You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
I came across a scene today downtown, near Wall Street. Striking iron workers, carpenters, all hemmed into a little alley. They were yelling and screaming. Periodically a group standing on a platform at the front of the alley led them in a chant: "Scabs go to hell!" Some wore hardhats, many had whistles, and a few had earplugs stuffed into [...]
Check out Rachel Sherman's new book! ** No one who does Japanese hair straightening at Hair Village is Japanese. You can't have highlights if you want your hair straightened. You can't touch your hair - even put it behind your ears - for three days afterwards. You can't wash your hair for three days either. You should probably wear a [...]
Morning at a Midtown Manhattan publishing company office. Cubicles house individual workers. Cube walls are six feet high. My coworker, Lilly, is standing in the corner of my cubicle when it happens. In a fit of pique over the latest uncorrected typo, she’s suddenly throwing Kung Fu kicks, whirling, twirling, balletic, her long raven hair whipping around her face. I [...]
It’s like this: I’m bipolar. Manic-depressive. Heavily medicated and mad as a hatter when I’m not. I have had so many days of smelling colors and hearing lights, so many brushes with the law, that I have gathered up the stories and been given the go-ahead by a young, hip literary agent to write the young, hip, bipolar memoir. I [...]
I grew up in Manhattan, and for most of my life the tuneful chimes of the Mr. Softee truck have been a regular feature of the warmer months. That creaking melody is probably one of the most familiar tunes I know. It’s consoling and calming and ever so faintly haunting. Jerome Badanes once remarked that he found it very disturbing [...]
Yes, he was wearing sunglasses inside his tinted command car. He did not exit the car; he exuded suspiciousness. I could see that he didn’t have much room in there. He was surrounded by banks of monitors and servers. Half hidden, he waited for me to explain myself. I told him my particulars, held out my camera and asked if [...]
I live next to the neighbor from hell. B-man is about 5/10, slim and dark skinned. He always wears a black kango and one of his old black suits. I can tell they’re so old because of all the wrinkles in it,cand besides that its faded. On the east side of Harlem on 129th Street and Lexington Avenue is where [...]
I really did try all the conventional methods. Really. I wrote imploring letters to the Office of the Mayor, I called my City Council members' secretary at all hours, I testified at public hearings before assorted half-awake bureaucrats. Nothing and again nothing. It would have been less frustrating to tell it all to the guy at the token booth. I [...]
Rio Mar was a Spanish restaurant that once occupied a little wedge of space between Little West Twelfth and Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district. It had been there for decades, an obscure treat, and even when flashy Pastis opened directly across the street, it remained esoteric, hidden in plain site. From the outside you hardly knew it was there, [...]
Every high tide harvested beer bottles, oil containers, fishing lines, shiny candy wrappers, and plastic bags onto the sloping shoreline of Pattaya. At low tide I collected the trash into sea-worn rice bags. Within a half-hour the sand was devoid of any human refuse and I could smugly regard the pristine sand with pride. While tourists turned their noses in [...]
In medicine, when you see an attending physician walking down the hall and you stop him or her to ask for an impromptu consultation, it’s called "curbsiding." As a medical student, however, no one is ever particularly reliant on your expertise, and the average medical student can walk through a hospital without ever being pulled off track by the lapels [...]
They predicted rain, but the sun shone through hazy skies last Wednesday at the School of the Arts protest at Columbia University. I had never been to a protest before. I was angry—I am angry—at President Lee Bollinger for his utter lack of support of the School of the Arts despite his pledge at his inauguration to make us a [...]
Seven o’clock isn’t late, but already it is dark in New York City. On the corner of 111th and Broadway, two women meet; they stand in tune to the pull of wary strangers. The duo, a short Hmong girl and a thin white woman, stand beside a portable table. Kao Yang has on a long, black coat. Sabina, the tarot [...]
We had coffee the other day at a little place in the West Village called The Brewbar with a man named Chistopher Hacker, who used to work there. Past The Brewbar's red-painted window frames, traffic careened silently up Eighth Avenue. The sky persisted with its threat of a Noreaster, but in here Carmen Miranda was doing a tiki-version of "Fever," [...]
At the Outsider Art Fair – held in the Puck Building from January 23rd-25th - there were as many men with ponytails as there were terms to describe the art they had come to buy: grassroots, vernacular, folk, visionary, Nueve Invention. Yet there was little question as to who were the most important artists in the show. Marquee outsiders include [...]
The spray-painted image of Tony’s tightly clipped mustache and smooth fade is beginning to show its age — but his dark eyes still stare out intently from the wall at indifferent passersby. This is still the Loisaida, he might boast: Spanglish for the Lower East Side. Tony’s pupils are guarded, harboring the memory of the violent episode in 1993 that [...]
A few seasons back, Perry Ellis (the company) chose Patrick Robinson (the designer) to resurrect its iconic American style . This past September Robinson staged a renegade runway show where the spectators did the walking, parading past lines of models posing and preening in a cacophony of Spring 2004 style in muted pastels, creamy whites and quirky patterns, not a [...]
His hands were large. My resume lay flat on his desk. He had cleared a space amidst the clutter, and he ran one of those big, sensitive, but also violent looking hands over it again and again while he studied it, as though his hand was a scanner and would impart some key bit of information that reading never could. [...]
As most everyone by now knows, a little family of French bistros lies scattered over the lower half of Manhattan, as if arranged by the single pass of a great pepper mill. Named Le Gamin (save one Le Deux Gamin), each is a neighborhood place, a paradox of quiet and noisy, sunny and dark, boring and piqued, where woody rosemary [...]
This week’s meeting of the New York Companion Bird Club of Manhattan was held at the Jackson Hole Restaurant. This would be the first bird club meeting of my life. I have never liked birds very well. In my last year of undergraduate college, I transferred to San Francisco State University, and discovered that the cafeteria there was infested with [...]
When I was in college, I spent an entire night dancing at the Palladium in New York City with Spalding Gray. We danced and danced to every song- danceable or not. I didn't know who he was but my friends did and he was a very cool older man who seemed to still like the things I'd assumed you stopped [...]
The high ceiling lofts feel more SoHo than Lower East Side, though the view of Seward Park High School to the north and tenement bricks from the terraces facing south easily reorient you. This freshly painted blue building gracing Grand Street between Essex and Ludlow Streets originally housed a piano showroom and warehouse before the Sunray Yarn factory took it [...]
A block or so north of the Brooklyn Bridge, just behind the old New York Post Building, between Catherine and Market Streets, squats Knickerbocker Village. This unassuming enclave of bare brick apartment towers, privately managed, which might easily be mistaken for one of the nearby government projects, made history as the first major housing development even partially supported by public [...]
Distinct from other great cities of the world, Manhattan is almost pathologically averse to letting you wander to the river's edge and get close enough to touch the water. It has erected a prophylactic wall of fences and other physical barriers, which over-protectively stave off potential accidents, intentional harm and, most of all, liability suits. It was not always thus. [...]
There was a time, not long ago, when turtles enjoyed a brief vogue in New York City. Turtles whose shells weren't much bigger than a silver dollar were sold on street corners all over Manhattan, and people crowded around to buy them. In the midst of this turtle trend, my friend Kip moved back to New York, after two years [...]
Middlemarch was a bitch: all lace and wayside chapels and conversations hissed behind gloved hands. Eliot's prose was denser than a Dorset garden, and we were all lost. All except for Todd, the grinning mook genius in British Lit class, who would interrupt the torpor with irreverent debates. We craved the distraction. It was the Spring of 1980 at Syracuse [...]
It was 1969 and cats were everywhere in Morningside Heights. Multitudes of feral alley prowlers, storefront dozers, and the gray cat who was allowed to sit in the open, unscreened window of the fourth floor apartment across the street. He was always reaching toward pigeons with a wistful paw, even though the pigeons were never anywhere close. Whenever I returned [...]
Twenty-one children (the first of whom were triplets), and twenty-one grandchildren. And two wives, if you're wondering. Thirteen with the first wife, nine with the next. He's not married anymore. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when it was still Brownsville, Brooklyn. Now he lives in Springfield Gardens, Queens. On public transportation it takes him two and a half hours [...]
Michael had long used us as a test audience for his trendy nihilism, togging up in punk, new wave and goth to suit his status as a Parsons grad student. We, his undergrad pals from Syracuse, continued to feign shock, through ten shades of hair color, safety pins inserted in various extremities, kilts, bondage pants and all-black wardrobes. But there [...]
A slightly built African-American man in a standard-issue beige trenchcoat murmured as we passed on the street. "Say, you wouldn't mind giving the time of day to a Black man?" "What can I do for you?" "Well, I'm just here at St. Luke's, you see, for the methadone program, and I have to get home, and the buses, they require [...]
The garden in Riverside Park is fragrant and full of kids playing, but only several hundred yards away Grant's Tomb maintains its atmosphere of austerity and stillness. The sign on the plaza outside the Tomb, under the sycamores, reads NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. And immediately one thinks of whiskey and of the General in his Union-blue private's coat and of the [...]
I sit in a tree with pen and paper in hand, planning to writing a letter. The branches under me are smooth and rough in patches, warped like an elephant's trunk. The shade of the tree, the cool breeze and warm sun make me feel good, and calm, and in control. An elderly man stands some ways off, smoking a [...]
Manhattan is the capitol of the unexpected encounter. There are no dogs barking to warn you of the unexpected, no dust being kicked up on a long curving dirt road as a stranger approaches. So it was that I found myself standing in Nussbaum & Wu, wishing that her presence had kicked up a little more dust. Here before me, [...]
Eliot Majors, age 9, slides his queen diagonally across the chessboard, then inexplicably halts one square short. Check. Several watching youngsters groan. "Nooo!" cries one, clutching his chest, and falls to the ground in dramatic disbelief. Maurice Ashley, age 34, removes his dark sun glasses and his leather jacket. "You sure you want to do that?" he says. It doesn't [...]
Melting orange popsicles, dripping ice cream cones, slushy cherry ices and candy all day long--all reminders of lazy summer days spent growing up in Harlem. A day that began for me not long after dawn. Peering out of my living room window, I see that the Harlem world is just beginning to stir, but I am wide awake and bursting [...]
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