You are currently browsing the stories about the “Midtown” neighborhood.
The candle does not just smell of street-corner pine forests and homemade apple pies; it also smells of tinsel, traffic, and the extra table leaves in place to make room for four, five or--if they really squeeze--six more cousins. Honestly, if you’ve never owned a Slatkin Holiday candle, you’ve never really been home for Christmas. This time last year, I [...]
I hustle into the car, glad to secure a seat. It’s always musical chairs on the cross-town shuttle, full-grown adults making a mad dash to slip into any remaining sliver of real estate. The open desperation on their faces and their coiled, tense bodies once embarrassed me. But I’m used to it now. I’m one of them. There is no [...]
We were three gay women surrounded by a ring of testosterone in an Irish pub in midtown. The Rangers were on TV playing the Sabres in the semifinals taking place down the street in Madison Square Garden. Grown men sat at the bar in team jackets and hats and cheered the onscreen action. Maybe they couldn’t get tickets--what was I [...]
The lobby of The American Theatre of Actors has the dimensions of a good-sized loft. The walls are lined with rows of old theater seating, about half the seats functional, others semi-functional, propped up with wood, or hanging low. Several are covered, permanently out of commission. There’s the box-office. Double doors open on the theater. Facing away from the theater, [...]
It was a garmento’s worst nightmare--not that I consider myself typical of the type who hustles through life working in the apparel industry. But there I was, literally trapped in one of the notorious bargain stores located in the heart of the Garment Center in New York City. I was in Conway’s on 35th and Broadway wedged between three circular [...]
(This story took place on a stalled Amtrak train one hundred feet from Penn Station. Therefore, since the train didn’t get to New Jersey yet, I’m calling this a Manhattan story. Though, that can be argued about by those who say it’s not where you are that’s important – that’s just earth stuff - but where you’re going to end [...]
Herald Square is not a good neighborhood in which to work. In fact, it’s not a neighborhood at all. It’s an area. On street level there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Office buildings empty into crowds of slow-moving shoppers who move in and out of the oxymoronic Manhattan Mall. They move about at a bovine pace. They take [...]
The mysteries of 47th Street—men in oily black suits and beards the color of tar, swollen red noses and black eyes lined in soot, wiry eyebrows, faces half-hidden by coarse pepper-black hair, tallit dragging from the sweaty hems of their coats. Men with secrets. In their pockets, translucent wax paper folded and folded again like some ancient origami. Papers passed [...]
There are some things you do purely for love. Or I should say there are things you do purely for sex with the one you love. You do things not because you are in love but rather because your significant other withholds sex and bothers you about them so much that finally you simply cave and bend to their request. [...]
I took the subway uptown to stop by my old boss’s townhouse. Drop by any time, she’d said. Just ring the bell. We were on good terms. I had quit that job to take something downtown. The new job paid a little bit more, but it hadn’t worked out. Now I was back working as a waitress. My old boss [...]
Finally we were meeting for dinner. I called him at just the right time when he happened to be in the neighborhood. That meant that he had class at Hunter and I was on his way home, in between him and Fort Greene. "Why don't you come up here?" he asked. "Because I'm down here, and it would take me [...]
I'm standing on the crowded Lexington Avenue subway platform, waiting for either the N or W Train to take me off the island of Manhattan. A drone-like female voice booms over the loudspeaker: "Ladies and Gentlemen, pan-handling is against the law. Please do not give to law-breakers. Please give instead to charities that support those in need. Thank you." I [...]
The bouncer pulled the door. Daylight, quite a shock. How long were we unconscious, the Important Visiting Friend and I? We squinted our way out into the day, me very reluctantly, him, I recall, more bravely. He wanted to see a movie, as usual. Had he planned to see this film, memorized the location and times the day before? Or [...]
Rada told me to be at the broker's office at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday. I showed up eating the last of my sublet's granola bars. Abandoned desks sat side by side without cubicle separators; it was like the newsroom of the Daily Planet. The receptionist seated me, then quickly disappeared into the bathroom. She did not return. Rada materialized at [...]
Day talked about those skintight hologram jeans for weeks. It was 1978, and they'd look nice for shooting heroin in the basement lavatory at CBGB, especially in the snazzy lilac color with the lime iridescent overlay, and they'd look nice later--complementary--when she turned blue outside on the sidewalk. The jeans cost $65.00, a considerable sum for 1978, and they were [...]
The sex club looked more like a cheesy New Jersey club than a happening orgy fest. There were balloons on the ceiling and people dancing to seventies music. Most of the people were not very attractive. The women were bleached blondes with frizzy hair and a bit dumpy or with fake boobs. The men had beer guts and receding hairlines. [...]
Thus spoke the Redhead Complainer: "So I told him to get his own goddamned dinner." This vivacious female who rides the N train with me regularly once appeared intriguing--that is, until I finally heard her speak. And that only happened a few weeks ago, when the subway car was particularly bustling and my fatigued frame conveniently happened to be jammed [...]
This morning I saw a dead bird on 52nd Street. It was lying on its back on the sidewalk in between Park and Madison Avenues, in front of a Duane Reade Pharmacy. Its feet were in the air. At first I wasn’t sure if it was dead. It looked like it was just dozing, sunning its chest and staring at [...]
During my second year of living in the city I almost drowned in despair. I refused to admit it to myself – and especially not to my nagging parents who regularly suggested I move home to California –but New York was crushing me. The city had delivered a series of blows, starting with a broken heart. My Greek borough-bred boyfriend, [...]
For some people, a bicycle is something to be taken out for a pleasant jaunt in the park on weekends, an opportunity to feel the breeze in your hair and to coast alongside novice roller bladers whose eyes are wide with terror. Then there are the brave souls who use it to make a living, the bicycle messengers, a group [...]
A letter came in the mail not long ago, informing me that it was time to make a pilgrimage back to my old college for my tenth year reunion. The letter has sat on my desk ever since, sometimes under a pile, and sometimes, after a vigorous purge of junk, all by itself, unabashedly requesting my attention. There are several [...]
Every few years, on the front page of the Times, a plan is announced by a consortium of merchants and industrialists and bankers to transform Forty-second Street into a squeaky-clean thoroughfare. One recent proposal calls for glass-enclosed atriums (the Ford Foundation, sponsoring the project, is big on Atriums), "bridges crisscrossing 42nd Street, and escalators moving through a complex set of [...]
A company called Viacom has recently purchased another company called Paramount for about ten billion dollars. This followed several months of intensive maneuvering between Viacom and another company called QVC. The competition held the businessmen and a large segment of the media in thrall. It was also good news for poets and the like. It's not often that what is [...]
I was reading the fall issue of Esquire Gentleman recently, experiencing the slightly pleasing, slightly lulling sensation of an American fashion magazine, when I came across a photo of Adolf Hitler in a pin-striped suit. It was part of an article on old-fashioned pin-stripe suits, like the ones worn by the Duke of Windsor or Al Capone, who were also [...]
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away--that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter in a paper bag from [...]
"Chef!" The word rings out over the din of the vast kitchen, swirling in heat and motion, as 62 men and women in white smocks and white chef's hats go about the business of making dinner for the eight O'clock seating. "Chef!" The eight o'clock seating at Le Cirque is not to be taken lightly. The New York Times has [...]
Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (the protruding piers its cilia) or like a gourd or like some kind of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere. The Japanese of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had a word, ukiyo, [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut: a masterpiece or utter crap? My own impression was that it was utter crap when I saw it a little over a year ago, though I did enjoy the movie in certain ways, none of them, I felt at the time, intended. Since then I watched Kubrick's Lolita again and was [...]
1993 Like most of the people who haunt Shea Stadium these days, Steve Calandro is a diehard Mets fan. He's also a vendor, and the vendors, like the Mets, aren't having a terribly good year. The vendors work for the Harry M. Stevens Corporation, and when things are slow, as they have been this season, who gets to work is [...]
The strange twinge that often comes when I leave work and head west on 56th Street is, oddly, much like the same thing that hit the center of my gut when, at 13, I rode a bike to a movie theater in South Jersey and, with my school buddies, went to see my first R-rated movie. It's as if, confronting [...]
One of the first things a new visitor to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is likely to notice is how well dressed most of the men are. Monsoon rains may turn the streets into shallow lakes, the electricity may be erratic, but the men are fairly consistent in their outfit--a pair of slacks and a neat button down short sleeve shirt. The [...]
My story is true. Every detail I will relate is exactly as it happened on a beautiful spring day, May 16, 2000. This story starts in Kingston, NY, where four co-workers from the Ulster County Department Of Social Services prepare for a wonderful, exciting day in New York City. At 6:30 a.m. all four women, Janet, Sue, Gloria and Reine [...]
My dad worked in midtown at an advertising agency and for years as a young kid I would go to work with my him in the summers, just as a way to stay out of trouble. We would always take the same route and on the way we would pass an old decrepit building sandwiched between two large contemporary buildings. [...]
I call myself a security consultant because it sounds better than salesman but, essentially, I'm a salesman. I sell security products, primarily safes. My dad preceded me in this. He was with the Mosler Safe Company starting around 1948 and, quite frankly, as a kid, the work sounded very dull to me. I wanted to be a playboy of the [...]
Here is a note Isaac Mizrahi wrote to Grace Mirabella shortly after she was replaced by Anna Wintour as the Editor of Vogue Magazine.
Patricia Bosworth, the author of biographies of Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus and who has been at work on a biography of her father, Bartley Crumb, for the last 10 years, recently had the idea that it might be nice if a group of biographers could gather now and then and commiserate, perhaps over lunch at the China Bowl, a [...]
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