You are currently browsing the stories about the “Midtown” neighborhood.
My first real job was in a recording studio on 8th Avenue and 44th Street, producing movie commercials for broadcast on the radio. I was the second engineer, which sounds a lot more impressive than it was. I set up microphones, recorded the talent, edited sound effects and music, layered the voice over the background sound. When the mix was [...]
In my youth I wore a red beret. Twenty-some years ago, I was a New York City Guardian Angel who patrolled Restaurant Row with Curtis Sliwa and his wife, Lisa, and about ten other vigilantes. We were a small group who made a lot of noise. We also patrolled the “A” train, which we nicknamed the “Muggers’ Express.” Express trains [...]
It’s not that you have to wait in line it’s how you spend your time waiting. At first I planned for a Netbook to do my writing on the go. Keyboard, long battery life and reasonable price were the enticing factors. I checked out a Netbook on display inside the Staples store on 6th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. [...]
My good friend’s elderly grandmother was always losing her handbag – leaving it in restaurants, bank lobbies, once in a Times Square movie theatre. One morning the old woman awoke and could not remember what her handbag was for; and so, within weeks her family moved her to a nursing home where her senility rapidly progressed. When she finally passed [...]
Back in the 1970’s, my girlfriends and I decided to spend a Saturday night without boys at a restaurant in midtown called Jacques. Long gone now, Jacques was a cool, elegant white table-cloth place that stayed open late and served delicious Hungarian food. We looked lovely walking in, in our pretty summer dresses and soft shampooed hair. While the maitre [...]
The door to Karen’s office was open and I waved a little hello as I entered, indicating that I would only be a second. Karen was the creative director at the magazine publisher where I was freelancing as a copy editor. I thought there was something cozy about her, something very motherly, in a distracted kind of way. She and [...]
The voice on the phone is asking what I see, and since this is the third time we’ve spoken, I’m feeling a bit chummy. “Police cruisers,” I say, taking in the block. “A whole shit load.” We’ve been tracking each other since Penn Station, this voice and I, for precautionary reasons I’m told, and this is where it ends: Thin [...]
In the late-70s Fiorucci on East 60th Street was the style center for the disco world of New York. The windows boasted the latest flash fashion from Italy. These trendy threads guaranteed almost immediate entrance into Studio 54 or any exclusive disco in Manhattan. Joey Arias was the store manager in the summer of 1977 and the part-time singer featured [...]
I usually hate Times Square. At its best it is a bunch of light bulbs on steroids, marquees on acid and fluorescence on speed. But no real light penetrates this galaxy as reflected milky ways of neon; garish, overpowering signs and streaming advertisements all compete to be the best travesty of the sun. While light races above you, movement down [...]
This is a story about my grandmother, who was young in Manhattan in the 1920s. Speakeasies, nightclubs, drop-waisted dresses, bobbed hair, cloche hats, waist-length strands of dime-store pearls. Even for a middle-class workaday office girl like Frances Thornton, those were heady times. She was among the first of the gals in her office to bob her hair, which caused Chub, [...]
This weekend I went to see a film called The Wrestler. I am quite neurotic about going to the movies. Because in New York City, theaters, especially on weekends, tend to fill up and sell out quickly, I make it a point to show up about an hour early. I feel panicked when there are lines, and I really like [...]
The snow is beautiful and magical as it begins to come down in light flakes in the early morning hours of late February. The roads and sidewalks are still manageable, the seagulls playfully carving the air a few blocks away from the Hudson, children throwing snowballs, people out walking their dogs. As the hours pass the snow continues to fall [...]
“Je m’a…,” I’d stuttered to Aristede Mezondes, the serious young man in a grey wool overcoat, standing before me with ramrod posture. “Je m’appelle Dr. Ofri.” There. I’d gotten it out. The language of Descartes, Voltaire, and Balzac had clearly vacated my cortex. Despite those years of French classes and one brief visit to Paris, “Je m’appelle” was the best [...]
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 [...]
"THE first thing I did when I got off at Penn Station, I went into this phone booth. I felt like giving somebody a buzz. I left my bags right outside the booth so I could watch them, but as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anybody to call up.'' So begins the New York adventure of [...]
By the third day of working on the case with Ray we were comfortable enough around each other to drop our professional facades and start slacking off a little. At first neither one of us knew how career-minded the other guy was so we kept using industry terminology relevant to the case. It was really tiring; I was so pleased [...]
When I woke up that morning, I thought we were in my East Village apartment sleeping in my bed. I thought we had fallen in love. It was the sound of his voice that convinced me, soothing and sexy, masculine and raw. His words were unintelligible as they crept through the dark. I liked the sound of my name on [...]
Morty Gunty grew up in my neighborhood. Morty Gunty was a two-bit standup comic. Morty Gunty played himself in Woody Allen’s film “Broadway Danny Rose.” Both Morty and Woody went to my high school, Midwood High, but Morty doesn’t rate a Wikipedia mention. Perhaps his greatest exposure was as the backup host for the Cerebal Palsy Telethon. When Dennis James [...]
I live in New Jersey. That means that I have been known to frequent Manhattan as a somewhat out of place and bemused bridge and tunneler. A friend of mine is a rising star in the New York music scene. (This means that she occasionally gets a free beer and sometimes she even gets paid!) As a result, I find [...]
My legs ached, but we had nothing else to do so we kept circling the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree over and over again. All I had on was this long brown jacket that looked like a cross between a trench coat and a windbreaker. It provided no warmth at all, but I was convinced it was the coolest thing ever, [...]
Shortly after noon on October 7, a Harpo Marx horn was blown four times and the monthly Madison Avenue Sports Car Driving and Chowder Society meeting came to order. Founded in 1957 by CBS Radio executive Art Peck and advertising executive King Moore to generate media for car enthusiasts, the Society meets monthly to talk auto shop. Original members included [...]
It is 3pm on a weekday, and I have left the office to caffeinate. As I step through the revolving doors and out into the day, I note that summer has seamlessly turned into fall. I gather this not from any change in the weather, but because the kids are back. I work in Midtown in a monolithic glass tower, [...]
I knew very little about diamonds as a child other than Superman could squeeze coal with his steel-hard hands to create diamonds and my father had bought a diamond ring for my mother. It was a hundredth of the size of the diamonds Superman never gave to Lois Lane, but my mother loved hers, often singing, “Diamonds are a girl’s [...]
It’s 31 degrees on the third Saturday in February and I’m ignoring everyone on 9th Avenue. I am not a native and my ability to ignore is still a blunt instrument, numbing when engaged, so that walking down the street feels a bit like being led by a string out of a dark tunnel into the bright lights of the [...]
I’ve become obsessed by wrinkles. Particularly the ones surrounding my eyes and across the map of my forehead that extend like arid rivers across my skin’s terrain. About a year ago, I purchased my first wrinkle cream, Oil of Olay Anti-Aging Eye Gel ($12.99) from the local Duane Reade. This was followed by Olay’s Regenerist Microdermabrasion Treatment and Peel Activator [...]
Back in the days when bookselling was uninfected by the dubious influence of Oprah’s Book Club, I was employed at the historic Midtown Book Retailers, a New York City landmark. The bookshop was housed in a now bulldozed brownstone buffeted by crags of diamond mines, popularly known as West 47th St. Manhattan, ground zero of the vertebrate universe, as advertised [...]
My radiant, delusional mother, my two older brothers, and I lived in second-rate hotels and one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan from 1961, when I was five, until 1967. We’d sporadically get locked out of wherever we were staying for not keeping up with the rent, have our possessions confiscated, and spend the night sleeping in Central Park, or nursing hot chocolates [...]
I’ll admit it, I was uptight. I didn’t know what to expect and tend to have social anxiety in big groups, even when the folks that comprise them are fully clothed. I sat uncomfortably in the Beamer, cruising down 2nd. Still, I don’t consider myself a prude and the opportunity to go and view seemed fascinating. I also rationalized that [...]
As the New Years Eve hullabaloo in Times Square exploded, I followed suit with a cataclysmic orgasm. That was the good news! Then things became Byzantine! Did complications arise because I met Desmond on Craigslist, where a dizzying succession of weirdoes and losers answered my ad? Since that New Years, I’ve evolved a strategy, plus adopted a scientific detachment to [...]
I only had twenty-four hours in New York to buy my grandmother a gift for her 90th birthday before my flight out to Portland for the big party. I’d just gotten back from Germany where I unsuccessfully tried to woo a woman I’d been in love with, or thought I’d been in love with, for three years. A tall, thin, [...]
In commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of “Star Wars,” a number of mailboxes around the city have been made over--shrouded in an industrial strength decal--like R2-D2, my preferred mailbox among them. The USPS website quotes a postal representative as saying it was a “natural fit,” the tone of his hyperbole exuberant. My suspicion is that it has more to do [...]
I come home to find a message on my answering machine from the nurse at my daughter’s school. “We had a case of head lice in the 5th grade, so we did a school-wide check.” Pause. “Meredith has some nits.” I immediately think of The Thorn Birds, which I read when I was a kid. I know it was meant [...]
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? --William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and brawny, toying with the tail [...]
Driving along the West Side Highway in New York City, there is a sign that reads: Intrepid Museum returning Fall 2008. And every time I’ve seen it these past two years, I think, “By the time the Intrepid returns, my book will be finished.” I first saw the USS Intrepid in 1999, not as part of a historical tour of [...]
As always when I break up with a boyfriend, I go back to trusted Craigslist. There’s something comforting about shopping for sex on the internet. Safety behind the screen. This time, I was more daring. I wanted a dominant man. This much I knew for sure. I’ve had a lot of mediocre sex in my time. And over the past [...]
My wife is one of an elusive American species: the serious reader. And like many serious readers, she also indulges in crap. For a long stretch she indulged in a guilty pleasure known to many but not known to me, until one Christmas season years ago: the Regency-era paperback romance. These books aren’t the sexed-up bodice-rippers with Fabio-like models on [...]
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