You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
I came from Chicago to do a reading on Thursday. The guy I was staying with, Bryan, couldn't make it, so I arranged to meet him at the World Trade Center the next day--he worked for Morgan Stanley on the 70th floor of the 2nd tower. At about 5:00 I waited for him with my friend Jay. We ate Krispy [...]
Since September 11, it's been especially surreal and sad to see our skyline. Though I was never particularly enamored of the Twin Towers - I prefer the Flat Iron and Chrysler Buildings - it's devastating to see that they're gone. Several times this summer, I hung out by Battery Park City, where they would loom over the landscape. My girlfriend, [...]
In the silence, ash and smoke and dust snowing down, right before I felt and heard the second collapse, there was the teenage girl, with blond hair that should have been shining in the sun but for the pieces of the Towers in the air, and hiphuggers, and a boyfriend listening to her read from Revelations. I walked past them [...]
On the first day of October, the Windows on the World community held a memorial service for those lost in the WTC tragedy. Held at the breathtaking and enormous Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the simple and touching service managed to make everyone feel as one in love, loss and sorrow. The renowned restaurant also had many fans who [...]
All the days have been strange since. Though I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to leave my friend Luke’s apartment, where I spent that Tuesday night, I woke up determined to get to work Wednesday morning. Life needs to go on, I thought. I walked out of Luke’s apartment building. The sidewalks were lonely; instead of the usual morning [...]
I’m not a PTA mom, and I’ve never hosted a parent potluck dinner. I’ve said no to volunteering at annual school galas and spring fairs so many times that, at this point, no one even bothers to ask me. I adore my two sons, but their time in school is precious. And since it seems as if school is closed [...]
I live in a medical ghetto. Within my zip code there are 12 hospitals, one famous medical school, one re-known cancer center, one biomedical research institution, 18 medical laboratories and 1,866 doctor‚s practices. Vamps, a shoe emporium two blocks away from my apartment, stocks Danish clogs popular with area nurses. The mission of the Roman Catholic parish around the corner [...]
I heard the shots that killed John Lennon. Did you hear that?" My sister asked as she burst into my room after the five quick popping sounds had just drifted into my room. "Did you hear those gunshots?" I gave her a look. I told her they were firecrackers. It was late and she was bothering me. I was sixteen, [...]
On Saturday, August 6, 1988, I was possibly even more abstracted than usual, because it was well nigh midnight before I realized that I had neglected to eat dinner, and that the refrigerator contained nothing but half a jar of horseradish. So I set out for a greasy spoon on Second Avenue, in the heart of the sidewalk market district [...]
A friend of mine in Seattle recently sent me an email, asking me how I was doing in these weeks after September 11th. She wrote me the following: "I imagine you’ve been dealing with the horrific events in NYC since the 11th -- I’ve been thinking about you. Where is the Comedy Central bldg in relation to ground zero (do [...]
The Upper East and the Upper West sides distinguish themselves relative to each other--their identities are based on slandering the attitudes on the "other side" of the Park. Today, however, they were connected by a giant rainbow that stretched to the ground on both sides. A six-year-old boy stared intently up at the larger-than-life rainbow, his mouth dropped open like [...]
The Cosmetics Plus at 57th and Broadway is having a clearance sale. They’re going out of business. I buy two small white tubs of Cool Goo at 20% off. The woman behind the counter is carefully made-up, but her appearance she self-describes with blunt accuracy to no one in particular: “My bags are twice the size today.” “It’s been hard [...]
"Gotta Knit," is on the second floor of a walk up on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. I heard about it from my girlfriend when she waltzed in the door one day and said, "I’m back from my knitting lesson," all breezy and matter of fact. "Your what?" I said. She told me about "Gotta Knit!" and all the women [...]
I remember... the sound and the smoke... the terror of the crowds rushing past... a dark cloud billowing toward me in a wave of debris, determined, absolute... Searching for a meaning in this memory, I look at other stories born on September 11 and see a shared vocabulary that is at once horrifying and epiphanic: "It was the apocalypse." "Like [...]
I don't tell many people about the E-Bay thing. I usually just do the easy version. Like today -- four weeks later already -- I walked into the salon and when the Dominican beautician who does my hair asked where I'd been (you know that question: "So where were YOU when it happened?") I already knew my answer would sound [...]
Last week ABC and Ted Koppel had on a panel of authors to comment on what has happened to our city and our world - the always-awful Maya Angelou, the cliché-laden David Halberstam, and two better sorts, NPR-favorite Bebe Moore Campbell and Jonathan Franzen. Whether it was Koppel or the facts that proved too much for them no one can [...]
I worked on the 54th Floor World Trade Center 2. On Tuesday 9/11, I was on the plaza of the World Trade Center when I saw the first plane hit WTC 1. It was 8:43 am. Since Labor Day we had been very busy and the entire office had been arriving very early for work. On Monday 9/10 I worked [...]
When I hear about the plane crash in Queens, all I can think is, "I can't believe no one's talking about it." Then, after sunset, I'm thinking, "God, it's clear out tonight. Look at these stars." Our season of caring seems to be over. Later, at 3 a.m., I'm at 145th Street, waiting for the 1/9 train. There's a guy [...]
It was not any ordinary day when I left home on September 11th. I was coming off a two-week vacation and feeling on top of my game and on top of the world. I had a new state of mind, a new attitude. I was refreshed and all aglow. I had used my vacation time to rejuvenate and replenish body, [...]
I was working at my job in the World Financial Center, just across the street from the two seemingly constant World Trade Towers when the first plane hit. Feeling and hearing the force of the impact, my co-workers and I initially thought the first plane was a freakish accident as we ran to and from the huge conference room [...]
On a cold and rainy and wintry Sunday in New York, I went to a memorial service for a fireman in Manhattan. (Schedules of funerals have begun appearing in the DAILY NEWS, with urgent appeals for people to attend. There will be over 300 of them. ) Today's memorial service is the only one I have seen scheduled for Manhattan. [...]
Stephanie Black does not want to talk about the September 11th World Trade Center attack in the context of her movie, "Life and Debt." "I'm still processing it, like everyone else," she said on the phone the other day, speaking from her apartment in downtown Manhattan. But her film, which is currently playing at the Cinema Village (12th Street and [...]
The World Trade Center had this fascinating opacity: two steel-grey slabs stopping thought. The more you looked at it, the less it gave you back. The Twin Towers came out of the minimalist aesthetic of the late 1960s, Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those aluminum Y's, provoking you by their tight-lipped abstraction, like the curved curlicues in [...]
It is 8:30 p.m. on September 10th, the day before the World Trade Center attack. I am at therapy like I am every Monday night. "New York is killing me," I complain to my therapist. "At every turn, I am filled with a new contempt for New York. A garbage truck passes me and spews out thick exhaust in my [...]
Late this afternoon I stood amongst a tightly packed crowd of onlookers at Broadway and John Street, watching from behind a barricade as engineers prepared to remove from the World Trade Center rubble the 500 foot wall that -- for many of us -- had somehow, over the past two weeks, come to symbolize our city's struggle to pull through [...]
9:30 AM It’s a slow morning like so many, in that I am running slow. I get into the bathtub, and turn on WCBS Newsradio. Downstairs I can hear my wife assuring our fifteenth month old that breakfast is fast approaching. And then I hear the unfamiliar sound of a plane about to fly into my house on Sullivan Street [...]
"You have star quality. " My aunt once wrote this to me in a get-well letter. It had been our joke; years before, she had been the nanny in the house of a well-known film director, and these were the only words his parrot knew. And now my aunt had actually said them to me. Star quality evoked images of [...]
Last night, I attended a memorial service for an artist I knew, Michael Richards. He was fortunate to have been selected for the lower Manhattan cultural council's program "world views’ (or something like that). He was unfortunate in that his studio was on the 92nd floor of Tower One. I met Michael two years ago when I first came to [...]
September 11, 9:30AM I was still nursing a baseball hangover from the previous night, a game that never started. Just as warm-ups were finishing, a 43 minute downpour erased all hopes of watching Roger Clemens add one minor record to his ego, winningest percentage among 20 game winners. Goers huddled near the concessions, splitting peanuts and sipping Budweiser, cops warned [...]
My Sister was silent on the Saturday following the WTC collapse. We were in the country trying to degauss our heads from the city's pain. She was an OB on call in the emergency room when the planes hit. I cooked and the rest of the family drank caffeine on the deck, in the sun. Dinner finally finished cooking and [...]
On the day it happened we walked briskly to the hospital almost before our emotions had time to respond. Our eyes stung from the sun and our heads pounded from the hangovers which prompted us to remark that the blood we were about to donate might still have a good deal of alcohol in it. We were numb and we [...]
So it began at the dry cleaners, at five past nine, when someone said a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and Chris, the Jamaican tailor, turned from his sewing machine in the front window and said, "Two. Two planes have hit the towers. Both of them." The dry cleaner is Le Kang, an Asian name, and the woman [...]
At Thomas Street, about six blocks North of the World Trade Center, the nature of the crowd on the street changed. There was more urgency and less mirth, more police shouting, and amidst the crowd was a guy who had been on the 81st floor on Two World Trade Center when the plane hit. It was just after ten AM. [...]
All of us who were in Manhattan on September 11th have our own harrowing, freakish and scary stories to tell, but of all the stories I heard directly that day, my neighbor Jennifer's story takes the cake: Jennifer was on the 92nd floor of 2 World Trade Center on Tuesday morning. She looked out her window and saw a plane [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
