You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m standing on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street staring up at an enormous billboard advertisement, which in behemoth white letters is instructing me to "ProCreate." Gaslight, the venue for this evenings HurryDate party, is on the bottom floor of the building directly below that billboard. HurryDate takes fifty eligible singles and pairs them up for three-minute long [...]
The other day I realized that the further away September 11th gets, the rawer I seem to get, and the less I want to talk about, be reminded of, or think about it. When people ask even the simplest questions about that day, I’m tempted to hand out copies of "Witnessing," and then, like Forrest Gump, stare grimly ahead and [...]
I don't think I thought of Eli every single time I walked down lower Seventh Avenue, but I may have. His parents' West Village brownstone had been a shrine to me in high school insofar as Eli, himself, had been a god. When passing it back then, I craned my neck at the upstairs window and said whatever magic words [...]
I was temping. My ‘agent’, as I liked to think of him, was overweight and short, with a firm handshake and a friendly manner. He called me “Bud” a lot. Although he was very enthusiastic every time we spoke on the phone, he seemed incapable of placing me in a job that paid more than ten dollars an hour. I’m [...]
Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood was started in the year 2000, and we have published many stories about what happened in New York on 9/11/2001 and the months that followed. Today is the 24th anniversary of that day. This story was first published on March 11, 2002. (JM) Here was a morning like any other. I got up at 6:40, took a [...]
It's a trick of the light. Depending on where you stand, the "Tribute in Light" memorial looks more like a pillar of fire descending from heaven than a recreation of the World Trade Center. You’d be forgiven if, after 9/11, you thought you’d never crane your neck to look that high up again, because there it is, against all gods, [...]
One would be inclined to describe Jen Miller's 5'3'' frame as pixyish, were it not for her very strong self- identification with another sort of sprite. Miller, a 29-year-old Lower East Side performance artist, would love to wake up one morning to find she'd become an elf. Barring that unlikely miracle, she'll have to settle for wearing her prosthetic elf [...]
Since I wrote my piece about Fresh Meadows a year ago, the sleepy little Klein Farm has exploded into public prominence. In late 2001, word spread that the elder Klein, now happily ensconced out in Jericho, had indeed decided to sell the no-longer profitable farm, despite the younger Klein’s desire to continue the enterprise. ("It’s the only job I’ve had," [...]
Like the homes of many New Yorkers these days, the Illera apartment in Flushing, Queens, has a small American flag taped to the door. Six-year-old Vanessa answers the knock, her hair held back with a stars-and-stripes headband. She walks inside, past the Colombian flag in the kitchen, into the living room. The walls of the Illera home are covered mostly [...]
Here is one of the more interesting faces on 11th street: Electronic Ed, so named for his uncanny knack for finding electronic devices in still working condition. There are few people with a keener aesthetic eye wandering around than Ed, who in spite of his disheveled appearance is often carrying all sorts of elegant and eccentric objects. This morning the [...]
I get on the downtown F train at W. 4th street, it’s a Saturday at 1:30 a.m. The car is pretty crowded, there’s nowhere to sit but that’s fine since I’ve been sitting for the past 4 hours listening to Elvis Costello speak about his career for a TV show. He sang a little too, wish he would’ve chatted less [...]
Jon Voight he was not. But the Midnight Cowboy rides again in the Big Apple. It was twilight, late April, 2001. A cool breeze blew from the East River as I waited for the Manhattan bound J train at Marcy Avenue. The J ferries passengers, mostly working folks, across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan. On the Brooklyn [...]
Another morning at the Bedford L stop, reluctant professionals line the platform waiting, not saying much. Several dozen yards into the crowd, you hear screaming -- a high-pitched, angry sound -- against the tinny sound of recorded music. People closer to the commotion direct their attention towards the center of the platform, next to the bench; typically, this is where [...]
Imagine a 20th-century history of the United States that omitted the 1900s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Something of the kind has attended the chronicling of Times Square's latest identity as Disneytown, Goofyville, or Mickeymart. Most accounts of West 42nd Street's conversion have been content to say that for decades the district was a magnet for penny- ante drug dealers, dollar-ante [...]
I met Marty between Fourteenth and Forty-second Streets after having waited most of my ride for a seat to free up. One finally did, next to him. "Is this Fourteenth Street?" he asked as soon as I sat down, ignoring the fact that I was deeply engrossed in the Metro section. I replied that it was. He then continued as [...]
Passing by St. Mark's Bookstore, I hesitate and peer in, sizing up the window displays. I’m anxious about a fifteen minute gap in my color-coded schedule. Brown for my day-job, red for visual art, aquamarine for friends & family are the colors I assigned to the categories in my laptop’s organizer program. A few moments in a bookstore can absolve [...]
John Epperson is Lypsinka, but Lypsinka - the performace artist drag super star whose show, The Boxed Set, has been a smash hit at the Westbeth Theater since this past September, - is not John Epperson, or rather John is a lot of things in addition to being Lypsinka. John has agreed to keep a diary for Mr. Beller's Neighborhood [...]
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