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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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
Walking through the backyard to get to the basketball courts, to work out by myself at 6:00 a.m., like I do everyday. It was kind of misty outside and the grass was wet and the benches and ground were slippery. I had on basketball shorts, Orlando sweatshirt, and my ball kicks dribbling the rock through the backyard on the wet [...]
It all started about a year ago in the summer time. We all finished going shopping, me and my mother, who is about five foot seven inches tall, wears glasses and is kind of chunky. Along with us was my little sister. We then decided to stop on 117th Street at 3rd Avenue for a bite to eat. Since we [...]
Every day when I come home from a very hard day of school, I walk up the gray stone steps of my old dusty yellow house. And every day there this old lady with a large housedress and old decayed leather slippers is sitting at the top of the steps. She is always sitting in the same spot, nothing budging [...]
Finally after eight years I can go back to where it used to be fun for me and other children to hang out at Wagner Project’s pool. It still looks the same but really doesn’t feel the same. The children are still splashing in the water, the babies are still in the baby pool with their parents, but it has [...]
It was March 16,1998 around 3:30pm, I remember it like it was just yesterday. As I made my way through my house door from school, I heard the phone ring from the kitchen. I went to drop my books off in my room which is at the end of the hallway. I went back to the kitchen to see who [...]
The street fight had happened on 122nd between 2nd and 3rd Avenue in front of a bar. That was not the first fight that had happened on the block. There are many fight on that block. That block is real bad. The big issue that makes the block even worse is all the drugs and gun shootings that go on [...]
While studying piano in college in Mississippi in the mid-seventies, I discovered I could make money with my ability at the keyboard. I played the pipe organ at a church in Hazlehurst, where my parents still live, every Sunday morning. During the week I played the piano for singing lessons and ballet classes in Jackson where I went to a [...]
When I was assigned to photograph the bank manager, something inside me gave a decisive nod. The bank manager was someone I could hate. The bank manager was someone I could hunt. Even though he had suffered this horrible experience the day before, I looked at the photographs of him flailing on the ground, attached to what he thought was [...]
I was a New York City Urban Park Ranger usually stationed in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, but for this day I was detailed out to Central Park, the park of my childhood. In Van Cortlandt Park I knew where the hophornbeam trees lived in a valley of white oaks and tulip poplars. I knew where the skunks made [...]
In the late 60's, I went to the old Madison Square Garden on 50th St. to see a main-go between two Latin fighters. One a Cuban and one a Puerto Rican. So, the Garden is a tinder box; any spark will ignite it. The main event is very hotly contested, and could go either way. When the decision was announced, [...]
I was nearly there. Carrying my chair, beach bag and small cooler the few final yards to my usual spot, I was almost past the part I dreaded. It was the trek from the parking lot at Riis Park in the Rockaways, to my little beach at the start of neighboring Breezy Point. To get there, I had to walk [...]
Not too long ago I sprained my ankle playing basketball and was unable to walk for several days. I had no food in the apartment during my ordeal so I was forced to order all of my meals in. It was a great indulgence which I thoroughly enjoyed. Yet by the eighth meal on the fourth day, with my ankle [...]
The man sitting on the locker room bench looked like he was asleep, but he was merely exhausted. Sweat coursed down his massive torso and dampened the white towel tucked around his waist. His stomach, of which he was always aware, spilled over the towel and rested on his thighs. In two weeks he’d lost seven pounds, most of it [...]
My mass transit had misplaced its insanity. The B48 bus driver obeyed traffic signals. The one-legged beggar banking on his one-leggedness vanished. Even the angry accordion player took a sabbatical. My chunky-monkey commute was now old-fashioned vanilla. But vanilla was what I craved. It was another day answering phones for a tri-monikered firm. The job was painless when the company [...]
It was 1972 and I was walking along Third Ave. one evening past PJ Clarke's, a bar-hangout for the sports crowd and the media, and a booming voice hails me, "Joe!, Joe! Over here!' I looked over in the direction of the voice and I saw a guy as big as a building in a huge suit standing in Clarke's [...]
There’s this place on 57th between 8th and 9th called Dramatics for Hair. There are a few of them in the city. Dramatics has this thing going on where they give each of their employees a “dramatic” name, something like Flame or Lightning or Cognac. They are usually nouns but once in a while you meet an adjective. Naming the [...]
Smalls--a tiny, 50-person-capacity club in a West Village basement where for the last ten years you could watch the city's rising jazz stars grow up before your eyes, where the jam sessions kept going past dawn, where musicians (and sometimes the customers, it seemed) often lived in some of the club's back rooms--is dead! On June 1, a rent increase [...]
Iso is the best sushi in New York. This is due, mostly, to the freshness of the fish, the portions, which are generous, the style of presentation, the bustle of the place, the color of the napkins and table cloths (an extremely appealing pink), the manner of Iso himself and the other sushi chefs who make the sushi (brusque but [...]
My teenage years in the suburbs of Philadelphia were filled with lone trips to the city to cruise South Street and ogle its unsophisticated riff-raff. Later, to help finance my Bachelor’s Degree at NYU, I worked at the counter of an Espresso Bar near Carnegie Hall. The neighborhood got some suprisingly rough traffic. There was the lady who wore a [...]
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