You are currently browsing the stories about the “Midtown” neighborhood.
In the spring of 1902, the lawman swung down from the train. He was nearly fifty and a trifle stocky now. But he had worked for Wyatt Earp and known Doc Holliday, he had upheld the law in Dodge City and kept the peace in Tombstone. His shooting hand had lost none of its cunning, the .45 still swung on [...]
The organizers of Erotica USA threw a party recently at a place called Club New York, and all the exhibitors and exhibitionists who will shortly be filling up the Javitz center for the four-day Sex Expo were invited. The evening began with a sort of Freudian slip--the address on the invitation, "225 West 43rd Street"--did not exist. So many of [...]
Of the big five, our sense of smell is supposedly the one most closely associated with our memories. And I buy that, because I’m always a little turned on when I smell Burberry perfume. I can’t really describe it, but I can always identify it when I smell it. My first college girlfriend wore Burberry perfume. And the sensation associated [...]
Every year on March 30th, Brooke Astor’s birthday, I think about the time I killed her. Here is how it happened: In 2000, Brooke Astor kindly lent her name to the Gotham Center for New York City History. Mike Wallace (the historian, not the reporter) was starting up a center at the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate New York City [...]
It was during my second month in the new office that I determined I was in love. She was standing next to the fax machine, paperwork in hand, bending over slightly so she could read the message in the small screen. She had a short skirt and long legs. They looked very shapely but solid. Clover never asked me to [...]
On my first day of the assignment I was pointed toward a stack of newspapers and told to find a pair of scissors so I could cut out any articles mentioning Hillary. My supervisor’s name was Jennifer. She was waving an adding machine above her head and ticker tape hung by her face like a fez tassel. “Howard! Is this [...]
I was walking to the office even though it was Saturday—this was years ago when I was gainfully employed and hadn’t the time I do now to dredge up incidents from the past and turn them this way and that—when I noticed a woman walking towards me, pushing a baby in a stroller and holding a little boy by the [...]
The world of magazine publishing in New York is extremely competitive. No matter how talented one is an editor or a writer, one must have contacts in the industry to obtain that first, entry-level job. Mrs. Carpati, my landlady, happened to work at Cosmopolitan in ad sales, and she was glad to introduce me to Hearst Magazines. I got lucky [...]
If you are of the runty persuasion (for our purposes let’s say 5' 2" or shorter – ceiling-skimming 5' 3ers need not apply) you likely know the terror that is the general admission rock show. You may – as I did for years – swear off the concert hall forever, foregoing its unforgiving expanses for the more amenable terrain of [...]
The old lady thrust her flabby arms toward me and yelled, “She’s a man!” I fixated on the waddle of skin beneath her chin. With her arms flapping and her waddle shaking, she looked like a turkey. “You’re sure Raven is a man?” Maury Povich cheerfully asked. I awaited gender judgment, posing in my seven-inch, black patent leather, come-fuck-me-but-please-don’t-make-me-walk-in-these heels, [...]
On the first day of the New York City transit strike of 2005 I went to talk to Rosa Gutgold. She sells pearls, and is usually good for a few pearls of wisdom. But Rosa did not come to work on the first day of the strike. Nor the second. On the third day the tiny kiosk she normally occupies [...]
I was recently musing about my time as a trainer at Manhattan's most prestigious 1980's gym: The Vertical Club. The place was loaded with the beautiful people and the celebrities they yearned to be. A regular in the weight room was one Bruce Cutler, the late John Gotti's lawyer. The barrel chested Cutler was a popular figure in the trendy [...]
1. If one peers through the storefront windows of the National Jewelers Exchange on West 47th Street, past the hundred or so feet of bustling merchants and shoppers and side-by-side display cases filled with gold and silver, all under the harsh track lighting suspended on cables from the 20-foot ceiling, one can just make out two old-fashioned words painted onto [...]
Photo by Ricky Powell In the midst of the most un-ironic activity in the world--sports--Marv Albert is a burst of jazzy, sardonic, droll Brooklynese. Marv is all about cadence and inflection; his initial notoriety was based on the pronunciation of a single word--"Yes!"--drawn out and shaped like a piece of taffy. For 24 years he has called play-by-play for the [...]
So we thought a movie, and he says “you pick one.” I look into it and suggest either that one about the Rwandan genocide or "Raging Bull" in a new print at the Ziegfeld. “Remember,” I ask him, “remember how at some point they started issuing tickets for actual seats at the Ziegfeld, with seat numbers? I wonder if they [...]
For six years I worked as a trainer and gym floor manager at the Vertical Club. What Studio 54 was to 1970s New York, the Vertical Club (VC) was to 1980s New York. A warehouse-sized health club, complete with neon lights and blaring dance music, it was where the Big Apple's social elite came to sweat, strain, moan, groan, and [...]
i'm getting fat. the thing is, i i'm a dominatrix. so i really can't. it's not that i'm in the habit of over indulging. my sister just got back from switzerland. so i'm eating her presents. that's p-r-e-s-e-n-t-s, not presence. i know you're going to think everything i say is about sex. that's what happens when you're a dominatrix. this [...]
Hello. Thank you for tuning into “The 1st Anniversary of the 2004 Republican National Convention.” Happy Birthday, Mr. President, indeed. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is proud to present twelve stories recounting the way that the Republican National Convention reshaped New York City, articulated from a wide variety of perspectives and in a wide variety of voices. Click here to enter the [...]
The revered pugilist/philosopher Iron Mike Tyson once mused: "Everyone has a plan until they get hit." And get hit everyone will. Case in point: Many of the Anybody-But-Bush (ABB) protesters who took to the streets of the Big Apple during the Republican National Convention in August 2004. I don't just mean blows suffered at the hands of an over-eager policeman; [...]
I expected to lose some dignity, I just didn't expect to lose it on the convention floor. The month of August the New York party business is in a coma--waitstaff and chefs either decamp to the Hamptons where there is plenty of work or vacation themselves. But last summer there were so many parties in town that the waitstaff could [...]
I work in the New York Public Library in the Wertheim Study. Tuesday, August 29th, 2004 I decided to work there and show up at the demonstration against the Republican National Convention to meet at the front steps of the library. Not only did we opposed the war in Iraq, as an expression of an attempt at submission, the Republicans [...]
>From: "LL Smooth J" >To: Subject: RNC Diary: Day One >Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:59:29 +0000 > Hello Friends. Pat Flynn threw down the gauntlet with his Boston DNC diary, and no one's picked it up just yet: Whatever, No Problem! I can do it! Day One of the RNC was quieter than expected, and besides I had to [...]
Take one large city already threatened into a constant state of low-level nervous breakdown with terrorism jitters and a rockpile of an economy. Scare away a large percentage of the population by placing a Republican Convention in the city’s center. Pour in 5,000 delegates, half a million protesters, seven billion journalists and a concentration of cops greater than the entire [...]
One morning last August, a week before the Republican National Convention, I took a cab to my studio in the Film Center Building on 45th and 9th. My cabdriver was wearing a natty chauffeur’s uniform, cap and all. Once we got going, he smiled at me in the rearview mirror and said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m all dressed [...]
Senator Wellstone: I will not go on about the curious timing of your death. People are very impatient with conspiracy theories these days, even when past theories have revealed conspiracies. Still, I read with weary cynicism that you spoke to a meeting of war veterans in Willmar, Minnesota in October 2002 and told them that Dick Cheney said to you, [...]
For 10 years I lived in New York City in the House of Carpati. Moving to New York after college was an ideal next step for a person who wanted to be a magazine editor, so that’s what I did. After spending the summer post-grad as a nanny in Scarsdale, and then six weeks house sitting for friends of the [...]
It was the Friday before Father's Day and I still had shopping to do. I wanted to get a little something for my boyfriend, Steve. I didn't normally get him a gift for this occasion, but now that his son was 21, fully grown by most standards and away at college, he no longer bought his dad a gift for [...]
A new customer took the stool next to me at the Morningstar Diner on 59th and 9th on the West Side. His name was Rich, a thin, white, middle-aged man carrying a plastic Gristede’s grocery bag that must have contained books. He took a seat, ordered a coffee to go, and I asked him about how the Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen/Jetlandia neighborhood [...]
I’m not the first nor will I be the last writer to wait tables. More illustrious authors in this category include Tennessee Williams, Michael Cunningham, who tended bar before he penned The Hours, and Cynthia Huntington (who was once told by her boss that she was the ‘best-educated barkeep in New York.’) While I don’t aspire to become what Anthony [...]
Eventually everything is history - even one's own life. I once caught a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy in the flesh - and that image, so radiant and energizing - has stayed with me for over 40 years. I saw him when I was an actress playing in a comedy called Mary, Mary on Broadway. Next door to my [...]
It was the middle of a heavy, overcast day. I was eating lunch in Greenacre Park. Most of the patio chairs were leaning against the tables, draining off the earlier rainfall. Usually this vest-pocket park on 51st Street between Third and Second Avenues is Standing Room Only at lunchtime. But the weather had scared away the usual crowd. So there [...]
October 23 is a cold, gray Saturday. I get off the train F train at Rockefeller Center and step out onto Sixth Avenue, underneath Radio City Music Hall. There is a film crew set up on the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 51st Street. A white light fills the corner. At the center of the light, a dark bearded [...]
I’m a long time Texan currently living in New York City, and I recently spent some time in the company of the Lone Star delegation, when they came to New York for the Republican National Convention. Most were esconced at the New York Hilton on 53rd and Sixth Avenue—“Avvnoo of the Amuricas,” as the delegates pronounced it. ** Tuesday, August [...]
Esteban Vicente arrived into the world in Turegano, Spain, in 1903. In 1921, he arrived at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. He arrived in Paris in 1929, and in 1936 he arrived in New York City. His reputation arrived somewhat later. In 1950, Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro included him in their "New Talents 1950" show at [...]
Midtown is the part that nobody loves, that nobody thinks of as home. The bars have no character and the delis are as uniform as cartoon nurses. If there is an all-night bodega, it must be a joyless one. (I like all-night bodegas. They are an unfailing source of joy and surprise to me. I can spend half-hours marvelling drunkenly, [...]
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