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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 [...]
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," [...]
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 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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
"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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
There is a cohesive community of would-be slam poets, could-be greeting card writers and should-remain computer programmers in New York City, and they meet at various open mic nights around town. I happened upon one of these amateur slams when a friend of mine admitted to being a closet writer of poems (she wasn’t sure if she could actually call [...]
Being a bohemian Communist without a mutual fund, a 401(k), or any valueless dot com stocks to add to the oil drum fires the homeless gather around, I don't often find myself in the Financial District. But when I do, I get the biggest kick out of seeing white brokers, lawyers and computer guys lining up for the three-card monte [...]
I long ago decided that my next-door neighbors were mass murderers. They are nice, quiet, neat, and “keep to themselves.” In fact, I couldn’t confidently identify either one of them on the sidewalk or in a police line-up, I so rarely see them come or go. And I have never heard any noise coming from their apartment. I only know [...]
I was going through a cycle of uneven haircuts and interesting colors that summer; Franco, my stylist, gave me a discount because I was always underfoot, always fetching him beer, always up for a change in color or fringe. When Allie moved in upstairs from his salon, the three of us spent hours sipping beer and coffee on the metal [...]
Early 1980's. Alphabet City. Segments are airing on national TV about drugs, guns, general life-threatening disorder. Yet, still and all, it's where the artists live. Coax a cab east and try your luck. On Avenue B, half-windowed buildings. Puerto Rican mafia guys lurking. Street lights, but they do little more than rattle and buzz. Rats. You carefully watching your footsteps [...]
Nadine had dark curly hair, a slow quiet voice and more stubborn patience then anyone I knew. She was showing me her favorite textile, a small pre-Columbian piece, dated around 500 BC. It was no bigger than a doormat, but she had been working on it for over six months. “These repeated geometric patterns form a god’s face,” she said. [...]
It begins with a button marked Brass Lab. I press it and there is no answer and behind me groups of men in tank-tops work in automotive repair shops and listen to to Spanish music on mini-stereos set up next to the cars. Finally, a voice from above bellows, "It's open!" and I look up to a bald man who [...]
Ariel was convulsing. I had been trained in CPR, but couldn’t remember how to do it. The patient telephone was sitting by her side and a loud dial tone rang out. She was a bouncing fish on the stool, spewing foam from her mouth. I held her head so it wouldn’t rap against the wall. Her eyes rolled back. I [...]
After 9/11, I stepped into the Williamsburg bodega that I've been going to for years. Some of the workers I know by name, others are just familiar faces. We've mentioned our Middle Eastern backgrounds to each other. "She's Egyptian," said the Palestinian woman behind the counter, gesturing towards me. But her co-worker already knew. "Don't say it too loud," I [...]
Over the years, Kathy and I have spent weekends in Manhattan, taking advantage of lower hotel room rates and exploring the neighborhoods. One of the places we liked was the Marriott at the World Financial Center. It isn't there anymore. And we thought it was time to visit … we wanted to see the Columns of Memorial light for ourselves. [...]
After the World Trade Center is destroyed, I get drunk and seek comfort in the arms of an Orthodox Jewish friend. He is gentle. “I don’t have sex,” he says, and that is fine with me, although the distinction between intercourse and what we are doing seems non-existent. He is warm, and soft, and tentative, and I feel good about [...]
The city was crawling with carpet salesmen and industrial designers and Formica representatives and stadium planners, and no one outside of the Javits Center even noticed. I wouldn’t have noticed either if it hadn’t been for my friend Amy, who had flown into New York from East Lansing, Michigan, to attend the NeoCon Interior Design Conference, New York’s largest interior [...]
I’ve been out of work for a month. My life is my own. No longer must I force myself through the routine of setting my alarm, waking up, dragging my tired body out of bed, taking a too-short shower, brewing coffee, forgetting to drink half of it, deciding what to wear, taking the subway, taking the elevator, saying "Hi, how [...]
World Gym, upstairs, is fresh with creamy white paint and music, while beat-driven, played at an appropriate level. There are the requisite scantily clad Spandexed women and the scantilier clad hyper-muscled men. But there is a civility, a sense of propriety, a lovely calm to this gym that the trendy joints are lacking. Downstairs, however, the music from the boxing [...]
Charles Boromeo Eder (Charlie) and Hermine Fleckenstein (Minnie) were immigrants, Charlie from Vienna, Minnie from Habichstal (a 300 person farm village about 80 kms. east of Frankfurt). Both had immigrated to New York City in the late 1920s. Charlie, a waiter at the Essex House met Minnie one afternoon in Central Park, as she was nannying. After a three year [...]
So then we had enough for a full court and in the April heat we wandered over to the full court where they often fence the whole thing off to shoot commercials because of the way that building rises dramatically up above it, the massive open space of all that asphalt the smack of a softball, your head jerking up [...]
Mara from upstairs, who lives off flute lessons in her dining room and touch-and-go pit orchestra gigs on Broadway, knocked on my door and everyone's door, begging us to start a tenant's union. We each had a reason. I was terrified of the dawn in July when half the sixth floor burned and everyone was out on the street in [...]
The cellar of the Chrysler Building is midtown's one great monument to the American filling station. It offers (for free) the same perfume of motor oil, the same lulling throb of distant engines, the not unpleasant heat, the mesmerizing hiss of compressed air. And it is always noontime in the Chrysler Building cellar, the same endless noontime with everything suspended [...]
I'm not much of a TV person. I am completely unfaithful to any one show or annual event, certainly anything like the Academy Awards. My theory has always been, why watch a three-hour awards show when I can watch E!, or some other all-celebrity network, and get the highlights in thirty minutes? But this year was different. Still suffering from [...]
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