You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
I immediately rediscovered my stance - Kruger's signature red boxes, the bold typed messages upon entrance erased the damage the glossy magazine had done. I remembered whose side I was on when viewing Kruger's commands: "you are a captive audience", "your body is a battleground", "we are your elaborate holes", "your comfort is my silence." Every picture and its copy [...]
In his long running quest to be a perpetual house guest, Sherban had developed a new strategy: balconies. Something about a balcony reassured apartment owners that one's presence was only temporary, enjoyable almost. And life on a balcony turned out to be refreshingly casual, al fresco. By contrast to a "spare room" or fold-out sofa, one could be proud of [...]
Having finished the Blue-plate Special And reached the coffee stage, Stirring her cup she sat, A somewhat shapeless figure Of indeterminate age In an undistinguished hat. When she lifted her eyes it was plain That our globular furore, Our international rout Of sin and apparatus And dying men galore, Was not being bothered about. Which of the seven heavens Was [...]
Julio, a boyish thirty-one, has difficulty not smirking when admitting to having slept with over seventy-five females. The majority were what Julio dubs "Barnard floozies": white, rich undergraduates at Columbia University or Barnard College. Julio can list most of their names on a napkin. Those whose names he can't recall, he can usually remember something about them, like the one [...]
Phoebe’s is the local coffee shop, and it isn’t a bad place to be in the summer. The patio in the back hosts a leafy tree that sprawls between the fire escape above and the duplex behind, shading the tables and chairs and making it cool. A rusted watering can props open the screen door. There is a sink off [...]
Illustration by Elisha Cooper I was married and she was married and we probably shouldn't have been doing what we were doing, especially where we were doing it. But there we were, late winter, 2002, at 57th and Broadway, a spot that, at least to an out-of-towner like me, signified something important. I read once that that intersection was the [...]
Dear Diary, Having just dropped towel in the men’s locker room of one of the numerous branches of the Union Square-area New York Sports Clubs, I bent over to slip my leg into my underwear (charcoal gray boxer briefs, from Bloomies, of course!) when I noticed out of the corner of my right eye that someone had moved inappropriately close [...]
Our company president paced before us in miniature Ferragamo shoes, her furrowed brow crowned by a platinum beehive. With her short, tyrannical stature she smacked of Kim Jong II preparing to invade Madison Avenue. She had called us junior PR flacks into her office for a rousing speech. "You’re the best of the agency and that’s why we have you [...]
Aspiring poets learn, early on, the value of concrete imagery; of replacing metaphorically huge words with small sensory explosions which blow the reader into reality. Allen Ginsberg didn't write "live life," he wrote of those "who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup." Sylvia Plath didn't say, "I mourn the dead," but rather, "Thirty years [...]
“The movie was mad nice,” said Anissa. “That movie was the dumbest movie I ever seen,” Brian answered. “It was a waste of money. I thought that Event Horizon would be the scariest movie of the month, but turns out it was just another dumb movie.” Anissa answered, “The only reason you think it’s dumb is because you’re dumb and [...]
It was the day before the day before Christmas. Several puppies were carousing in the window of a pet store. The avenue was full of people. It was not the normal crowdedness, he felt. It was a less stressed out crowdedness, a crowd in the mood for lingering. He joined the crowd watching the puppies. They were separated into three [...]
K.Y. Grocery, near the corner of 83rd on the east side of York, is run by a Korean family who are friendly with the Japanese fish market that lies next door. If you are a regular, they will let you run small tabs if you’re short on cash, and they always round up or down to avoid pennies. Since it’s [...]
Anyone who passed by the intersection of Adams and Plymouth on the summer evening of August 9th must’ve been confused—violent splashes of every color imaginable had turned a dull concrete lot under the Manhattan Bridge into a gargantuan Jackson Pollock painting. Not that shocking in artsy DUMBO, but closer inspection revealed that this was no street painting. In fact, the [...]
The Segway first appeared in front of the B-61 bus stop on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg about a month and a half ago. Riding it was a short, thin lad sporting an uneven bowl cut. He looked about fifteen, as though he might have torn himself away from a Dungeons & Dragons game, swung by the barber shop, picked up [...]
I pointed them out to you just a few weeks before you left. They were a couple–a man and woman--a few years older than us, maybe in their late forties, traipsing along the sidewalk in that odd way they had of walking–taking funny little unbalanced steps, but steps that moved them hastily along nonetheless. Neatly dressed, yet incongruous: the man [...]
For three years, I lived with the blinds that came on the windows when I’d moved in: plastic, listing, motel-room-beige blinds. While barely scraping by on a teacher’s salary, purchasing window treatments isn't a high priority. When the blinds finally collapsed, the bare windows looked so tall and bright, so pleased to have been freed-up, that I didn’t have the [...]
The Editors of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood and The Whitney Museum Invite you to a Party on Friday, November 7th. 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street. 6-9pm Admission to the party (and the whole museum!) is whatever you want, including free. There will be a reading featuring Phillip Lopate, Rachel Cline, and Thomas Beller. Snacks, Drinks, Doo-Dads, Door-Prizes, and an audio [...]
The air on the fourteenth floor of 1 Police Plaza is a little thick, and Captain Z. wheezes. "You’re wheezing," I say. "I am not," he says, and pulls out his asthma inhaler, shakes it, and takes a puff. His lung sounds immediately clear. It’s 4:30 on Thursday, August 14, exactly nineteen minutes after the power went out. I had [...]
Now Elle stands to demonstrate the Bunny dip— Playboy’s signature manner of serving drinks. She is all cool grace: knees together, a slight roll, the bosom strategically directed away from the customer while the Bunny tail rises. “When I got out of school in 1965,” Elle says, returning to her stool at the bar, “every job I went for: they [...]
My devotion to fashion shows began with the designer Cynthia Rowley. About six years ago I inherited an invitation to her show when a fashion editor at the magazine where I worked couldn't attend. I still remember grabbing a cab at the last minute and scrambling in as the show was just beginning. Sly Stone's "If You Want Me to [...]
I’ve always been a bit obsessed by mastheads, and one of my favorite mastheads to peruse is that of The Paris Review. The print is very small, because there are so many names to fit on the page. The normal fluctuations of people arriving and vanishing from a magazine do not apply here; a name might get moved from one [...]
When I first moved to New York I worked at a large accounting firm in west Midtown and lived in Yorkville, at 90th and Second. One day in early October, about two months after I began my job, I decided to walk home from work. I determined that I could walk on Fifth Avenue until I reached 90th Street, at [...]
Vladimir Putin stopped by a gas station in Chelsea on Friday afternoon on his way to a visit with President Bush. On hand to greet him was Senator Charles Schumer. The gas station had received a make-over--new paint, new sign. It had once been a Getty, but like all the Gettys in the city it has been transformed into a [...]
I was sitting on the floor of my older sister's East Village apartment helping her pack up her things, when I found her diary. She was in the kitchen wrapping plates and bowls in newspaper, so I thought I’d take a break out of eyesight and read a few pages. I went up the steel ladder to her tiny lofted [...]
Apartment-house neighbors don't go bad suddenly, like winter avocados. You get an alarming sense of them as soon as they appear. A week after my upstairs neighbor Thad moved in, we were already engaged in a mortal vendetta. I've shared walls with annoying people, but this character was off the charts. His schedule was bizarre, and his habits were strange. [...]
The girl arrived late on a Friday afternoon and interrupted what I was doing. She refused to take a number and said she only had to collect her airline ticket and that she didn’t have time to wait. She had to get to the airport, she said. I was busy helping somebody, I explained with overt politeness, and she would [...]
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is located at 97 Orchard Street. From the outside, it appears to be no different than any of the other buildings on the street, save for a plaque proclaiming it to be a National Historic Landmark. On the inside, it is a different story. Through painstaking research of the former inhabitants of the tenement, [...]
My parents were due in at 6pm on Blackout Thursday. I see them but twice a year, when I travel to their home in Beverly Hills; but this time, for the first time, they were coming to me, to my new "adult apartment" uptown. I was looking forward to entertaining them, had a fridge full of gourmet food and chilled [...]
57th Street, 8th Avenue, midafternoon: I’m at the newsstand when the traffic light goes out. It has the same ominous, empty face a dark stoplight always has. Newsstand man looks up. His light went out too. We turn in tandem. The subway light is out. Now we look at each other. Not good. We shake our heads. Nothing like a [...]
Sometimes I think about the reasons why I love New York, but the one thing I love the most about it is the parades in the summer time. When I was in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at my aunt’s house, we stayed to see the parade. It was the West Indian Parade and everyone was outside. There were dancers hyping the crowd [...]
One day I was on the M60 bus going across 125th Street. It was a nice bright sunny day. There were lots of people who had just came from shopping, from all the stores on 125th Street. I was with my friend and my little sister, who is four. My little sister’s name is Maya. She is in Pre- K [...]
Two weeks before Christmas, my Aunt Cooklyn and I were decorating. We decorated the Christmas tree, put lights on the windows; we also decorated the apartment door. It was snowing; the exact date was December 8, 2001. “Hurry up, you’re as slow as a half dead chicken, give me the tape.” said Aunt Cooklyn. I said, “OK, but can you [...]
It was a nice Saturday morning, sun shining bright and all. I woke up to get ready to go to my grandmother’s house to go shopping for her. It was about 11:00 a.m. as I got ready to go. I put on my sweatpants, my slippers, a wife beater, and a hoody. I did not have to travel far because [...]
I can remember one Saturday evening, a nice and beautiful day in April. It was about 70 degrees and everyone was happy, showing smiling faces and enjoying the weather. I was at work on 125th Street between 7th & 8th Avenues at McDonalds and it was busy as usual. Then a maniac came inside the store and he began bothering [...]
One March afternoon, I was at my neighbor’s house on the balcony. I was excited because it was a nice sunny day, and there were a lot of people outside having fun and listening to music. At the time my neighbor and I were listening to Elvis Crespo, Suavemente, eating nice juicy mangos. She was making her own scene, by [...]
It was a nice day, the sun was out and it wasn’t too hot or too cold it was just right. That after noon I was with my friends dub and Dee on the corner of 128th and Lexington Avenue chilling when Dee decided to go to the store. Now that we were walking to the store, dub, Dee and [...]
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