naturally we’d love it. Frank and I are just old enough that we remember Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons not as […]
Brownies
by Paddy Boom 01/02/2016Neighborhood: Manhattan, Midtown
There were very few places to score any weed in the suburbs of Chappaqua, NY, in the winter of 1986. Feeling itchy and bored during my Christmas break from the School of Visual Arts, I hopped into my orange 1974 VW Super Bug on a mission to get ‘baked’ with some school buddies. My main […]
The Empire State Building Loves Me
by Alexa Brahme 09/13/2015Neighborhood: All Over, Central Park, Midtown, Union Square
The day before my birthday was beautiful. It was one of those clear summer days in New York that somehow evades the typical humidity and the sun’s unbearable heat. Instead of roasting everything beneath it, the sun proudly showcased New York’s beauty. The pink and purple flowers on the High Line unfurled themselves towards the […]