You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
We found the doll right there on 16th Street in Brooklyn, outside the Baptist church (now, don’t get too excited, they’re boring white Baptists--no big hats or electric guitars anywhere in sight). The doll was wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. Only its feet were showing, chubby little feet in high-button boots. The church folk had been cleaning out [...]
The neighborhood is barren of niceties, wide cobbled streets separate low buildings of a century past, warehouses of animal flesh with racks for hooks hanging out over the freight doors where trucks deliver their carcass-cargoes. In the pale dead winter afternoon I stumble over ice and snow blocked gutters to a set of heavy glass double doors into a narrow [...]
There it was, in my Inbox, mocking me. Dragging me down to its oceanic depths. Instantly, drowning me in thoughts of that horrific day downtown in August of 2000 when I attempted to swim a mile in the Hudson River. The New York City Swims people e-mailed a friendly reminder to sign up for this summer's swim, 8/4/02, from the [...]
When I was a kid we visited New York once or twice a year. I usually went with one of my folks and one or two of my brothers but we almost never went as a complete family. Back then we lived in rural New England, so it was always a big thrill to board the series of buses and [...]
"American Vogue, please!" screeched the group of blond, stick-figure 16-year olds teetering on platform espadrilles, each one clawing to get a grip on the gleaming steel reception desk in front of them. "Who are you here to see?" said the straight-faced security guy, who was, clearly, over the model thing. From my vantage point behind them , these girls looked [...]
One of the other editors is looking at the Dow Jones or the stock market or something and whistling. “Wow!” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t even believe how bad it is!” He sounds kind of merry. The staff reporter is reading aloud from a posting on a job search web page from a woman, a college graduate and a [...]
I was sitting in a bathroom stall in late June on the third or fourth floor of The New York Public Library, back past the Charles Addams drawings, and I began to think about my old schoolmate Derrick Foster. I ran into Derrick about 10 years ago, long after I had known him in grammar school, and we chatted about [...]
On the 4th of July my girlfriend and I took a friend visiting from Richmond, Virginia out to dinner in an area of the West Village that we refer to as Charm Central. We parked the car on West 4th, which is my favorite street of its kind in the city. It’s quiet, tree lined, narrow, and it, as well [...]
Ann Magnuson begins her new one-woman show, Rave Mom, standing in a hotel room in Las Vegas, high on ecstasy, staring at the radiantly naked form of a young, blonde man with "the body of a surfer." He reaches out to touch her, and though Magnuson refrains from describing what happens next, peals of another kind of ecstasy follow. She [...]
I step onto the 1 downtown train at 116th street every day and usually stand all the way down to Houston Street, where I get off for work. Sometimes I am able to balance and read a book as I hold on to a greasy pole. Other times, I am not so lucky; at five foot one, the long horizontal [...]
Le Parker Meridien on West 57th is not the type of hotel where my parents took my siblings and me when we weren't camping or staying with relatives. It wasn't in my budget during the winter of 2000 either. At the time I felt self-conscious of each cold step taken across the hard marble floors. I looked furtively at my [...]
Claude was smart and talented and I was beautiful but both of us were too boring to hang around with. That was what they thought at the Playhouse of the Ridiculous where we were each featured members of the chorus in a play called, "The Moke Eater" that ran most midnights at Max's Kansas City. I suppose we were boring [...]
Manhattan just doesn’t make for good redneck living. You can't bag a 12-point buck, park a Ford F250, get a gun permit, or buy a tin of Skol in this city. If you like Nascar racing, the N.R.A., Rush Limbaugh, and personalized bug-deflectors, finding like-minded friends won’t be any easier. Worst of all, as far as redneck bars go, the [...]
Lisandra and I both graduated from the same college with writing degrees and hopes of being comedy writers, but after graduation, neither one of us had a job. When I met Lisandra, she was a grad student with a cushy part-time assistant job. She spent her days trolling for MP3s, making copies, and listening to her boss complain, which was [...]
I was sitting on a green bench outside of a cafe on Irving Place, on a hot day with a blaring sun. I was in one of those moods where I was thinking of everything bad that had ever happened to me. I noticed a huge bagel on the edge of the sidewalk. It was one of those modern bagels [...]
Several summers ago, my central air conditioning let loose. A fast drip became a flood. My daughter discovered the problem during the eleven o’clock news, walking around in socks that became cold and wet. I called the doorman, requesting that the superintendent come immediately. Often surly, Ely intimidates many residents in the building, who naturally resent him. We live in [...]
The Great London Terrace Rent Strike began in the Fall of 1992 over the swimming pool. Once billed as "the largest apartment complex in the world," London Terrace occupies an entire square city block on the north side of 23rd street between Ninth and 10th avenues. The "Great Briton in Manhattan" opened in 1929 with elegant dining rooms, stores, London [...]
The doorman doesn't ask , but he knows where we are going. The guy at the front desk seems wise to what floor two female twentysomethings are headed for. The buildings Super, who shares our elevator, is all too aware of why we pushed button #12 and me and my gal pal snicker in the awkward silence. The Super gets [...]
Through four years of college Louise Holmes was always in my dreams and always out of my reach. So you might imagine the huge surge of adrenaline when one Friday afternoon, two years after graduation, I obeyed the DON'T WALK sign at 53nd and Broadway, looked to my left and discovered she was standing next to me, little changed. "Hi," [...]
There were no rollerblades in those days. We wore our roller skates on our shoes. The skates had straps that buckled across the instep -- clamps, also referred to as "clams," that we tightened with the all-important skate key we wore on a string around our necks. The wheels themselves were ball bearings; in fact, we referred to our skates [...]
Most evenings will find Michael Johnson, a New York City Police Officer, sitting at home alone in front of his TV with a bottle of Hennessy near by. Hennessy is top shelf he says. It doesn't leave you with a hangover. Michael doesn't drink every night to get drunk, according to Michael. He doesn't even drink to unwind from a [...]
Nearly every day the homeless men who hang around the front steps of St. John the Divine are keeping tradition alive. The tours they give of the cathedral’s western façade and the Peace Fountain are one part hallowed and one part hustle, and they’ve been going on, in one form or another, for ten years. At a world famous cathedral [...]
Friday, June 22, 1956…one day out of Rice High School and just seventeen years old … the first day in what my yearbook identified as my career - advertising. And what more appropriate place to start? At the bottom of the (at-the-time), worlds' biggest advertising agency, the mailroom of the J. Walter Thompson Company. JWT had billings of over $370 [...]
The A train rattles through the tunnel underneath the East River. It’s late on a Sunday night and the train is not very crowded. About ten customers are spaced equidistant on the seats. They stare up at the ceiling or down at the their feet. Doors at the end of the car click and slide open. A woman shuffles quickly [...]
The Dakota. It’s not simply a brown building. On the northeast corner of 72nd and Central Park West, it stands like a fortress. It has the soothing color of earth. Near the entrance to the park, a hot dog vendor sells an abundance of meat and buns. Multicolored balloons hang from a tree. A guy with muscular legs skates south, [...]
My girlfriend Emily recently got a job as personal assistant to a stockbroker who lives on the Upper West Side, on the forty-seventh floor of a building directly adjacent to Lincoln Center. The stockbroker goes to work at eight or so and often doesn’t get home until eight or nine in the evening, at which point she eats and goes [...]
On Broadway, between 84th and 85th Street, next door to Haagen Daas and Godiva, is the Origins cosmetics store. Outside the store sits the Origins gumball machine. Someone has scratched off the ‘e’ in “Peace of Mind,” so that the gumball machine now reads, “Pace of Mind.” The pace of the gumball is slow. Intended to evoke the purity of [...]
At 7:30 on a Monday evening, my apartment on 122nd Street and Broadway fills with the voices of young Mormons singing hymns. From 7 on, around 40 clean-cut, blonde, smiling 20-somethings, some bearing baked goods, arrived in a continuous stream. They bustled down my bowling alley of a hallway to the living room, where they proceeded to comment on their [...]
"You can tell when a person's just not ready," the young man in charge of birds at Petland Discounts told me as I pressed my face against the glass atrium to get a good look at the small animals so close to danger. "Have you ever had to say no to anybody?" "There have been occasions." "What have those people [...]
He rushed into the Starbucks on 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, camera in one hand, laptop in the other, holding them up high, like they were platters of food. He wore an FDNY baseball cap on backwards, and a light green, somewhat military looking vest over a blue shirt. He moved among the tables very quickly with the spry agility [...]
In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he apprenticed to a Philadelphia shipowner. In our day of wooden men and iron ships, "learning the ropes" is a cliche. To Levy, it was life and death. [...]
1. Recently, a cousin of mine stopped over on his way from Beirut, a city which now has most of its politics in the street, but almost no sanitation services. Standing outside my door, he looked down the Bowery and marveled, "They keep it so clean!" 2. My most persistent fantasy is that one day, when I'm gathering up the [...]
One February night in1969 a man knocked on my door and introduced himself; he had heard about me from somebody, he said. He didn't say what he heard. He had just moved into #2 with his wife Jamie and his little girl Hannah, they had just arrived from Alfred University; there was something about the SDS and an ROTC armory [...]
We decided to visit Manhattan and everyone agreed that was a good idea. In the weeks before we left Scotland emails and telephone calls arrived telling us all the places which we absolutely must see, and all the things which we absolutely must do. On arrival, we followed instructions and headed down towards the World Trade Centre like true tourists. [...]
Ellen was our captain. When they started canceling step classes at Body Strength Fitness, a small, privately owned gym on 106th Street and Broadway, Ellen clandestinely circulated a petition for the reinstatement of high-energy aerobic courses. She solicited support before and after classes. She held impromptu meetings in the locker room. She kept the whole of the high-impact faction up [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper I know I'm not alone. Off the top of my head I can think of two friends, single women, Upper West Siders living alone, who are experiencing a similar ordeal. "It's traumatic," I agreed when Nina called, frantic about the leak in her bathroom ceiling and the building's lack of a super. "You'll be okay," I [...]
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