You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
Four of us had gathered for dinner in a room above a popular bar on University Place on a swampy and airless Manhattan night. We were all twentysomething professionals, friends from the business side of the music business. Hannah worked for a British artist management firm, and Dina managed PR for a small American record label. Sally was with an [...]
So I found myself on the corner of 45th St and 8th Ave, having arrived ten minutes ago in New York City, October 4th, 1986. I was pretty much sitting in the center of the biggest glut of seed you could find per square inch in any city in the world. Wide-eyed crack heads floated past after scoring at local [...]
I scrolled through last Saturday’s call log on my cell phone to find his number. I hadn’t saved it on purpose, never thought I’d be dialing it. Weird, I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy. It wasn’t a crush or anything (the thought of romance with anyone Y-chromosomed made my stomach turn), but I had to admit, his charisma had [...]
MR. BELLER’S NEIGHBORHOOD READING SERIES CONTINUING MARCH 11 AT MO PITKIN’S HOUSE OF SATSIFACTION! The Webby Award-nominated website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood has published stories with an autobiographical as well as geographical focus since 2000. In that spirit, the site takes over a space at Mo Pitkin’s the 2nd Sunday of every month. Readers on March 11 are Kate Angus, Denise [...]
If you find yourself awakened by an eccentric, foul-tempered neighbor called el Jefe in the hallway of an apartment building known for its vermin while fully installed with a vodka hangover and reeking of pizza-flavored snack treats, be as pleasant as possible. Especially if you are seeking assistance in the forcible entry of your own apartment. Especially if it is [...]
I am not expecting it to be so pink. The floor is tiled light mauve-ish, though it’s having a brown sort of day, what with the rain and the customers tracking in the muck from outside. The counters and tables are a marbleized pink and the occasional wall panel is deep purple. I had been expecting a lot more bright [...]
After my daughter was born, I spent part of each day on the balcony of our third-floor apartment in Sheepshead Bay, rocking her in her stroller. Even when chilly, we’d sit out. Just like her mama and papa when they were little in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sasha has spent much of her first year wrapped in blankets on the balcony. [...]
[A few months after this piece was originally published, Ennis Smith sent us a revision which we have also published here. Look at the two versions side by side and see if you learn anything about how revision figures in the writing process. --Ed.] They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the super of the building on the corner [...]
It’s snowing when our plane touches down in Washington, D.C. Christmas morning, cold and dark. The terminal doors slide open and we are hit with a blast of bitter air. We bundle the girl in blankets and she stares through the car windows at the falling flakes of snow. The wipers beat back and forth and the tires hiss through [...]
I have just taken over the passenger car from Roberto. There are three tenants in the elevator and they are discussing their vacation plans. 3A and her family will be hitting the slopes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; 5C is going to work on his tan and try his luck at the blackjack tables in Aruba; and 12B and his girlfriend [...]
The bouncer pulled the door. Daylight, quite a shock. How long were we unconscious, the Important Visiting Friend and I? We squinted our way out into the day, me very reluctantly, him, I recall, more bravely. He wanted to see a movie, as usual. Had he planned to see this film, memorized the location and times the day before? Or [...]
I’m at the opening of Least Wanted, a collection of mugshots, many of them enlarged, from the 1930's through the early 70's. The young and the bad are beautifully indignant in black and white, and I could stare for hours at the badass mug of a 17 year old boy caught rioting on the streets of Denver. His hair splays [...]
Golden slumbers. I slept like an heir apparent, drifting in satin oblivion from Sunday to Monday. I had been away for the weekend. I had visited my family: my nieces and nephews, my successful older siblings, my mother and father. We did wholesome things as sign of our shared familial concern and love. And for once, in a surprising four [...]
Rada told me to be at the broker's office at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday. I showed up eating the last of my sublet's granola bars. Abandoned desks sat side by side without cubicle separators; it was like the newsroom of the Daily Planet. The receptionist seated me, then quickly disappeared into the bathroom. She did not return. Rada materialized at [...]
Day talked about those skintight hologram jeans for weeks. It was 1978, and they'd look nice for shooting heroin in the basement lavatory at CBGB, especially in the snazzy lilac color with the lime iridescent overlay, and they'd look nice later--complementary--when she turned blue outside on the sidewalk. The jeans cost $65.00, a considerable sum for 1978, and they were [...]
On a recent Tuesday morning, at exactly 9:32 AM, Suzanne Seggerman pulled her white, full-sized van, a Chevrolet Gladiator she affectionately refers to as The Gladiator, into a choice parking spot on Bleecker Street near the NYU gym. She was fresh on the heels of the street-cleaning vehicle assigned to this block every Tuesday and Friday between 9:30 and 11:00 [...]
The sex club looked more like a cheesy New Jersey club than a happening orgy fest. There were balloons on the ceiling and people dancing to seventies music. Most of the people were not very attractive. The women were bleached blondes with frizzy hair and a bit dumpy or with fake boobs. The men had beer guts and receding hairlines. [...]
People. What can I say. Are unpredictable. Quite. It's approaching four years since we first met at Bar 13 downtown while listening to some of the dopest spoken word artists. Most notable was Bonafide, Puerto Rican kid, Columbia guy. We both were given to the electronic medium of connecting, given that substantive "real-time" connections were elusive. I wrote an original [...]
Their hands were clasped. She had on a skirt suit and he had a tie around his neck. In my mind, their arms are down, right hand holding left between the balls of their hips. But I know this can’t be right. Another impossibility: her hair. It was long, brown, and fell below her shoulders. But her hair, like their [...]
Thus spoke the Redhead Complainer: "So I told him to get his own goddamned dinner." This vivacious female who rides the N train with me regularly once appeared intriguing--that is, until I finally heard her speak. And that only happened a few weeks ago, when the subway car was particularly bustling and my fatigued frame conveniently happened to be jammed [...]
I wouldn’t have noticed her at all if she hadn’t stepped on my foot. Her hair was in a tight braid that bounced against her exposed shoulders as she rushed past. She wore a skimpy red top, extremely tight white pants and high heels. I glanced after her with a tiny bit of indignation – Hey! You stepped on my [...]
We found it. After two years of wasted Sundays touring sad places in forgotten boroughs, my wife and I had finally found a place we liked, a place that was affordable. Well, maybe we didn’t like like it. It was a six-flight walk up that the real estate broker called a “handyman’s special.” My wife called it a “common man’s [...]
The date seemed to be going well. Not mine—I wasn't on a date. The one behind me. "Which do you think?" I whispered to my best friend, Alex, leaning in over my moo goo gai pan. "First? Third?" "You always skip second," she said. She was right. Alex and I smirked at each other. Second dates at kosher places? How [...]
I saw him first. He was lounging; a big grey parrot perched above him while lizards slunk and swaggered in a terrarium nearby. Our eyes met; his were big and dark and luminous against pale coloring. He yawned. Stretched one arm up in a dramatic arch. There was another fellow right next to him, but it was he, Clovis Stirling, [...]
Adam Purple cycled by me as I walked down Second Avenue near 3rd Street early on a sunny spring morning. It was nothing unusual—in the past twenty-five years he has pedaled by me dozens of times while making his rounds below 14th Street. A few weeks earlier, I had seen a photograph of Mr. Purple’s long-since demolished Garden of Eden [...]
I had never gone to the Frying Pan—the restored boat/event space docked beside the Chelsea Piers—before last week. It was one of those places that I’d almost been to a bunch of times, but never actually made it. I nearly didn’t go that night, either, but I’m glad I did, because I think I ended up there under perfect conditions, [...]
A guy on my street, let's call him Eddie, is probably thirty-eight, only two or three inches shorter than Wilt Chamberlain, with a sort of pirate's crook nose and a Russian infantryman's sinewy musculoskeletal system. He doesn't seem to mind the smell of trash. I know this because he's my trash man. He used to live somewhere far beneath my [...]
We took the train to the very top of Manhattan, exiting the subway into a neighborhood of large boulevards and boarded-up storefronts. Black sedans cruised by and occasionally stopped to ask us if we needed a taxi. At 9:30 on a Sunday morning, it was already steamy. This was only our fifth Sunday in the city. My fiancé and I [...]
It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday in April 1973, and my first-day tour on the job, when that seminal alarm sounds. The disembodied voice of the dispatcher booms from loudspeakers throughout the firehouse, “Attention the following units…Engines 83, 60, 41-1 Ladders 29, 17-2 Battalion 14…Respond to…” The box number and address are given, and then the dispatcher adds, “We are receiving [...]
“Leap and a net will appear.” Right. You know what appeared the last time I leapt? MasterCard debt and an empty bottle of vodka. Don’t get me wrong – vodka can really cushion a blow, but a net it is not. I moved to New York City on a whim. Well, most people call it moving—I call it running away. [...]
The woman comes into the New York restaurant where I work and is reading a poetry magazine. “Say,” I say, “is that some sort of poetry magazine?” “Yeah,” she says. “I like Billy Collins,” I say. “Yeah?” she says. “Yeah,” I say. “But don’t you think Poetry is Dead, kinda?” “Not really,” she says, and she gives me facts and [...]
I have an intimate relationship with my bike lock. In fact, I dance with it. It is not, at first glance, an obvious dancing partner—a heavy chain swathed in a black nylon sleeve, but then there are many unlikely dance partners in our lives. Just as many people will do an unconscious two-step when they are opening the refrigerator, or [...]
“Now, you know, when I was a young girl, before your Granddad came along, I lived in Chicago. And boy was that an experience.” My grandmother takes a sip off her still steaming coffee; black the only way she’ll take it. “It was a grand time. So much energy, so lively. And then we moved to Wichita, Kansas and I [...]
This morning I saw a dead bird on 52nd Street. It was lying on its back on the sidewalk in between Park and Madison Avenues, in front of a Duane Reade Pharmacy. Its feet were in the air. At first I wasn’t sure if it was dead. It looked like it was just dozing, sunning its chest and staring at [...]
The women lined up early for a chance at the best gift bags. Some had spent the past 20 hours miserable and sleepless on a Greyhound from Iowa, such was the desire to inhale some combination of cupcake accord, sumac leaf note, and diet brambleberry liqueur that was reputed to possess magical and potentially aphrodisiac qualities unknown to the women’s [...]
I am sitting at my desk in my coop one day on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, paying my monthly expenses: coop mortgage; coop maintenance; coop insurance; four other kinds of insurance--health, for four people (I’ve got a stay-at-home wife and two kids); life, in case I die on them; disability, in case I collapse; and car, in case [...]
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