You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
When I was a kid, Avenue B was a neighborhood for the working poor. Old guys would sell hot knishes from a portable oven on wheels for a nickel, and in my family, that was considered "eating out." We didn't have a phone, or even a radiator, until the city made the landlady put one in. We did have a [...]
Herald Square is not a good neighborhood in which to work. In fact, it’s not a neighborhood at all. It’s an area. On street level there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Office buildings empty into crowds of slow-moving shoppers who move in and out of the oxymoronic Manhattan Mall. They move about at a bovine pace. They take [...]
Arriving at work for the night tour on October 29, 1974 I discover the firehouse to be as abandoned and silent as a cemetery at midnight, I was spooked by something but wrote it off to the approach of Halloween when in reality it was actually an omen. I am the first member of the night tour reporting in for [...]
The mysteries of 47th Street—men in oily black suits and beards the color of tar, swollen red noses and black eyes lined in soot, wiry eyebrows, faces half-hidden by coarse pepper-black hair, tallit dragging from the sweaty hems of their coats. Men with secrets. In their pockets, translucent wax paper folded and folded again like some ancient origami. Papers passed [...]
Luciana, my aesthetician, is administering my facial. I come to see her in this upscale New York city dermatologist’s office about every three months or when I just need a pick me up. As she is stroking my skin with a warm creamy make-up remover, we are sharing our usual catch up questions about kids, work, exercise and then the [...]
Pretty much every woman in New York City gets her nails done and why not? There are at least six or seven per two-block radius, give or take. It’s a cheap and standard luxury here, courtesy of lots of supply, lots of demand. For those who tote their bright all-smiles and pleasant politeness, it’s the respite, “Ahhh-I’ve-been-looking-forward-to-this-all-week”. For others and [...]
There are some things you do purely for love. Or I should say there are things you do purely for sex with the one you love. You do things not because you are in love but rather because your significant other withholds sex and bothers you about them so much that finally you simply cave and bend to their request. [...]
I took the subway uptown to stop by my old boss’s townhouse. Drop by any time, she’d said. Just ring the bell. We were on good terms. I had quit that job to take something downtown. The new job paid a little bit more, but it hadn’t worked out. Now I was back working as a waitress. My old boss [...]
One Halloween, I decided to wear something different than my usual orange shirt from the 1989 Westchester Girl Scouts Jamboree. On the evening of disguises, I tried on a very local one. I dressed as a stereotypical “Murray Hill” Girl, a costume that required an explanation and a bibliography. The costume evoked a particular New York Observer news article written [...]
At the risk of sounding insensitive - I normally have zero patience for whining panhandlers. I had an unpleasant experience a couple of years ago when I bought a homeless guy a slice of pizza. He then showed up five minutes later, with his friend, asking if I could buy them both a beef patty. Another source of my harbored [...]
On May 20th, while most of the city was watching the Yankees and Mets slug it out for "Best Team in New York Baseball" bragging rights, just beneath their feet, a different sort of battle was being contested inside the Brooklyn-bound J train. The whole car, even when stationary with its doors open onto a platform, was rattling from the [...]
Nicola is a lively twenty-year-old girl of Thai and Italian descent, born and raised on the Upper East Side. She has been my roommate on East 4th Street for four months, since I answered her apartment ad on Craigslist, and she works as a cocktail waitress at Thor—a fashionable nightclub in the Lower East Side—until 4:00 a.m. most nights. The [...]
Madison Square Park confirms New York as civilized city. The park is a cultured green in Manhattan's punishing grid: the Flatiron Building to its southwest, Broadway to the west, the century-old architecture, the clock tower to the east, buildings that house Credit Suisse First Boston and some of the globe's most powerful corporations, America's wealth, New York's wealth, and the [...]
I troll craigslist searching for traces of my ex. He dates trannies and the dregs of society. I had lunch with him the other day and I said, "Hey Luke, did you put this ad up?" "Oh my god! How the hell did you know!" I wanted to say, it’s really not that difficult when you date someone for nearly [...]
Herman the German waited for his prey. He turned a small Iron Cross over in one hand slowly measuring the length of each of its four silver edges. His quivering lip shook an inch long ash off his cigarette’s end. It fell onto the top of his Austrian sandals with the matching black socks. A loose thread sizzled. He didn’t [...]
Harry’s back. It’s Wednesday, the middle of the week, and that means Harry is back to visit Winslow Homer. Harry visits his old friend Winslow Homer as if the two old friends were going to play their weekly game of checkers, as if this congenial game has been going on for fifty years with breaks only for the occasional war [...]
It’s a freezing Friday night at the Guggenheim, 8:00, and technically the museum closed 15 minutes ago. Two gallery guides, as their bright red tags indicate they’re called, are following Cate and me down the spiral that swoops around the building’s atrium like some giant half-stretched slinky. In their early twenties, at times during our forced march they are some [...]
It was a chance encounter a few years ago in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side where I peeked into the shadowy universe of the “junky.” After the meeting I invited Harry to my office to continue to tell his story which goes back thirty years when the island on 72nd Street and Broadway was known as “needle [...]
I buy my morning paper from a little shop on the corner of West 83rd Street called the Columbus Avenue Food Corp. & Convenience Store. When you walk in, standing behind the counter on your left is Shahid, a very sunny and trim Pakistani man in his 50s with a thinning salt-and-pepper comb-over and a wardrobe of fresh-pressed button-down shirts [...]
I never shared my life with any pets – unless you count a legion of uninvited cockroaches. Until I got married, that is, and my wife brought a black cat home from the gym. “This cat has been rescued, my instructor was offering him up,” she said. “Cat’s poop inside,” I said. “You’ll love him.” “What’ll we call him?” “Felix,” [...]
I have three different nights confused in my mind. It was raining each night--a sentimental story. This is a sentimental story. I have been living in Vermont so long now that when I come back to the city its cleanliness and prosperity seem obscene to me. These nights were different--in my memory it was darker then, it was raining and [...]
We are driving in from the country, out where we go to school, a little town in a valley and a school on the hill. We come in from the west, over the Bridge with the sun sliding around the tip of lower Manhattan, mocking the Lady’s little torch, basking in its own reflection off the river. It’s autumn, an [...]
Mossy stayed with me for a week in New York and never saw any of the sights. He left the apartment every day and found a breakfast for himself someplace and walked around the east village a little and eventually found his way to the Blue and Gold and started drinking. I’d meet him there later on and ask him [...]
I had gotten a summons for jury duty. Or should I say yet another one. I was afraid of those tall, gloomy, impersonal Wall-Street-area buildings full of people in somber look-alike suits. Jury duty was some sort of gulag. Stripped of rights. Where was the joie de vivre? What about poetic justice? Besides, I wasn’t feeling any great affection for [...]
A young woman dressed in a leotard was dancing in City Hall Park today. The sun was brilliant and warm, the fountain flowing with water and the soft sound of an alto sax in the background. I felt nurtured in the sun, and great joy looking at the voluminous colors of spring tulips in luscious, full bloom. The young dancer [...]
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 [...]
I only wanted it to be over, even as I dreaded its arrival. For weeks I walked around in a clenched state of anticipation, unaware of how tense I had become. “An adventure or an exile?” I asked myself. I couldn’t decide. A few days before the big move, I was sitting in front of Rice, a delicious hole in [...]
“Just like a boxer in a title fight you’ve got to walk in that ring all alone You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own” --Billy Joel I was looking at some apartments with my realtor, Harriet Loshin, just west of Union square, near west 12th street. We [...]
Blue never counts the raccoon coat in her estimate. By this time in 1984, t’s too old, even though from a distance it makes her look like a rich person. The coat, which falls to her ankles, is from the 1920s and was her grandfather's. The inside label even spells out his name in baroque cursive writing: David Stewart. She [...]
Finally we were meeting for dinner. I called him at just the right time when he happened to be in the neighborhood. That meant that he had class at Hunter and I was on his way home, in between him and Fort Greene. "Why don't you come up here?" he asked. "Because I'm down here, and it would take me [...]
I'm standing on the crowded Lexington Avenue subway platform, waiting for either the N or W Train to take me off the island of Manhattan. A drone-like female voice booms over the loudspeaker: "Ladies and Gentlemen, pan-handling is against the law. Please do not give to law-breakers. Please give instead to charities that support those in need. Thank you." I [...]
Today it hit. I woke up with the usual thought—coffee. Despite the heat that caked my mouth like cracked paint, my craving kicked in immediately. I rolled out of bed and as I walked toward the kitchen it suddenly hit. My heart was broken. The heartbreak had been triggered the week before but the realization, like a sluggish messenger inadvertently [...]
6:30 A.M. I’ve only been able to sleep about six hours because there are three bars downstairs which close at around 3 A.M. It’s just getting light. I’m in a corner apartment on the 6th floor overlooking Orchard and Stanton Streets facing South and East. The morning sky is streaked with indigo, pink and brown. I close my eyes hoping [...]
I felt like I owed him something, even if I couldn’t say what. It wasn’t money. I closed my eyes like a dead man and gave those coins to the nuns on the corner. My brother is a music publisher. I’m not really sure what this means, but I’m proud. People always ask about it. It’s not the usual thing [...]
I hesitated before walking through the alleyway that led to my old backyard. I could see that my mother and father’s old fig tree was still there in the yard. It was late summer and there had just been a light rain. This would have been prime fig picking time back in the old days. I remembered that after a [...]
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