You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
It was the first perfect day of spring; the air silky with warmth. People, like the daffodils, were blooming all over Washington Square Park: Bicyclists, street musicians, bag-lunchers, in-line skaters, mothers with strollers. Those who were just standing around, others who were walking—they flew into the air like handkerchiefs tossed by the breeze when the car hit them. I was [...]
After our engagement my family had decided that I would be allowed to talk to Fatmir on the phone. When my niece was engaged she had to make secret phone calls, but my family was modern. In anticipation for the phone call Asllan and Behare went out and took Sokol’s three boys. My Mom and Sokol’s wife were at their [...]
I am standing on the F train platform, my toes just over the yellow line. I lean toward the darkness of the train tunnel. In the distance I can see the faint, low-lit squares of train windows passing through the darkness. Then there is the hollow rumble of the F train approaching from in between stops and the shine of [...]
Having grown up in the City my entire life, I should have had my guard on and my extra sixth sense alert for the criminally suspicious. But I had just come off an awkward date, and I was still reflecting on its minute details, and otherwise pondering the futility of finding love in this hard-worn City, so I was not [...]
One of the pleasures of living in a ranch style home is that I can clean all of the outside windows while standing firmly on the ground. Here is why that’s important to me. 219 Audubon Avenue Once each season in my growing up years in the 1940s and 50s, my mother would wash the outside windows of our Manhattan [...]
It was me, the girl standing in front of the Krusq, the wedding party, wearing a wedding dress. How did it happen? What went wrong? I had asked God to change things. I didn’t like the man I was going to marry -- but I had no choice. “On the day you were born God wrote on your forehead who [...]
please amend your story about The Fool of Abingdon Square Park. If you would like to be accurate about the facts mentioned in your story, please consider changing that Abingdon Square Park was restored under the auspices of the Greenstreets Program. It was actually funded by the city council in reaction to a petition delivered in 2001 by a trio [...]
Driving along the West Side Highway in New York City, there is a sign that reads: Intrepid Museum returning Fall 2008. And every time I’ve seen it these past two years, I think, “By the time the Intrepid returns, my book will be finished.” I first saw the USS Intrepid in 1999, not as part of a historical tour of [...]
He began calling her everyday from Scotland. Once she heard his voice she couldn’t get enough. The first time she spoke to him she was working at home writing up a press release for one of her authors. She forgot all about work. He emailed her the day before from an online dating site saying that he was coming over [...]
As always when I break up with a boyfriend, I go back to trusted Craigslist. There’s something comforting about shopping for sex on the internet. Safety behind the screen. This time, I was more daring. I wanted a dominant man. This much I knew for sure. I’ve had a lot of mediocre sex in my time. And over the past [...]
Since my father’s suicide in the Hotel Edison, I made sure never to pass that hotel. I would not even walk down West 47th Street. But suddenly there I was, smack in front of it, thirty-nine years later on a brutally cold night in 2002 with my boyfriend Craig, who innocently suggested we stop in and have a drink. I [...]
My wife is one of an elusive American species: the serious reader. And like many serious readers, she also indulges in crap. For a long stretch she indulged in a guilty pleasure known to many but not known to me, until one Christmas season years ago: the Regency-era paperback romance. These books aren’t the sexed-up bodice-rippers with Fabio-like models on [...]
The candle does not just smell of street-corner pine forests and homemade apple pies; it also smells of tinsel, traffic, and the extra table leaves in place to make room for four, five or--if they really squeeze--six more cousins. Honestly, if you’ve never owned a Slatkin Holiday candle, you’ve never really been home for Christmas. This time last year, I [...]
Time really is the great leveler. The other night I went to BB King’s Blues Club and Grill to hear the Psychedelic Furs of all things. Or a better way to put it, in my case, would be that I went to hear the Furs at BB King’s of all places. Either way, you get the point. BB King’s, it [...]
In the gallery, I saw a woman on video shave her pubic hair and later, walk naked through Venice, but it turns out that I missed the best part of another performance piece in which an artist slowly releases a raw egg from her vagina, throws it at the screen where it smashes--as though in the face of the viewer--and [...]
I slouched on my unmade bed in the murky mid-afternoon twilight, back against the wall, staring forlornly out the window. The sooty red bricks across the air shaft, crusty with flecks of ancient pigeon shit, provided little comfort. I tried casting my eyes around my room every now and then, for variety, but that was even more depressing. Nothing had [...]
The American Theatre of Actors is located at 314 West 54th Street. The same building as Midtown Community Court. During the day, you have to pass through a metal detector to enter, emptying your pockets into a plastic tray and running your bag through an x-ray machine, under the supervision of NYPD. Fortunately, when court is not in session, you [...]
The Captain sensed an uneasiness in the room. The two men in front of him were looking off to their right. They had strange expressions on their faces. Was it disgust? Was it fear? Was it an expression of embarrassment or shame? None of these emotions had been noticed by this Captain during several years of physical fitness training. He [...]
It’s 1983; I’m on the job ten years and have received my first promotion. Yesterday as a firefighter I carried an axe and fought fires; today as a Fire Marshal I carry a gun and fight crime. In most departments around our country, the title Fire Marshal denotes a person who performs inspectional duties. In NYC, that title identifies an [...]
Our doorman, John, wants an exercise bike for the lobby. I can imagine him on the bike, next to the sign that reads, “All Guests Must Be Announced.” Instead of greeting me, he would be riding the bike. Instead of buzzing the intercoms, the wheels would be churning and the perspiration on his brow would shine. Gray sweats would replace [...]
During a packed, standing room only ride on an uptown No. 1 train, I tried to shut out the crowd, absorbing myself in the free AM New York newspaper I picked up that morning. Two men who were squeezed against each other began to argue. Their voices grew so alarmingly loud that I could no longer concentrate on my reading. [...]
I hustle into the car, glad to secure a seat. It’s always musical chairs on the cross-town shuttle, full-grown adults making a mad dash to slip into any remaining sliver of real estate. The open desperation on their faces and their coiled, tense bodies once embarrassed me. But I’m used to it now. I’m one of them. There is no [...]
We were three gay women surrounded by a ring of testosterone in an Irish pub in midtown. The Rangers were on TV playing the Sabres in the semifinals taking place down the street in Madison Square Garden. Grown men sat at the bar in team jackets and hats and cheered the onscreen action. Maybe they couldn’t get tickets--what was I [...]
The lobby of The American Theatre of Actors has the dimensions of a good-sized loft. The walls are lined with rows of old theater seating, about half the seats functional, others semi-functional, propped up with wood, or hanging low. Several are covered, permanently out of commission. There’s the box-office. Double doors open on the theater. Facing away from the theater, [...]
“No, it should be to your left,” I whispered into my cell, trying not to disrupt the hushed conversations of the infatuated couples around me. Jeremy couldn’t find the bar, it was tucked away upstairs from a bakery, so I guided him to it over the phone. With each direction I spouted out, I grew giddier, like a sixteen-year-old thinking [...]
It was a garmento’s worst nightmare--not that I consider myself typical of the type who hustles through life working in the apparel industry. But there I was, literally trapped in one of the notorious bargain stores located in the heart of the Garment Center in New York City. I was in Conway’s on 35th and Broadway wedged between three circular [...]
Travis Barker--he of the Eminem-a-like hip hop wigger lifestyle replete with marital discord (in his iteration it includes a catfight between the old ball and chain and pre-prison Paris Hilton)--yes, that Travis Barker, was briefly my boon companion aboard a rather small US Air carrier for some four hours when the traffic radar in Atlanta went out, was rerouted to [...]
Cocaine did not ruin my life any more than video games or an overprotective mother ruined my life. Which is to say, not at all. Whether or not cocaine impaired my intellectual abilities (I am not a member of MENSA) is something I’ll never know but as for my physical development (I’m six foot nine) I’m pleased to report cocaine [...]
If not for the classic red, white and blue rotating stripes on its barber poles, the Mayfair barbershop on 39th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues might go unnoticed among its garish neighbors. Fabric stores clutter the view, along with the other big business in the area: Porn. The sex shops and "XXX" theaters easily beat Mayfair when it comes [...]
My new play, “Asterisk,” recently opened. It was workshopped at The Crucible of American Theater, which planned to produce it in their first season, but went bankrupt after their first production. I had a show fold at The American Theater of Actors, when the director’s wife asked for a divorce, and he lost his job, all in the week preceding [...]
Here I am in Bergdorf Goodman, and not for the first time, holding up the left half of a pair of $900 boots with the kind of delicacy usually reserved for fine antiques and newborn babies. It’s an exercise in frustration, a form of self-inflicted torture: I barely have $900 in the bank, let alone the kind of expendable income [...]
August 1987. New York City shimmers in the heat. Everyone we know is on vacation. “Where’s Daddy?” Anna whimpers. She’s two. “I want Daddy.” “I do, too, but he’s at work, Annie.” I try to edit the anger out of my voice. “He’s very busy. He’s getting ready for a trial. Do you know what a trial is?” “I know, [...]
My neighbor is an artist and I’ve been walking my dog Vera past her door daily looking for evidence of how she lives. I’m new here now but no longer young. When I was, I lived in the same neighborhood but it was different, so even though my first address in this city was only a few blocks from my [...]
I’ve been living half a block away from the Russian-Turkish Baths on 268 East 10th St for two years, and until the other day I’d never been inside. The sidewalk thereabouts smells faintly of eucalyptus, like parts of San Francisco, but not because of the trees (which are mainly gingko and ailanthus). Eucalyptus and lavender are infused in one of [...]
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 [...]
(This story took place on a stalled Amtrak train one hundred feet from Penn Station. Therefore, since the train didn’t get to New Jersey yet, I’m calling this a Manhattan story. Though, that can be argued about by those who say it’s not where you are that’s important – that’s just earth stuff - but where you’re going to end [...]
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