You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
Every year on March 30th, Brooke Astor’s birthday, I think about the time I killed her. Here is how it happened: In 2000, Brooke Astor kindly lent her name to the Gotham Center for New York City History. Mike Wallace (the historian, not the reporter) was starting up a center at the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate New York City [...]
At the height of the scandal over the inventions in James Frey's “A Million Little Pieces,” I was thinking about “Westchester Burning” by Amina Wefali. “A Million Little Pieces” is about a man and his addiction. “Westchester Burning” is about a woman and her marriage. Any resemblance between these two very different books is limited to whatever slim overlap there [...]
The pivot of this story is not the state of generic poverty that I found myself in upon entering New York. You don't have to be poor to be thrown in jail, but it helps. I had broken some sort of levee on the China Town bus between Philadelphia and New York. That morning I had woken up next to [...]
I got all dressed up for the opening night of Land of the Dead at the United Artists Union Square Multiplex. It was June and I wore a fine white picnic dress. My new boyfriend wore his usual tee with a funny message and ordinary jeans. I have a tendency to scream. When I attended a scary movie with my [...]
Johnny Depp slips me a twenty when we shake hands. Do that again, I say. "It's preparation, it's all preparation," he explains, and we shake hands again, more of a brush of fingers really, the sort of discrete low key maneuver any drug dealer in the park would be proud of. A twenty dollar bill appears in my palm. Johnny [...]
Because I work in Norwalk and live in Chelsea, whenever I have a bad day mixed with a bad drive home mixed with not being able to find a parking space, I usually stop by Billy’s Bakery for chocolate cupcakes. They ease the pain. So I’m leaving Billy’s recently with my cupcakes and I see a woman who looks like [...]
The monthly meeting of the co-op’s Board of Directors is tonight at 7:30, so I clean the basement a little earlier than usual. I am just finishing mopping the floor when Mrs. 11B, the President of the Board, steps out of the elevator onto the wet floor. She apologizes for ruining my hard work and slowly tiptoes across the floor [...]
1. “Saturday, January 27, 1996. Last Wednesday night, Anna* told me the story of how she made ten dollars letting a guy she worked with lick her feet. From what she tells me, he was really into it--licking her toes, the in-between areas, the heel. She said she even ‘threw in the other foot for free.’ I told her this [...]
It was 4 am. Maybe 4:30. The sun was just coming out, shading the city gorgeous cool oranges and blues and pinks and yellows. It was late spring, early summer. We had been up all night listening to Johnny Cash, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. We were on Skillman Avenue, Brooklyn, in my canted railroad apartment that had big picture [...]
Day 1 One day in 1999, an item in the New York Daily News noted that Woody Harrelson is in town and on the lookout for good pickup basketball. Sure enough, the star of "White Men Can't Jump" showed up at my gym today for the daily lunchtime game. This was not my first brush with celebrity; in my somewhat [...]
Arriving before the engine, with fire blowing out two windows on the third floor and people in the street yelling, "There's two kids in there" our asses are about to be kicked and there is nothing we can do about it. It's 1977, and Lieutenant Annello leads the way as usual. He is simply the best fire officer I have [...]
It was during my second month in the new office that I determined I was in love. She was standing next to the fax machine, paperwork in hand, bending over slightly so she could read the message in the small screen. She had a short skirt and long legs. They looked very shapely but solid. Clover never asked me to [...]
On my first day of the assignment I was pointed toward a stack of newspapers and told to find a pair of scissors so I could cut out any articles mentioning Hillary. My supervisor’s name was Jennifer. She was waving an adding machine above her head and ticker tape hung by her face like a fez tassel. “Howard! Is this [...]
On my way down the steps I was stuck behind a man with a cane, so I missed the D train. In my head I said, "Curses," then clarified out loud, "Not you," to the guy with the cane. He had enough problems. I didn't think the next train would be long, though, because it wasn't late and it was [...]
I was walking down the steps to the downtown train at West 23rd Street & 7th Avenue. I heard a trumpet being played and someone singing. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I see this guy sitting on a bench facing me as I was slipping my Metrocard through the turnstyle. He seem to be around 70 [...]
I moved into 292 Elizabeth Street in the fall of 1976. On a Sunday night. I was skipping out on three months rent at 242 E. 10th Street on the corner of 1st Avenue and figured it would be easiest to do when there was less traffic and not many people around. Unfortunately, the Maltese landlady lived on the 2nd [...]
I was walking to the office even though it was Saturday—this was years ago when I was gainfully employed and hadn’t the time I do now to dredge up incidents from the past and turn them this way and that—when I noticed a woman walking towards me, pushing a baby in a stroller and holding a little boy by the [...]
Jimmy, the boss, and I are in the basement still mourning the passing of 16A, when the passenger car opens and a white envelope dances out of the elevator. The white rectangle shimmies and gyrates obscenely, beckoning us. We are powerless to resist. As we near the object of our desire, the envelope, and the hand to which it is [...]
Inside the firehouse, sweeping floors, cooking meals and maintaining equipment are routine parts of the job. However when the doors go up and the rigs go out you have to be as flexible as Gumby, because you do not know what you are going to be faced with next. While responding to alarms, we always scan the sky for smoke [...]
When I walk through Midtown Manhattan, I think of The Jetsons. One episode in particular, where George and Co. bought a new apartment, and that apartment was taken up by a big space-age crane and placed in an empty hole in an apartment building, thus making it full and round. That’s how I think of the offices in those huge [...]
The world of magazine publishing in New York is extremely competitive. No matter how talented one is an editor or a writer, one must have contacts in the industry to obtain that first, entry-level job. Mrs. Carpati, my landlady, happened to work at Cosmopolitan in ad sales, and she was glad to introduce me to Hearst Magazines. I got lucky [...]
If you are of the runty persuasion (for our purposes let’s say 5' 2" or shorter – ceiling-skimming 5' 3ers need not apply) you likely know the terror that is the general admission rock show. You may – as I did for years – swear off the concert hall forever, foregoing its unforgiving expanses for the more amenable terrain of [...]
On a summer evening in 2001, after work and after grilled cheese in the Greek diner on Amsterdam, Jeremy and I are walking through Verdi square, past the 72nd Street station on the 1 and 9, the most treacherously narrow subway platform in all of Manhattan, forever poised on the precipice of disaster. The streets are packed with nervous life [...]
She was an old lady and for a moment I wanted to kill her. We were at the grocer, and she was taking an inordinate amount of time paying. After a long time spent peering into her purse she handed over a few dollars, and a couple of quarters, and a dime and a nickel, and was now very carefully [...]
In April, 1992, I was in Los Angeles preparing to go to the Academy awards as the date of someone who had been nominated for an Oscar--my mother. The Oscars are about Hollywood, about bright, ephemeral glamour, about surfaces that reflect. My mother is not about these things. Yet there we were, an unlikely pair, preparing for our big night. [...]
I met him in Starbucks while drinking a cup of coffee. He didn’t look like the kind of man that frequented Starbucks. He was reading a newspaper and I sat down at the table and chairs next to him. Even sitting down he seemed very tall; his hair was neatly shaved off his head, and he had a small graying [...]
The old lady thrust her flabby arms toward me and yelled, “She’s a man!” I fixated on the waddle of skin beneath her chin. With her arms flapping and her waddle shaking, she looked like a turkey. “You’re sure Raven is a man?” Maury Povich cheerfully asked. I awaited gender judgment, posing in my seven-inch, black patent leather, come-fuck-me-but-please-don’t-make-me-walk-in-these heels, [...]
I had been living in New York for three years before I saw my first dead body. Sure, there were those moments of uncertainty all New Yorkers experience, when stepping into an empty train car and seeing a body splayed out, usually a poor homeless person who certainly smelled like death; but you were never sure. I even played a [...]
Alma Mater, the massive, laurel wreath-sporting statue-woman who sits at the heart of the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights, strikes an ambiguous pose: her forearms raised, her palms open to the sky, her face blank. This gesture can be interpreted in all kinds of ways, but, on days like Tuesday, it was a shrug. Many students I talked to shrugged [...]
I’d dashed in about a half-hour before closing time. This little toy store in the Village, whose shelves cheerfully overflow with cute wooden toys in primary colors, funny stuffed monkeys and bright plastic puzzles. A friendly, crowded little place devoid of Gameboys and electronic pinging, the kind of place where you can reassure yourself you’re in the company of rational, [...]
A beaten body sat slumped on the back step of an anonymous pumper. We nearly walked right by Danny without recognizing him. Danny’s turnout coat was half open and covered with remnants of the building burning at the corner of Townsend Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway. His face and hands were black with soot. Steam seaped from his helmetless [...]
There is no commuter more unqualified to weigh in on the effects of the transit strike than a cyclist who lives and works in Manhattan - which is me. I have been riding a bicycle in the city for the last 12 years and have become so reliant (addicted might be a better word) on it as my means of [...]
Date: Feb 13, 2006 The staff at The Mermaid Inn are eager to meet your dining needs. Please tell us about your experience in the space below. Your opinions and suggestions provide invaluable insight into how we can continuously improve upon both our service and cuisine. Please visit us again, and soon! Name: Doug Maloney E-mail: dougerino@gmail.com Scallops were sort [...]
An "incident" had occurred at the group home where my younger brother lives with five other men and three women who all have mental retardation. His supervisor, more amused than upset, followed procedure by notifying me and beginning an investigation. Fred, a 103 pound, 5’2” 52-year-old man, was discovered standing with his roommate of two years in their tiny room [...]
That morning I got up in the afternoon. My friend Micki came from 204th/Post Avenue, from her man's crib complaining about his small penis saying, "My baby brother's got a bigger dick than his!" And I had to get up and shower, leaving her in my room and I took the loofa with me because I scrub the dead skin [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
