You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
The play was going to be close. The runner, my best friend Sam, was trying to go from first to third on a ball lined into the gap in right center field. But the guy in right had jumped off with the bat-crack and knifed in smoothly. He’d gloved the ball and was launching a low hard wicked throw to [...]
Brother Theodore astonishes David Letterman Brother Theodore was always a ghost to me. When I returned to Manhattan in the early 1990s, Theodore was a specter haunting downtown. His one-man show, terrible and comic all at once, was still running on 13th Street, and posters boosting the show were everywhere. I saw them at the buildings at the New School [...]
There were a lot of things that should have been taken into account before our plane even touched the ground, but they were not taken, and we just kind of sat there. It rained all week. I'd come about three days earlier and Travis showed up later, his plane was a little delayed. I'd been highlighting things in the back [...]
I do not generally travel by limousine. When the long sleek cars drive by in the mad tangle of traffic I peer curiously at the tinted windows with the rest of the masses, hoping for an elusive glimpse of fame and wealth, Madonna going to the Grammy’s perhaps, or Bono on his way to his Upper East Side apartment. They [...]
The elevator doors open and all I see is pasta drying on cardboard tubes. Multi-colored striped pasta, as if the most important costume from a prep school’s production of Sondheim’s Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had been passed through some improbably large papershredder. Lasagne sheets from the kitchen of Mimi Oka and Doug Fitch, co-founders of OrphiCorp, co-creators and [...]
Over the Internet came the call for help: my expatriate Upper West Side sister, living now for twenty years in a European capital, was soon to cook a Mexican meal. All the ingredients were to be had in the vast marketplaces of Amsterdam, all except the peppers. Not being one to leave a sister in the lurch, I took a [...]
1. Lasker Rink: Central Park at 108th St. "I can shoot better than you," this six-year-old boy is taunting as we're slapping pucks against the boards. He's referring to the wrist shot technique I'm trying to demonstrate which apparently he finds unimpressive, and I have to admit I don't blame him, though the sting of his jab is lessened by [...]
The good old days: when you could look to farthest downtown Manhattan and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age; when urban blight—the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories, the vacant lots, the decaying piers, the alleys, the child’s endless treasure-trove of it all—was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a [...]
Several months ago I was stuck in a rut. You know, drinking at the same tired bars, hanging with all-too familiar friends, masturbating in the same routine sock. So in my grand tradition of superficial alterations-buying new shoes, switching from contacts to glasses, wearing headbands instead of hats-I buzzed my skull. And now, several months later, the result was scraggly [...]
There is the sense that we are doing something wrong, Diana Wall and I, as we walk south from Franklin Street toward what is arguably Manhattan’s most compelling dig site, the hill of rubble that was, until recently, the World Trade Center. Wall is a New York-based archaeologist, whose book, "Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York," co-authored with Anne-Marie [...]
"America. Boom. America. Boom. Boeki Centaa. Boom." During my time in Japan, I had grown quite used to not understanding what the hell people were trying to tell me. But this was a new one. Usually you can decipher the broken English of the Japanese by taking an abstract view of the words and changing a few L's and R's [...]
He was walking along Broadway passing in front of Macy's without lifting his head to glance at the windows. I was a few steps behind, slowing my usual frenetic pace so as not to catch up to him. I didn't feel like schmoozing, something that was tough to avoid when you ran into Jack. Jack. After twenty years, I still [...]
I have been in psychotherapy just over a year, and the whole experience at this point boils down to the single image of a young private school girl sitting two seats down from me on the cross town bus. She is accompanied by her Dominican nanny, who gazes absently out the bus window on to 96th Street as it crosses [...]
I was a regular at the Café Feenjon, on MacDougal Street, in the West Village in the early '70s. I was in my mid-twenties then and my older sister and I frequented the spot at least once a week. The club showcased Middle-Eastern Music: Israeli, Arabic and Greek. The menu featured non-Kosher Middle-Eastern food, which I couldn't eat. But it [...]
I had just gotten my hair cut and in reapplying lipstick in the dressing room afterward found that the only color I happened to have in my purse was slightly too bright, and a little bit orange--not harmonious at all. So I put on lots, blotted it, and put on more, figuring that one might as well be brazen. Then [...]
Matt worked on the 43rd floor of a building one block from Grand Central. When people came to visit, we took them up to the 46th floor conference room and let them look out the windows at the rooftop gardens and into other office windows and down Park Avenue, stretching away below in orderly blocks. Paint lines on the pavement, [...]
This was late on a Saturday afternoon, in the half gloom of the subway station at Times Square. W and N and R trains were barreling through, and the girls stood on either side of the platform, each guarded by a patrolman, looking bored and despairing. They were just mestizas, the kind who were raised in their own big cities [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper They're huddled in the far corner of the office, all of them peering out of the enormous window. They vibe is jittery. "Jumper?" I ask, throwing down my bag. "Yup!" All five exclaim in unison. Sure enough, here we are again. Our generous view has coughed up ringside seats for another round of human tragedy. Standing [...]
Lenny “The Rage” LaPaglia sat down at the post-fight conference looking like a man who was missing an important limb, though he didn’t know which one. It had been six rounds and countless number of punches to the head since he had stepped into he ring at the Felt Forum. At the time, the expression on his battered and pock-marked [...]
Entering the Rootstein Mannequin Showroom on W.19th Street is just like entering a typical gallery opening, only there's no art on the walls. Very slender people wearing fabulous clothes stand in groups of twos, threes, and fours engaging in hushed, exclusive discussions. You're offered a drink and the stereo system plays some kind of sophisticated world music. No one turns [...]
When I first heard the rumor several months ago, it seemed absurd. Someone in my neighborhood said she’d heard that Broadway Farm, the poor man’s Fairway that had been anchoring the southwest corner of 85th street for a decade, was going to shut down to make way for a Victoria’s Secret. How could this be? I’m as big a supporter [...]
Once a month, I take the downtown number 6 train to Astor Place for an $11 buzz cut. Near the corner of Broadway, a red and white awning urges me to Beware of Imitators as dozens of celebrity snapshots are exhibited in the storefront window — Judd Nelson, Susan Sarandon, Rosie O’Donnell, Yannick Noah . . . Inside, a man [...]
Photographs by Josh Gilbert The New Face of CBS News? Ed, in winter. Electronic Ed called out to me and I pulled my bicycle over and heard his news: CBS is interested in his story. He was lounging on a stoop on West eleventh street, in the dappled shade. "This Girl, this woman," he corrected himself, "from CBS. She saw [...]
Proposals of marriage are becoming the most public moment of people's private lives. By Meghan Daum Every Sunday the local newspaper in the midwestern town where I live prints engagement and wedding announcements that look like the pages of a high school yearbook. The faces are fair skinned and robust, some still marked with acne. Their pictures are taken at [...]
Fedora is a few steps below street level-- one steps down and pushes open the door into a red hued room that feels like another world, or at least another time: warm, unpretentious, exciting, wonderful. Photographs by Josh Gilbert, who has a story of his own Alfred H. Lane passed away on March 20th, 2002, at age 85. More here. [...]
1. So my doctor said it is true: You can get AIDS just from snorting cocaine. I decided to visit my doctor’s after I was unable to donate my vital juices at the Port Authority Blood Drive in the fall of 2000. I left without getting the needle after reading a form given to all potential donors that said anyone [...]
The subway station at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue is among the most heavily trafficked and congested places in New York. Watching people elbow each other for position on the platform during rush hour is like watching two NBA centers do battle in the paint. It's hot, the air is thick, and you can tell by scanning the crowd that [...]
"I LOVE THAT MAN A BITCH!" SHOUTS LIAM GALLAGHER. HE JUMPS OUT OF HIS CHAIR and paces around the room in a small tight circle. "If anyone stepped on his toes, I'd cut them off!" Liam sits down, and his voice becomes grave and somber. "I'd do time for 'im. I luv 'im. Me and 'im are cool. But..." and [...]
In The City. Manhattan. 41st Street and 8th Avenue, seven-thirty Friday morning. I'm waiting on the M10 bus uptown. I have a new job on 57th street. I'm reading my Daily News when I hear a strident voice say, "I'll give you DOUBLE anything you give me. DOUBLE! You give me a dollar, I'll give you TWO. You give me [...]
One night the owner of Sweet and Vicious, Hakan, hurled a block of ice the size of a softball and hit me in the temple. I was in the middle of pouring another drunk girl a Cosmopolitan. It was a Saturday night, and the bar was absolutely packed. Her mouth flew open, revealing a piece of well-chewed gum. I froze, [...]
Bogardus was a watch-maker and inventor who was awarded thirteen US patents and one British patent, for clocks, spinning machinery, grinding mills, gas meters, and devices for pressing glass cuttings, working with rubbers and making postage stamps. He built the first cast-iron fa?ade in history in 1848 at 183 Broadway (it has since been destroyed). In 1850, he patented his [...]
Sal: "You want it short?" I needed a barber not a stylist, in a barbershop not a salon, owned and operated by one man, not a local franchise of a national chain, who would cut my hair, not tag my head like some graffiti artist. I wanted a barber. "I know what you need," my friend Nick said as he [...]
French Roast has a gleaming pane glass window looking out onto Broadway, and a gleaming copper bar inside. From where I stand behind the bar, I see the city outside the window as a collection of lights, darknesses, and people who remain anonymous to me unless they decide to venture through the door of the restaurant. My shift, from 11:30pm [...]
New York City and the US Navy have a relationship that goes right back to the very beginning of the Navy. This is to be expected for a city that is this country's major Atlantic port. From 1801-1966, the principle site for the Navy-New York relationship was in Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Its three big piers show up [...]
I said my good-byes to Oasis in the lobby of a posh hotel in San Francisco. Elevators ascended to the skies in clear glass tubes and businessmen in dark suits marched in and out while the boys lay around on the overstuffed couches, profoundly hung over, trying to rouse themselves for the sound check for that night's show, the second [...]
We were on our way to a downtown loft party in Emily's Volkswagen, Emily, Kay and I, when we stopped off to see the ruins of a fire in the waterfront district, on Thritieth Street and Twelfth Avenue. This whole neighborhood, along the western spine of Manhatan, has always been mysterious to me, with its deserted steamship offices that look [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
