You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
Saturday night, I had smelly cheese, cashews, black bean dip, spooned Hellmann’s and three Coronas for dinner. I over-bought crap for company, it’s causing me stomach problems, but I have to finish the stuff. Sunday morning, I met a writing editor on Cathedral Parkway who took too much money to tell me too little about my work. I left her [...]
I moved to New York City on Friday, August 19, 1994. After twenty-one years in South Jersey and four more in Philadelphia, a move to New York seemed to be the most momentous event of my life. As I hooked my gypsy rental van around the Turnpike to face the skyline, even the cars’ lights seemed to make jazz hands. [...]
At first one or two left, dignified and quiet, as if they had to get home to relieve the babysitter. Then coats started rustling, whispers became impolitely perceptible, and the audience grew ever more restless. The Kaufmann Auditorium in the 92nd Street Y was turning into an unhappy, however cultured, hubbub. But David Mamet droned on, inexorably reading what I [...]
When Doree Gottlieb, a girl in my second grade class at P.S. 87, invites me over to her house after school, I beg my mother to let me go. She finally says okay though my grandmother is still against it. Doree Gottlieb lives at 135 Central Park West. A big, impressive pre-war building between 74th and 75th Streets. The maid [...]
I’ll admit it, I was uptight. I didn’t know what to expect and tend to have social anxiety in big groups, even when the folks that comprise them are fully clothed. I sat uncomfortably in the Beamer, cruising down 2nd. Still, I don’t consider myself a prude and the opportunity to go and view seemed fascinating. I also rationalized that [...]
As the New Years Eve hullabaloo in Times Square exploded, I followed suit with a cataclysmic orgasm. That was the good news! Then things became Byzantine! Did complications arise because I met Desmond on Craigslist, where a dizzying succession of weirdoes and losers answered my ad? Since that New Years, I’ve evolved a strategy, plus adopted a scientific detachment to [...]
I always thought Billy Wilder’s film SOME LIKE IT HOT was funny, until my next-door neighbor asked in his basement, “Who you think is prettier as a woman? Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis?” “Neither.” This was 1964 and men in dresses weren’t supposed to be funny to 11 year-old boys on the South Shore of Boston. “Yeah, but if you [...]
I watched it from a high floor of our apartment building: a confusion of spotlights, protesters, and riot police. Some two thousand people that night were lunging toward our compound wall, shouting “Yankee, Go home!” Through a bullhorn, someone called us gaijin, which technically meant foreigner, but was in actuality, closer to “gringo.” While the police beat back the crowds, [...]
My friend John promised a world away from the gray of Boston, but the Cloisters seemed equally cold and dim when we paid our admission fee (ahem, suggested $20 donation). The cold from the stone floor seeped upward through my shoes as we began to wander around, approaching the tapestry in which the unicorn sits entrapped. “I always found the [...]
On the train on the way home, I scan the occupants of the car, playing Wildly Inappropriate Matchmaker, my favorite daydream. For the purposes of this exercise, I settle on a tall woman with black hair tied back tight, librarian glasses slipping down her nose as she reads a copy of Finnegans Wake. I want to put her with the [...]
It is rare, in New York, so I’ve noticed, that conversations pop up with strangers but I have experienced a few. I was in the bakery down the street from my apartment on the Upper West Side, the one with only two tables and a line out the door, and I was searching for the extra chair they have hidden [...]
I only had twenty-four hours in New York to buy my grandmother a gift for her 90th birthday before my flight out to Portland for the big party. I’d just gotten back from Germany where I unsuccessfully tried to woo a woman I’d been in love with, or thought I’d been in love with, for three years. A tall, thin, [...]
It is a cool, dry August evening and I am in a windowless room at 111 Centre Street. I leave New York, the city of my birth, in less than a week. Yet, through a series of escalating events, I choose to be here, stubbornly clinging to the dream of winning back a minor sum of money with the help [...]
Her daughter tried dozens of rehab clinics and treatment programs. After awhile, Olga says, they blurred into a familiar pattern: “program, back, program, back.” “Back” meaning: back on heroin. Olga, who asked that her and her daughter’s names be changed for this story, came to New York City with her family in 1997, refugees from the former Soviet republic of [...]
My dad was the Ralph Kramden of St. Peters Avenue. He always had some plot, some scheme to try to make extra money. The first I remember, he played the number. No, not “Lotto,” but the real, old-school number “played” to scary old men in the back rooms of candy stores that sold wormy Chunky bars and pretzel sticks so [...]
We were on our way to school, my two sons and I. It was their first day back since the World Trade Center attacks last Tuesday. The weather was eerily beautiful, as it has been all these days. We were smiling and I felt brave. Their conversation was light and chatty. We are going to school, I thought. Getting back [...]
It’s brick outside, thermal-brick, coffee cup lids have coughing fits and a blind man with two good legs gets into my pocket by saying that I could be him one day. At the 116th stop Jane runs into Dick, all surprised and shit, she says, Wow, when did you move up here? Dick gives her the inside on a dirt [...]
“This would be a great place for making babies,” Kristal said to me, in the same longing way she often asked to go to the bathroom during city and state exams. Kristal was fifteen. They were all fifteen, even the other ones, the white ones from New Jersey, whose names reflected the suburban streets where they lived, who had come [...]
At the tender age of seventeen, I discovered that tigers were not in fact yellow and brown, but are rather orange and black. It never did much harm, my color deficiency, nor did it prevent me from getting my own way. It certainly never interfered with my love life. However, by no fault of my own, one opportune incident was [...]
In commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of “Star Wars,” a number of mailboxes around the city have been made over--shrouded in an industrial strength decal--like R2-D2, my preferred mailbox among them. The USPS website quotes a postal representative as saying it was a “natural fit,” the tone of his hyperbole exuberant. My suspicion is that it has more to do [...]
“Do you know--” “Of any sports bars around here?” I interrupted. The towering man paused, chapped lips parted in a bewildered grin revealing white teeth caulked with white material. “You looking for one too?” “No,” I said, “you asked me that last week.” We stood this December afternoon on 22nd off 6th. Last time, 19th and 5th. He smiled a [...]
I come home to find a message on my answering machine from the nurse at my daughter’s school. “We had a case of head lice in the 5th grade, so we did a school-wide check.” Pause. “Meredith has some nits.” I immediately think of The Thorn Birds, which I read when I was a kid. I know it was meant [...]
One of the children’s favorite holidays is now past, the heart-warming annual Recycling of the Desk Calendars. This followed hard upon the Transfiguration of the Christmas Décor, when inexplicable magic occurs: wreaths and lights, trees and cheery blow-ups quivering on lawns in vast profusion are overnight divested of hope and suddenly take on a forlorn, soul-sickening aspect that makes them [...]
Even the janitor’s wife has a perfectly good love life and here am I, facing tomorrow, alone with my sorrow, down in the depths of the 90th floor.  --Cole Porter It may not have been the 90th floor, perhaps the 30th or 40th. The exact number is foggy in my memory, but the rest of this “strange interlude” dances before [...]
In 1963, the year my father killed himself, I was obsessed with Bob A. I was crazy about him. My father hated Bob A. and flew into a fury whenever he heard his name. In Bob A., my father recognized himself, especially when he was young. Though Bob A. was not, as far as I know, a gambler like my [...]
I went out with my friend Dylan last night. We met in 2003 on the internet. Tried dating, but were better friends than anything. He was the first person I met when I moved back to New York and looking to date. I had left because my husband was killed in the World Trade Center. Dylan and I went out [...]
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? --William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and brawny, toying with the tail [...]
Living in Manhattan and dwelling in an apartment depletes a person of standard, taken- for-granted privacies and idiosyncrasies that I believe every person and family exhibits. Here, on this grittiest of islands, we are intimate and strangers. Think of all of the people you comfortably smile at and gossip with, not knowing (or caring) about the intimate details of their [...]
[For earlier Brookti & Me, check here and here . --eds.] ** I’ve been reading a lot recently about our new “post-racial” world, where we have “transcended race,” where a black man is running for president and white people are actually voting for him. I’m wondering, if we have transcended race so successfully, why are we reading so much about [...]
Every weekday and many weekend afternoons at around 12:30, I prepare a light lunch, sit down at the dining room table, and read The New York Times sports section. Which used to sort of surprise me, because I’m not that much of a sports fan. I go to a few baseball games a year. I’ve attended some of my younger [...]
We went into Calypso, on Madison Avenue and 69th Street. The first thing I noticed upon entering the store was a young woman paying for something at the register while she distractedly texted. Then, as she texted, she got an actual phone call. She picked up and announced her coordinates and her purchase, “A gray cashmere sweater!” And then a [...]
“I don’t know their names, but I know them by voice,” said Galo Cardenas, proprietor of GC Snax, located on the ground floor of the New York Supreme Court building at 60 Centre Street. And if Mr. Cardenas looks at his customers askance, it’s because sideways is the only way he can see them -- he’s legally blind, and only [...]
I return from my break to hear Vince screaming in Maltese. It seems two women, a real estate broker and her client, had been getting a little impatient waiting for the elevator and gave the button several long pushes. This would infuriate the most mild-mannered of elevator operators. Vince is not mild-mannered. “Who the fuck you are?! You wait like [...]
The Ansonia Hotel was not your usual hotel. But we were not your usual family. By the time I was born in 1945, the Ansonia had suffered years of neglect. The live seals that once frolicked in the lobby fountain were long gone. So was the fountain when I lived there as a child with my mother and father. Many [...]
He kneels on the gray-black slate in front of the Jefferson Market, rendering blue eyes in pastels on the sidewalk, the magazine cover of Paul Newman under his left knee--only the eyes done after several hours. I had passed by at 10. He was just starting, no eyes yet, only the box of pastels dumped onto the sidewalk, a few [...]
In the hiatus between semesters during my years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I often decamped to New York City, ostensibly to find a job during the break, but really an inducement to be somewhere—anywhere—else. One hot summer day while plodding along the sidewalk of MacDougal Street south of Bleecker, I noticed the open door of [...]
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