You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
This man is proud of his work. He's from Russia.
In the reading room at the Public Library they were working in the pleasantly vague, ethereal light, the faint smell of body odor hanging in the air, the many laptops and furtive glances. In Bryant Park, behind the library, a girl sat amidst a sea of chairs and stared out at the empty lawn. The sky was grey, a white [...]
The train lurches out of 33rd Street, and I fall, more than sit, into a seat that has miraculously become available at the height of rush hour. A slight but not unhandsome man beside me helps me catch my balance. "Come here often?" he jokes, and I laugh briefly, and his eye catches mine for a second before he looks [...]
The name: Stillman's Gym still is magical to old ring veterans--rapidly vanishing--but it's mostly just a revered icon like Jack Johnson or Boyle's Half-Acre that fight purists have read about in an old issue of Ring Magazine or on the internet in vintage columns of Dan Parker and Jimmy Cannon. For me, Stillman's isn't like talking about Benny Leonard or [...]
In a city with an Irish pub on every corner, where are the other kilt-wearing Celts to be found? Since returning from a trip to the Scottish Highlands, I have noticed a distinct lack of Scottish presence in New York, particularly when compared to the Irish. I searched in vain for the Whisky Mac, a mellow drink of equal parts [...]
On a Monday night at the Tenth Street Lounge, the Third Wave met the Second Wave. The woman I was dating told me some older feminists were having their works read and asked if I was willing to be a token boy. I'd been a lone wolf studying feminist theory in college in the mid-80s, so I figured I could [...]
There’s Antenna Lady, the black woman who stands in front of the building next to mine with the silver antenna-thing pierced through her face. Though she must be in her forties, her face is studded with all sorts of St. Marks-like piercings, the most shocking being the long one poking out of her left cheek. Every time she sees me [...]
Adrian Dannatt is not a man easily persuaded to perform manual labor, or labor of any kind. Anything that requires physical effort usually elicits from him an expression of mild horror and incredulity, as though you'd asked if he'd like to stroke a pet cockroach. Therefor it was a memorable occasion when I came upon Dannatt carrying a night table, [...]
The pictures on this page are 360 panoramic images. If you do not have Quicktime (and you'll know if there are no pictures visible even after a minute), Download it here. These are not static pictures. You can move them left and right, up and down. To move the image: Hold down mouse button and drag mouse in desired direction. [...]
Snow and cold are anathema to the skateboarder. The winter in New York can be a frustrating time to pursue an activity best done wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Hardcore skaters still hit the streets to skate midtown's smooth plazas on frigid nights, but that can be a slightly masochistic and uncomfortable experience. One remedy is to move the action [...]
The peculiar thing about these 360 degree images is that when shooting in low light, or when there is a lot of movement, individuals can blur to the point of being non-existent. My friend calls these barely present people "ghosts." An example can be seen below. Never mind the couple making out passionately (when they stopped kissing they began walking [...]
An old friend came to town not long ago and we met for a late lunch on the Upper West Side. Trilby ordered a burger, no bread, with brie; I ordered half a roasted chicken with mashed potatoes. The food was slow in coming but we had so much catching-up to do that we didn't care. My chicken, when it [...]
'Scape is a new theater company that will stage ten short plays on a Brooklyn rooftop this June. To cast the plays the new theater company employed an old tradition, the audition. The plays will be outdoors and open air, but the audition was held in a small white room in a Bleeker Street cellar--closed air. For three hours the [...]
One American flag pin is not enough for the woman across the aisle from me on the L train to Brooklyn. She wears one on her lapel, one on her coat, one on the front of her Le Sportsac bag. All are bejeweled. Her eyes are closed; her head falls to the side. She has blonde hair, blonder highlights. She [...]
All those who believe Tupperware parties have gone the way of Suzy Homemaker may have cause to break out the crinoline. As a party at PROUN space studio has recently demonstrated, Tupperware is alive and glib in the West Village. No longer the exclusive domain of Valium-popping post-WWII housewives, this particular Tupperware party, given by architects Gustavo Bonevardi and John [...]
I got the call at 9:00 am. They wanted me to go to a Central Park West address, the home of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones. The celebrity couple had just had their second child, a girl, two days earlier, and were expected back from the hospital at any moment. Rounding the corner in front of the address, I [...]
Several years ago, in the Spring of 2003, I endured one of those moderately shattering moments of identity crisis – a break-up – and resorted to drugs to ameliorate its effects. Included among the expected substances and liquids was the powerful drug of technology, specifically a new gadget, even more specifically a neat-o cool-o camera attachment that allowed you to [...]
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