You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (the protruding piers its cilia) or like a gourd or like some kind of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere. The Japanese of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had a word, ukiyo, [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut: a masterpiece or utter crap? My own impression was that it was utter crap when I saw it a little over a year ago, though I did enjoy the movie in certain ways, none of them, I felt at the time, intended. Since then I watched Kubrick's Lolita again and was [...]
1993 Like most of the people who haunt Shea Stadium these days, Steve Calandro is a diehard Mets fan. He's also a vendor, and the vendors, like the Mets, aren't having a terribly good year. The vendors work for the Harry M. Stevens Corporation, and when things are slow, as they have been this season, who gets to work is [...]
The strange twinge that often comes when I leave work and head west on 56th Street is, oddly, much like the same thing that hit the center of my gut when, at 13, I rode a bike to a movie theater in South Jersey and, with my school buddies, went to see my first R-rated movie. It's as if, confronting [...]
One of the first things a new visitor to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is likely to notice is how well dressed most of the men are. Monsoon rains may turn the streets into shallow lakes, the electricity may be erratic, but the men are fairly consistent in their outfit--a pair of slacks and a neat button down short sleeve shirt. The [...]
My story is true. Every detail I will relate is exactly as it happened on a beautiful spring day, May 16, 2000. This story starts in Kingston, NY, where four co-workers from the Ulster County Department Of Social Services prepare for a wonderful, exciting day in New York City. At 6:30 a.m. all four women, Janet, Sue, Gloria and Reine [...]
My dad worked in midtown at an advertising agency and for years as a young kid I would go to work with my him in the summers, just as a way to stay out of trouble. We would always take the same route and on the way we would pass an old decrepit building sandwiched between two large contemporary buildings. [...]
I call myself a security consultant because it sounds better than salesman but, essentially, I'm a salesman. I sell security products, primarily safes. My dad preceded me in this. He was with the Mosler Safe Company starting around 1948 and, quite frankly, as a kid, the work sounded very dull to me. I wanted to be a playboy of the [...]
Here is a note Isaac Mizrahi wrote to Grace Mirabella shortly after she was replaced by Anna Wintour as the Editor of Vogue Magazine.
Patricia Bosworth, the author of biographies of Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus and who has been at work on a biography of her father, Bartley Crumb, for the last 10 years, recently had the idea that it might be nice if a group of biographers could gather now and then and commiserate, perhaps over lunch at the China Bowl, a [...]
In the spring of 1902, the lawman swung down from the train. He was nearly fifty and a trifle stocky now. But he had worked for Wyatt Earp and known Doc Holliday, he had upheld the law in Dodge City and kept the peace in Tombstone. His shooting hand had lost none of its cunning, the .45 still swung on [...]
The organizers of Erotica USA threw a party recently at a place called Club New York, and all the exhibitors and exhibitionists who will shortly be filling up the Javitz center for the four-day Sex Expo were invited. The evening began with a sort of Freudian slip--the address on the invitation, "225 West 43rd Street"--did not exist. So many of [...]
La Tacita De Oro, the Chinese-Cuban restaurant on 99th and Broadway has a roast chicken special: One-half chicken (breast, thigh, back and wing) is served with yellow rice and black beans, or salad and fried plantains, for $4.85. I've come to learn that a small population of Chinese migrated to Cuba in the 1930s and then eventually came to America [...]
I had come to New York for spring break in search of fixing a broken heart. Probably a silly reason, but the cause and focus of that broken heart was spending the semester in New York at the Hotel Windermere with other theater students from my college in Indiana. Why I thought I could patch things up I'll never know. [...]
It's 10:20 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the air is filled with the unmistakable sound of coins hitting metal. The multi-colored machine generating all the noise stands almost six feet tall and looks like a cross between an oversized Lego kit and something that toddlers would be crawling over at Playspace. The high tech liquid crystal display on the front [...]
Of the big five, our sense of smell is supposedly the one most closely associated with our memories. And I buy that, because I’m always a little turned on when I smell Burberry perfume. I can’t really describe it, but I can always identify it when I smell it. My first college girlfriend wore Burberry perfume. And the sensation associated [...]
In October of 1960, Mom was pulling for Kennedy and Dad was rooting for Nixon. I couldn't have cared less one way or the other—my thoughts were on baseball. The Pittsburgh Pirates had just crushed my heart by beating the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series (to this day, I still wonder if Mickey Mantle cried as [...]
I was bounding down the stairs into the subway, three steps at a time, hoping to make the train. The stairs were wet. The air was cold. It was a day of harsh weather, a gusting snowstorm, but I had my iPod and was experiencing everything dreamily. To say it was a new iPod was only half of it. I [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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