You are currently browsing the stories about the “Morningside Heights” neighborhood.
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 hoop. When I did hit [...]
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 could a 20-year old, who [...]
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 patients and patience. I read [...]
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 the oncoming traffic. I am [...]
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 discussed exclusivity, the times we [...]
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 purportedly used to drink, to [...]
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 Hawaii or Australia, or even [...]
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 beyond those borders. The college [...]
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 elusive. I wrote an original [...]
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 students I talked to shrugged [...]
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 apartment on 23rd St. [...]
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 volleyball practice or debate team [...]
Earlier that afternoon I had come back from a trip to visit my Dad in the Midwest. I braced myself for the crush of people as always, but as I left the gate at LaGuardia I immediately noticed that something felt different this time. First in the airport, then on the bus, and finally on Broadway no one seemed to [...]
Nadine had dark curly hair, a slow quiet voice and more stubborn patience then anyone I knew. She was showing me her favorite textile, a small pre-Columbian piece, dated around 500 BC. It was no bigger than a doormat, but she had been working on it for over six months. “These repeated geometric patterns form a god’s face,” she said. [...]
It was 1969 and cats were everywhere in Morningside Heights. Multitudes of feral alley prowlers, storefront dozers, and the gray cat who was allowed to sit in the open, unscreened window of the fourth floor apartment across the street. He was always reaching toward pigeons with a wistful paw, even though the pigeons were never anywhere close. Whenever I returned [...]
Julio, a boyish thirty-one, has difficulty not smirking when admitting to having slept with over seventy-five females. The majority were what Julio dubs "Barnard floozies": white, rich undergraduates at Columbia University or Barnard College. Julio can list most of their names on a napkin. Those whose names he can't recall, he can usually remember something about them, like the one [...]
Aspiring poets learn, early on, the value of concrete imagery; of replacing metaphorically huge words with small sensory explosions which blow the reader into reality. Allen Ginsberg didn't write "live life," he wrote of those "who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup." Sylvia Plath didn't say, "I mourn the dead," but rather, "Thirty years [...]
I took two of my kids to see the new Adam Sandler picture, “Little Nicky,” and there it was again, behind Sandler as he sniffed some flowers: Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway. When I was at Columbia College, in the gray and bankrupt and crumbling 1970s, my friends and I had a joke that someday, older and successful, we’d [...]
Pregnant and nauseous, I slid over and rolled down the window. Risa and I had gotten into a cab that smelled of cherry-scented cleaning fluid. I rolled the window fully open and a big fat raindrop splashed me on the forehead. It was one of those wet November days, too dark for normal. At home, we had to turn on [...]
At 7:30 on a Monday evening, my apartment on 122nd Street and Broadway fills with the voices of young Mormons singing hymns. From 7 on, around 40 clean-cut, blonde, smiling 20-somethings, some bearing baked goods, arrived in a continuous stream. They bustled down my bowling alley of a hallway to the living room, where they proceeded to comment on their [...]
I long ago decided that my next-door neighbors were mass murderers. They are nice, quiet, neat, and “keep to themselves.” In fact, I couldn’t confidently identify either one of them on the sidewalk or in a police line-up, I so rarely see them come or go. And I have never heard any noise coming from their apartment. I only know [...]
Ariel was convulsing. I had been trained in CPR, but couldn’t remember how to do it. The patient telephone was sitting by her side and a loud dial tone rang out. She was a bouncing fish on the stool, spewing foam from her mouth. I held her head so it wouldn’t rap against the wall. Her eyes rolled back. I [...]
After the World Trade Center is destroyed, I get drunk and seek comfort in the arms of an Orthodox Jewish friend. He is gentle. “I don’t have sex,” he says, and that is fine with me, although the distinction between intercourse and what we are doing seems non-existent. He is warm, and soft, and tentative, and I feel good about [...]
Mara from upstairs, who lives off flute lessons in her dining room and touch-and-go pit orchestra gigs on Broadway, knocked on my door and everyone's door, begging us to start a tenant's union. We each had a reason. I was terrified of the dawn in July when half the sixth floor burned and everyone was out on the street in [...]
My girlfriend, Amanda, and me, and her friend Heather were at Nacho Mama's, drinking. It had just gotten cold. My friend Sal came in. He had been drinking, too. Heather brought up liquor, how old it had become, how tired she was of it, and asked him if he had any drugs. He said he had some K up in [...]
On a lazy hot August afternoon my parents and I emerged from the coolness of the Walter Reade theatre at Lincoln Center after seeing a movie from the sixties. It might have been Italian, maybe something by Visconti - my memory of it has been erased by subsequent events. We ran into my co-worker Jim who had also been in [...]
