You are currently browsing the stories about the Morningside Heights neighborhood

Playing It Out

by 06/26/2022
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights, Upper West Side

Everything got worse in New York except my jump shot. Though I looked the part —  white, six foot and fair featured, like some towhead from the Midwest — shooting was not my ticket on the court. In the small school league in Washington where I had starred, I got my points going to the […]

Moving to Queens

by 03/06/2022
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights, Sunnyside

I lived in Manhattan for most of my considerably long life, until moving to Queens four years ago.  In my early adulthood, Manhattan was still affordable, so affordable that the people who worked the jobs that sustain city life—cops, teachers, garbage men, hospital and transit workers—could afford to live in certain areas of it. So […]

Interview

by 07/04/2021
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

I want to be in New York because Sophia is in New York. This leads me from my home in the Jersey suburbs to the waiting room of a doctor’s office, an alumni who will interview me for a prestigious New York college. I sit and wait, squirming, and think about that tired joke about […]

Man Kicks Car

by 09/26/2013
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

Learning to walk the streets of Manhattan means learning how to jaywalk. When we first moved here, several years ago, from California, I was amazed at others and then at myself for jaywalking even while under the gaze of police officers. Crossing the streets in New York means looking and betting on yourself to outrace […]

Courting Coincidence

by 03/13/2011
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights, Uncategorized

With amorous eyes I looked forward to the summer of 1976. Not long out of law school, I had just landed a job with a landlord/tenant law firm in lower Manhattan, and had rented a beach house on Fire Island for the season. I was dating a girl named Elizabeth, and though we had not […]

Requiem For a Regular

by 07/28/2007
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

We called him Broadway Johnny, and as far as I know, none of us ever learned his last name. Every morning for the past fifteen years, he’d hobble out of Amsterdam House, the nursing home on 112th Street, and head for Straus Park to wait for Cannons, the dark Irish bar on 108th where Hemingway […]

Blood on the Tracks

by 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

Thoughts of tomorrow always began for me with, “One day I’ll do that”. But circumstances have changed the scope of my choices, and now I wear time next to me like a second skin. I have grown into New York like a pear in a bottle, and I don’t expect that I’ll ever go to […]

College Town

by 12/31/2006
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

I’m thinking about breaking the law. Not the law of the city and state of New York. The law of the neighborhood. I live in a college town. The boundaries of this town are roughly between 110th Street and 125th Street on the west side of Manhattan, though the holdings and minor fiefdoms extend well […]

Post New Blog

by 09/24/2006
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

People. What can I say. Are unpredictable. Quite. It’s approaching four years since we first met at Bar 13 downtown while listening to some of the dopest spoken word artists. Most notable was Bonafide, Puerto Rican kid, Columbia guy. We both were given to the electronic medium of connecting, given that substantive “real-time” connections were […]

Shrugging off the Strike at Columbia

by 02/22/2006
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

Alma Mater, the massive, laurel wreath-sporting statue-woman who sits at the heart of the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights, strikes an ambiguous pose: her forearms raised, her palms open to the sky, her face blank. This gesture can be interpreted in all kinds of ways, but, on days like Tuesday, it was a shrug. Many […]

The Old Man and the Strike

by 01/05/2006
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

You would think that everyone would know about the New York City Transit Strike, with its coverage in newspapers and television around the clock. On the 2nd day of the strike, I discovered I was wrong. After meeting with a friend at a Starbucks in Morningside Heights, I faced the prospect of either walking to […]

My Current Favorite School

by 11/03/2005
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

I hate high school. I hate the food and the bathroom doors don’t shut. I hate the flickering fluorescent lights and it’s always cold. Most of all, though, I hate the people who claim high school is the best time of your life. Since freshman year, I’ve been looking at colleges. Instead of going to […]