You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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