You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
Please join us for our upcoming readings: Wednesday, July 8th 12:30pm Bryant Park: Bryant Park Reading Room Thomas Beller will moderate a panel discussion on writing in New York, with Joseph O'Neill (Netherland), Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), Jonathan Ames (The Double Life Is Twice as Good) and Alice Mattison (Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn). They will [...]
My primary focus in grammar school was scheming ways to get out of class. At the start of seventh grade, I weighed my options. The parish claimed it needed money all the time. It ran fifty/fifty clubs, cake sales, bingo, casino nights, you name it. The low earner on the ledger was the religious article store in the rear of [...]
“I like being pastor of a church that is being disciplined for its positions,” Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis recently announced from the pulpit of Middle Collegiate Church. The minister was referring to the fact her congregation was under fire from members of its parent denomination, the Reformed Church of America, because it came out publicly in support of gay marriage [...]
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 [...]
That morning in 1949 begins innocently enough in our one-room apartment in the Ansonia Hotel. I am four. My father gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. I go over to the bathroom door. The keyhole is just the right height. Curious, I peer through it and see my father. I can hardly believe my eyes. Daddy has [...]
Tompkins Square Park had basketball courts. Full-court games were played close to Avenue B. Half-court was against the fences of the asphalt baseball field on Avenue A. Players were 50% neighborhood and 50% from the rest of the city. The quality of the competition was not up to West 4th Street or 125th Street, but a total stranger could walk [...]
It was the third week of what was to become my first real job, at Irving Plaza, the club in Union Square. I was working three days a week after school, doing odd jobs around the venue. Basically whatever tedious tasks they needed me to do. I was a junior that year, and took the minimum amount of classes, so [...]
In 1971 I took a class taught by Ralph Ellison, author of ‘The Invisible Man.’ It was my last year at the Washington Square Campus of New York University. In those days there was also a Bronx campus. Wannabe hippies, like me, went downtown. I was a little nervous about graduating, because most of the famous people who went to [...]
The Diner in Williamsburg is a 21st century institution now, I guess (just celebrated its tenth anniversary)—you can get arugula there! And the rest of their food is good too. It’s pleasant at their sidewalk tables if the weather’s fine, though you have to watch your step if you don’t want to trip over two dozen artists. Me and Jean [...]
“You can’t walk around here! They steal young girls and sell them as slaves.” Grandma’s voice hit a higher pitch with each syllable, her blue eyes sparking with agitation behind the dark rims of her glasses. I was momentarily stunned by her vehemence as much as by her words. We were in the backseat of the family Chevy, a sturdy [...]
The old man seated beside me awaiting the appearance of the celebrated Isaac Bashevis Singer at The Workman’s Circle Auditorium is becoming a pest. From a rumpled brown shopping bag he pulls out and shamelessly shows off photographs of his grandchildren to which I offer the obligatory compliments. Light and sound technicians, meanwhile, test the mike and spot, inadvertently knocking [...]
The Dallas Cowboys losing -- my number #1 Schadenfreude trigger. As you get older the word hate drifts from your conversation. It’s a bad word, and a silly emotion to hang onto. Life’s too short. If you’re lucky, you lose it all together. If you’re really lucky, you save it for one person, one particular thing, or in my case, [...]
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, [...]
Some people take their High School Senior Superlatives a bit too seriously. No, I’m not talking about Mary, my class’s “Worst Driver,” devoting her life to turning over a new leaf as a professional chauffer. I’m talking about my very own "Class Clown" award spurring my standup comedy career. Ever since my first time performing comedy at age 18--shortly after [...]
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 [...]
He was puckish and presumptuous, impudent and ebullient; a bantam and bumptious, dastardly and delirious hand-out seeking hotdogger with a bare head, bushy beard, and bushels of personality. On many nights he could be found fast asleep on a bench in Washington Square Park, his belly careening with gin and ale that he had bamboozled tourists into buying him. Born [...]
When I was 14, and living in an affluent, gated community in Manila, a handsome young boy from our neighborhood gave me a sapphire pendant. We were both members of a church youth group and were attending a party for new members. It was early evening. As our friends ate pork kabobs by the pool, the young boy asked me [...]
Yesterday I left for work without having eaten anything all morning. For a person with a normal schedule this would be no problem, but I start work at 12:30 PM and don’t take “lunch” until about 5:00 PM. My office is on Hudson and King Streets and I take the C train to the Spring Street Station. It’s only a [...]
I met Dan Dinnerstein at a party in 1982, when we were young, single guys in our late twenties. We had a lot in common: we were both were products of the New York State University system, we both came from the same neighborhood in the Bronx (although we hadn’t known each other there), and, at the time, we both [...]
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, [...]
If you have a gloriously Afro’d, insanely talented, sleek sapling of a former student who has given herself a single syllable moniker and released her first hip-hop CD, you want to walk her around your neighborhood like a princess. You want a red carpet to roll out in front of her as she shyly hunts for a smoothie which she [...]
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 [...]
“Hi George,” I said, with a wave, as I rushed toward the subway. George, who was sitting in his low-to-the-ground folding chair at his usual post in front of the liquor store, sat up bolt straight, as if I had touched him, giving him a shock of static electricity, and said with some outrage, “How do you know my name?” [...]
I met John Lennon in Washington Square Park. My friend Susan and I were returning home to the Village from our jobs as drug abuse counselors in the roughest schools in Brooklyn…when we spotted him. It was 1973, and his hat gave him away: a black Beatles’ cap that had become their trademark, a newsboy hat that has recently become [...]
We went to the movies and it was Woody Allen’s latest, about realistic murder, the first time in his career I think the man has been honest or real about anything and I wanted to kill Edward the entire time we were in there. “Honey put your coat on your seat, you can’t see.” He said, five hundred times. There [...]
Hey man, do you have a cigarette?” A man asked me out of nowhere. I didn’t see him creeping up to me, usually I am aware of my surroundings but he was soundless in his approach. “Naw, sorry, I bummed this from someone.” Which was true, I did bum the smoke from my friend still in the diner. “Do you [...]
“You’re blocking the whole fucking street, you’re a total asshole!” The woman in the road screamed at me. But she only knew one of my attributes and that hardly qualified her to give a generalizing narrative to all of the other onlookers. I agreed to move my vehicle but she was the bitter, lingering sort. I wasn’t sure if she [...]
East 11th Street between Avenue B and C on the Lower East Side of New York was hot for drugs the summer of 1986. The tenement building on the corner of Avenue B was called ‘the Rock.’ Teenage look-outs steered cokeheads into the tenement. The metal apartment doors were welded shut. A spy hole allowed the dealers to see their [...]
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 [...]
As he sits on the railing in Union Square Park, surrounded by hundreds of young men and women absorbing the first warm day of the year, José’s hands move nervously over a bottle of orange juice. On the label is an idyllic American farm, no doubt in some far-off corner of the country, where the grass never goes brown, the [...]
Most violin students must diligently practice on their instruments many hours a day, for many years, before even thinking of turning professional. Some may give it up long before they become proficient. And even should they pursue their musical studies, and become skilled at playing the violin, there are only a limited number of professional openings available to them, whether [...]
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 [...]
Roberto is giving Vince the usual changing-of-the-guard rundown: who has dry cleaning, who’s expecting guests, who left keys for the housekeeper, etc. When he’s done, Vince shakes his hand and says, “Good luck.” What’s that about? “I gotta get my pengé fixed,” he tells me. He has prostate cancer. It is in times of crisis that friendships are truly tested, [...]
The day I moved to Washington Heights, a kid stood on the sidewalk and stared at me. And not a trying-not-to stare, either; a slack-jawed, wide-eyed, rooted-to-the-spot stare. It was sweltering that day—the first day of summer—and even though it wasn't the most practical choice for moving day, I wore one of those tank tops with the built-in bras. Horrified, [...]
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 [...]
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