You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
During my second year of living in the city I almost drowned in despair. I refused to admit it to myself – and especially not to my nagging parents who regularly suggested I move home to California –but New York was crushing me. The city had delivered a series of blows, starting with a broken heart. My Greek borough-bred boyfriend, [...]
A.K. is as often used in mild, fond condescension as it is in derision: “Let him alone: He’s just an A.K.”...I make no special plea for alter kocker, but I certainly prefer A.K. to its English equivalent, “old fart.” –Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish We arrive for our weekly game on Mercer near Houston Street, four players just shy [...]
175th Street, between Audubon and Saint Nicholas Avenues was the playing field for hundreds of boys each year, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Anchored mid-block by Incarnation Grammar School, 175th Street was a four-car-wide, smoothly paved, level, treeless, usually-blocked-off-during-school-days street. The sidewalks were also wide and level, the street curbs sharp and unbroken, and the six floor apartment [...]
Last July, a friend of mine called to tip me off about an upcoming water gun assassination tournament. I was swamped at work when he called, crimping duvets for a big Neiman Marcus order—but seconds later I was on the tournament's website, reading the requirements for entry. By midnight I was in the back of a GMC Envoy, paying my [...]
I noticed him during the first week of living in my new apartment. I was staring down from my fourth floor two bedroom. He sat in a window on the south side of the block, to the west of Kelly's Flat Fix facing 3rd Avenue, his elbow hanging out the window as if he were driving along in a car [...]
I have no kids and never wanted any, so I was a bit anxious about playing tour guide for my 14 year old niece, Shannon, on her first visit to New York City. But my brother John said she could not wait to see Manhattan. It was quite a trip for an eighth grader from the Jersey Shore. They arrived [...]
My dad was helping me, his oldest daughter, carry a stuffed duffel bag up a dirty Chinatown staircase, in a dirty Chinatown building, with no-longer-usable brooms on the landings and cigarette butts on the sills. We could hear babies crying though the walls, drowning out television sets. He asked if I was sure I would be O.K. here. I said [...]
Sometimes I acquire personal training and kickboxing clients simply by correcting a stranger’s form. To put it bluntly, 90% of people in gyms are without a fuckin’ clue when it comes to proper training techniques. These folks can negotiate deals for zillions during the day at the office, yet they’re incapable of a quality bicep curl at night. Therefore, a [...]
My mother's narrow little medicine chest is a joke to her. It's quaint. It's for amateurs. She keeps her medicine in the kitchen cabinet and the kitchen drawers and the candy dishes. Her canisters for coffee and flour and sugar are filled with Lipitor and Propranalol and Prozac. She could collapse from overmedication at any moment, anywhere in her condo, [...]
The other week I was waiting for the subway at Union Square. I was glancing around the station looking to see if the train was coming, when all of a sudden I caught the eye of a man in a clown outfit. He winked at me and started walking in my direction. I’m not usually the type to talk to [...]
The Mets are out of town. My childhood friend Jim wants to see a ballgame before he's tied up remodeling his Long Island house, which he estimates will take all of his free time May through October. He can't wait until the Amazins, his favorite team and mine, return from a trip to the West Coast and Atlanta, so it's [...]
Jake's girlfriend broke up with him, so he started driving and turned up eleven hours later at my apartment. We were the kind of friends who'd been close once but who didn't speak often anymore, owing not to any particular falling out, but to the passage of time and a mutual inability to put any effort into the maintenance of [...]
Since my boyfriend, Alexis, injured his shoulder playing pick-up basketball, he’s been watching games from the sideline. Usually he’ll just stop for a couple of minutes, en route to wherever he—or we—are going. If a pick-up buddy says, “What’s up?” he’ll sometimes give them one of those street-hugs, where they grab each other’s hand and bump chests. Then Alexis will [...]
Hello. The 6th Anniversary of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is here, and the time has come to pay tribute to the site's past. So many pieces are coming in all the time, piling up on the surface of the site, that it's easy to forget how much terrific work has accumulated in the deeper layers of MBN's very own geological record. [...]
I hit the same bus every morning, Monday to Friday. It comes at 7:03 am. It doesn't matter whether I am running late or if I am ahead of schedule. I never miss this particular bus. To make it, I will sprint like my life depends on it; I will chase the bus two blocks to the next stop. I [...]
Looking around for the lieutenant, I find him standing alongside the firehouse, staring down into a neat row of freshly clipped hedges. I hurry to his side and he tersely commands, "Get to work." Right then and there, my life changes forever. * For firemen, there is nothing more startling than a Verbal Alarm--the riotous banging of fists on the [...]
Depending on how you look at it, Kamran Shirazi is famous in the world of chess for his flamboyant and innovative style of play, or for his amazing ability to lose, or perhaps both. He cobbles together a living by combining prize money from chess tournaments with fees from chess lessons, for which he charges eighty dollars an hour. If [...]
MOROCCAN LETTERS Phase 1: The Seduction Jane Bowles liked to call her husband, Paul, a spider. The spider is a dry creature, and she was referring to the spider’s thirst to lure its prey into his net and drain their fluids. She herself suffered that fate. Bowles met Alfred Chester at a dinner party in New York in the winter [...]
There used to be this guy who came to the park in a business suit with a thin black tie and his straw hair slicked back and wet-looking to make the case against Darwin's theory of evolution. He had a clutch of professional-quality charts, which he set up on an easel behind him to help illustrate his points while he [...]
In high school I was friends with two identical twins named Dan and Guy. They had long hair and beards and Dan played the Harmonica. They both did many drugs and sold drugs and got sent away to rehab a bunch of times. I was a little in love with both of them, Guy especially. He didn't say much and [...]
Elisha Cooper, our staff illustrator, spent two weeks, though December 22, 2000, sitting at a small table amidst the bustle of Kate's Paperie in Soho; he sat there all day in front of a stack of his book, A Year In New York, signing and drawing (everyone who bought one got a small portrait of themselves on the front page [...]
Bill Dilworth may have one of New York's most relaxing jobs. He is keeper of the New York Earth Room, a permanent installation by the artist Walter DeMaria, sponsored by the Dia Foundation. The work has been on display at the same location at 141 Wooster Street for over ten years, and Mr. Dilworth has been its guardian for the [...]
"He tried to soundproof the basement, but he forgot about the air vents," she says. "And I had an air vent that went from the basement right into my bedroom." Christina describes Terry Richardson's strategy for getting this picture: "He kept saying 'Flirt with the teacher! Flirt with the teacher!'" She said. "It was really annoying." It is lunchtime at [...]
It is the dulled, flat end of the summer; a warm Saturday night in the West Village, September, 1982. It is 4 a.m. We who had fawned and flounced and guzzled and still received no takers in the gay bars this evening have resigned ourselves to last-minute comfort in the bowels of the Christopher Street Bookstore, a grotto at the [...]
First Cemetery--Chatham Square, on St. James Place, also very close to Confucious Square Second Cemetery--11th Street & 6th Avenue. Third Cemetery--21st Street & 6th Avenue. During the nineteenth century, the accelerating sprawl of New York City forced the relocation of almost all of Manhattan’s dead. From 1846 to 1851, nearly 20,000 bodies were moved off the island, and by the [...]
These pictures were taken from Spring Street and Lafayette Street. And some from "before..."
About a month ago, a terrible new smell turned up on North Moore Street in Tribeca. It did not coexist peacefully with the other smells on the street: the coffee and cooking smells from Bubby's, a local hangout; the sweet, strong smell of olive oil stored in Hillside Imperial Foods; pepper and nutmeg smells from Atlanta, a spice warehouse; the [...]
My friend Jake is no head turner. He's too skinny and short for most girls, including me, nonetheless he pulls chicks all the time. He's a continuously evolving enigma. Whenever I see him he has a new girl. His luck began changing immediately after high school once he got into promoting clubs. He never stepped foot in a club prior [...]
For the last five years I've played drums in a rock band named Honus Wagner, but now it seems that we're breaking up, and I'm trying to reconcile myself to life without the drums. Of course I can still play the drums by myself, which is a joy in much the same way shooting a basketball around by yourself is [...]
The Mercury Lounge is a well-known venue for live music. All sorts of distinguished and screwed up and talented and untalented musicians have played there since the place was founded in 1993. It's been home to a great deal of rock music. Previously it was home to a different kind of rock. Before it was The Mercury Lounge, the space [...]
I am one of those people who can't stand New York. The first time I was in New York I was mugged by a young Hispanic man wielding a Phillips head screwdriver. It was long ago, I was young, and not about to give him $20, all the money I had. We went into a restaurant where I asked for [...]
It's common practice for a bar/restaurant to save their first dollar and hang it on the wall. Sometimes it's framed. Other times it's taped. But it's up there for luck. Or at least celebration. A sort of diploma from the school of capitalism. Some businesses even save their first dollar bill, five dollar bill, ten dollar bill, and twenty dollar [...]
Robert Longo--the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker--is in the habit of referring to himself as "Longo," just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, "This is Longo," and when we called back we [...]
Chicago has its merits. For example: my apartment has a large garden in the front yard where I am sequestered if I wish to smoke because of my girlfriend Bertie's so-called allergic reaction to cigarette smoke, which she has failed to show any scientific documentation for, but that's another story. It could be 15 degrees and I'll be outside shivering [...]
On the southwest corner of 2nd Street and Avenue A is a nameless bar (its patrons refer to it as “2A”), and it has on its second floor large picture windows through which one can survey the goings on in the neighborhood. Across 2nd Street is a wide patch of sidewalk where a street vender can usually be seen selling [...]
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