You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 25th 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
During the past few weeks, representatives from Red Cross have been going around to people who live below Canal St (in Tribeca, oddly enough, not Chinatown) offering them financial compensation whether they needed it or deserved it, or not. They came to my door. After they left,I wrote about the experience. It was an innocent act. That is, writing the [...]
A few drunk men standing around the television in Puffy's Tavern on a Saturday morning is not that unusual for the historic watering hole--back before when Tribeca became DeNiro-ified, a man "Puffy" opened his bar at the corner of Hudson and Harrison at 6 a.m. and closed it at 4 in the afternoon so the local blue collar types could [...]
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 [...]
Staying at a disheveled hotel in Midtown across from Madison Square Garden, I call and ask her to meet me at the restaurant downstairs for breakfast. We haven't seen each other since she moved away three years ago and have only spoken on the phone once (when she called to flirt with me after leaving her boyfriend). I walk down [...]
We got the phone call on a Tuesday night. It was Nick’s boss telling us he hadn’t been to work since Thursday and hadn’t called in sick either. That wasn’t like Nick, and his boss was worried. Nick was an older man who lived downstairs from us. Since he didn’t have a phone and we were his best friends in [...]
"All my dishes are masterpieces ‘cause my customers deserve the best! They should lick their fingers to the bone," my Dad would say. "Nobody eats here just once unless he dies before the next time he plans to come in," my Dad said. He was always busy cooking and talking at the B-29, the restaurant so named because of the [...]
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 [...]
My girlfriend, Amanda, and me, and her friend Heather were at Nacho Mama's, drinking. It had just gotten cold. My friend Sal came in. He had been drinking, too. Heather brought up liquor, how old it had become, how tired she was of it, and asked him if he had any drugs. He said he had some K up in [...]
So I paid $400 to St. Vincent's nursing school and took their EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) training course in February 1989. I went to class three days a week and I also had to do eighteen hours of rounds at St. Vincent's Hospital, which was like, total misery and insanity. Then I found out that getting your EMT license from [...]
Thomas Beller: You once said that one of your roles, Nora of Doll's House, helped you find out where you stood as a woman today. What did you mean by that? Liv Ullman: I don't believe that one single play will teach you what you are. I think that every time you work on something, whether it is a play [...]
I ran away to Manhattan with a rich girl. Well, it was more of her sweeping me away than running away with her. I was actually running away from a different rich girl, who had introduced me to this new rich girl. I was 19 years old, halfway through my studies at a prestigious university in Boston. I had grown [...]
Ever since my first wooshing ride down a log flume, I’ve been enamored of water. From sprinklers to swimming pools to lakes and the Atlantic,water soothes me like no other substance. Except beer. So when I heard the Staten Island ferry served cold brew on its cross-bay excursions, I knew I’d found my manna. A Friday night was chosen. That [...]
Just short of the 96th street station the kid next to me started to get really agitated. He was digging around frantically in his pockets for a pen, and since I was sitting next to him he kept pushing and bumping me with his shifting. He finally found his pen in his pocket, but he didn't have anything to write [...]
My mother was a talented seamstress so for the earlier part of my childhood most of my clothes were homemade. She loved embroidering tiny flowers and animals on dress pockets, basting collars and hand-sewing French hems. This was the late sixties and early seventies and downtown parents had two choices in clothing for kids: shopping for the cheap polyester items [...]
I went to XO on Walker Street last night. It's a small Chinese restaurant, far enough from mott street that little English is spoken there. It's the kind of restaurant where i like to go by myself...sit at the bar, suck down the rice noodle with shrimp and chinese vegetable, and hide behind a paper watching ancient eating rituals unfold. [...]
A sloppy silver and rose sunset is visible over the bunker-like structure of the Whitestone Lanes bowling alley, whose sign says: PLAY AMERICA’S GAME/75 LANES OPEN 24 HOURS 7 DAYS. Ahmadullah Raghbat, his uniform and sneakers in a polystyrene shopping bag, stands waiting for the bus. Raghbat is a young Afghani, and though he has lived in New York for [...]
Mario is a white African of Portuguese descent. In New York some people tell him, "I didn’t know white people could be from Africa." When they say this, he shakes his head. "Americans are so ignorant!" he says. "They don’t know about anything outside their own country." Mario has come to New York from Mozambique, where I live now. We [...]
You could easily have walked right past her. An attractive young woman, about twenty-five years old, sitting quietly on the half-full subway car. Her hair was done, her make-up expertly applied. She sported dangly earrings and a jaunty scarf knotted above a new leather jacket. Nothing unusual about her. Except for the pants -- or more precisely, the absence of [...]
On January 25 at 7:30 in the morning, two raccoons were found dead by Central Park personnel. One was found just below the reservoir and the other in the tangled stems of Shakespeare garden. Instead of just cleaning them up, as they might have done in different circumstances, they called the Urban Park Rangers. The Rangers too had been primed [...]
We were from out of town. We had finished school, were about to get engaged, and were moving to New York at the end of the summer. They showed us a “model apartment.” They put the hard sell on us. They asked us for a deposit in the form of a money order (can’t cancel ‘em). Then they asked us [...]
In the summer of 1980 I was living on East Fifth Street and First Avenue with Alpha Lorraine and I was eighteen, feeling not so much on top of the world as right in the middle of it. Alpha was a new friend and when Yves, my French dancer friend from when I was a dishwasher at Food Restaurant, went [...]
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