You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
This passage appears in the novel, The Sleep-Over Artist. Alex hadn't really believed that Katrina would agree to visit him in New York, and so he threw himself into the task of convincing her with a kind of easy abandon, as though it were a joke really, and he was teasing her. She had children, after all, and couldn't just [...]
12/31/00 It is the last day of the year at 8:30pm. I have just finished vacuuming, changing the sheets, and spraying the duvet with “Sweat Pea” pillow spray to make everything clean, cozy and refreshing on this wintry cold night. Tonight I am at home and alone, happily so, dancing around my apartment with dust rag in hand to the [...]
About Daniel Bell. Illustration by Milton Glaser In a recent letter to New York Magazine, an innocent lass from California asked, "What is an egg cream?" and was answered by The Underground Gourmet that like the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Holy or Roman, the egg cream contains neither egg nor cream but is simply a combination of [...]
Four years ago, my best friend Pauline moved from San Francisco to New York. Like so many bright young women before her, she moved here to become a writer, to have a snazzier life, to get away from her parents. I did the same thing the year before, and so she stayed with me for a few weeks. Her first [...]
For some people, a bicycle is something to be taken out for a pleasant jaunt in the park on weekends, an opportunity to feel the breeze in your hair and to coast alongside novice roller bladers whose eyes are wide with terror. Then there are the brave souls who use it to make a living, the bicycle messengers, a group [...]
A letter came in the mail not long ago, informing me that it was time to make a pilgrimage back to my old college for my tenth year reunion. The letter has sat on my desk ever since, sometimes under a pile, and sometimes, after a vigorous purge of junk, all by itself, unabashedly requesting my attention. There are several [...]
Every few years, on the front page of the Times, a plan is announced by a consortium of merchants and industrialists and bankers to transform Forty-second Street into a squeaky-clean thoroughfare. One recent proposal calls for glass-enclosed atriums (the Ford Foundation, sponsoring the project, is big on Atriums), "bridges crisscrossing 42nd Street, and escalators moving through a complex set of [...]
A company called Viacom has recently purchased another company called Paramount for about ten billion dollars. This followed several months of intensive maneuvering between Viacom and another company called QVC. The competition held the businessmen and a large segment of the media in thrall. It was also good news for poets and the like. It's not often that what is [...]
Between 10th and 11th avenue, on the north side of 18th street sits the Roxy night club which, on Wednesday nights, houses a medley of characters whom appear to have been pickled by time. Wednesday at the Roxy is "disco night." Everyone is on roller skates. The speakeasy secrecy of this sub-culture scene contaminates one with an air of stagnation; [...]
I am not from New York, nor have I ever lived there; the result, mostly, of not being a multimillionaire, nor having friends who are multimillionaires. I was living in Philadelphia, New York's embarrassingly second rate little brother, and had traveled up to "da big city" for the day with my girlfriend, to peruse potential art galleries for her paintings [...]
For several hours one afternoon last week, the unremarkable interior of a midtown hotel room was transformed into a kind of cat fantasia for the nineties, featuring some of the more exotic and genetically up to date entries in the Ninth Annual Cat show, which was recently held at Madison Square Garden. Cats were perched on chairs and couches and [...]
The Mail and Express reported appointment as a patrolman cost $300, promotion to sergeant, $1,400, and advancement to captain, $14,000. Policemen made back their investments by taking bribes. As Luc Sante observed of Big Bill in his book Low Life, "It was well known that he was corrupt; he in fact admitted as much quite readily." By 1891, Devery was [...]
An odd thing happened during game two of the Knicks' first round play-off series, against the Indiana Pacers. With a little under six minutes left in the third quarter, the Knicks were fighting there way back from a 10 point deficit, when Anthony Mason made a spectacular reverse dunk. The Pacers immediately called a time out, and the crowd, understandably, [...]
Right up until the time men started to stop wearing hats, the city was woven together by a network of pneumatic tubes that connected post offices and major buildings. A letter took seven minutes to go from Manhattan's 32nd Street to downtown Brooklyn through this Pneumatic Tube System, or PTS. Making use of the city's subterranean foundations, the tubes ran [...]
My name is David Zuva. I'm from Russia, from Odessa. I've been here twenty years. I'm a shoemaker. I repair shoes. This my profession. I worked in Russia in the same profession. I learned when I was small boy. My father teach me. All the family shoemakers--my whole family--my wife, me, my father, my brothers, my grandfather--all shoemakers. Zuva means [...]
All over the city, people leave their bikes locked up to fences, sign posts, whatever they can find, but there probably isn't a neighborhood with a higher bikes-locked-overnight density than the West Village. Our photo editor, Josh Gilbert went out one snowy January day and politely asked some to strike a pose or two. That's all for now.
I live where the wide expanse of Houston Street, in crossing 6th Avenue, suddenly dwarfs down to the little tributary of Bedford Street. It's an old Mafia neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop for hours. I've lived here 12 years, long enough so my neighbors and I know each other, or so I thought. I have one neighbor, Joe, [...]
Autumn, 2000 It is fall in London, where I now live, but I spent ten years in Manhattan so it comes as no surprise that I would remember early dark evenings, dark so suddenly that you know with a flash that summer has gone, and that I would think of crisp mornings when leaves first shuddered at my feet and [...]
Joseph Mitchell is famous for inventing, to a large degree, the tone and style of the New Yorker long profile, of which he is perhaps the unrivaled master (Calvin Trillin has said as much). He is equally (and perhaps a bit more) famous for enduring one of the most grueling and peculiar writer's blocks on record--it lasted from 1964 until [...]
The first nice weekend of the season, temperatures in the 70s, a light breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. A year ago today, I would have had a pang of jealousy thinking of the suburbanites who were combing their garages and heading to Home Depot to find tiki torches, bug zappers, weed whackers, and new patio furniture for [...]
At the risk of sounding terribly cliché, I was mugged in New York. It was July, 2005. I was a block away from home when two gentlemen – black, backwards hats – pushed me up against the wall, took the phone out of my hand, and asked if they could make a phone call. I said I was on the [...]
They are like a set of bees fighting over a flower. The waitress waits as long as she can before taking our orders because she knows there is an order to everything, that I was the sort of homecoming queen who slept with half the football team before a Saturday night game. Used as I am to this sort of [...]
The Joan of Arc Junior High school had just let out across the street and a crowd gathered right away. The man in the headlock, the captured man, was impossibly skinny, and wore faded jeans that were a bit too short, and sneakers. He had a beard and shaggy brown hair. He could have been a progressive librarian or mentally [...]
This essay appears in Thomas Beller’s essay collection, “How To Be a Man.” * There are those for whom a T-shirt is just another name for an undershirt, the sort of thing that never sees the light of day. But for others, myself included, T-shirts often are the main event, and the arrival of spring has prompted me to reconsider [...]
My writing teacher Sue said getting published would change my life. But as I prepared to dart past the security guard at the library, a stolen copy of The New York Post hidden in my parka, I sensed this wasn't what she had in mind. Only a month ago, everything had seemed so promising. An editor from The Post had [...]
It was 1978 and I was in sixth grade at public school I.S. 44 on the Upper West Side. A group of boys robbed me- daily. Tyrone, a mean little black kid in a blue down coat, which he wore regardless of whether it was summer or winter, grew up in the projects just a few blocks north of where [...]
The flat palm of my hand slammed into the steering wheel again and again. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck ME!" Yes, I was being vulgar -- and a bad driver -- but it had taken more like five or six hour to get from Washington, D.C. to New York, and now it was going to take another hour before we [...]
I was reading the fall issue of Esquire Gentleman recently, experiencing the slightly pleasing, slightly lulling sensation of an American fashion magazine, when I came across a photo of Adolf Hitler in a pin-striped suit. It was part of an article on old-fashioned pin-stripe suits, like the ones worn by the Duke of Windsor or Al Capone, who were also [...]
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away--that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter in a paper bag from [...]
"Chef!" The word rings out over the din of the vast kitchen, swirling in heat and motion, as 62 men and women in white smocks and white chef's hats go about the business of making dinner for the eight O'clock seating. "Chef!" The eight o'clock seating at Le Cirque is not to be taken lightly. The New York Times has [...]
When I take the subway I like to stand in the front car and look out the window. The window is long and narrow and through it I begin to watch the moving narrative of traveling through the underground on my way to wherever it is I want to go. I must keep my balance standing or else sit with [...]
For three years my girlfriend, Erin, lived in Dakar, Senegal, and though I never even made the trip there, I developed an attachment to Africa. There was something in knowing, truly knowing of her life there that became a part of my own life--acquiring not a working knowledge of Wolof (the language native to Dakar) but an understanding simply of [...]
I can't help but think about The O'Jays when I ride the C train. And not just because I used to commute back and forth from my boyfriend's place on 105th and Manhattan to my studio on Suffolk and Houston. The C train officially became the Love Train one day four years ago somewhere between Manhattan Valley and the Lower [...]
It started in a house. A bunch of guys playing music. It turned into a rambling, on again off again musical adventure, with numerous incarnations. The band's only record, Hell House, was released in 1997 by Grand Royal Records, thirteen years after most of the material that appears on it was recorded. John Berry, an original member of The Beastie [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper In the sixties and seventies watching the balloons being blown up wasn't such a big NY "happening" and the only people their were residents of the neighborhood, building and neighborhood employees and business owners, the volunteers who inflated and walked the balloons, and the police. The street was closed at around dusk the night before the [...]
It was an unseasonably cool Sunday evening in July, and, like the weather, I was feeling a bit out of sorts. I was looking for a new job and getting used to the pressures and angst of being in my first serious relationship. Walking on 78th Street between First and York, heading to the subway station after spending the weekend [...]
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