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From 1965, when the World Trade Center was in its planning stages, until 1972, Edith Iglauer was a frequent visitor to the construction site of the World Trade Center, researching an article about the building’s foundation, known as "The Big Bathtub." The article, 'The Biggest Foundation', appeared in the New Yorker on November 4th, 1972. In 1993 she wrote a [...]
In the summer of 1968 I had an apartment on East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. The rent was cheap, and it was on the top floor of a tenement which meant there was a sooty patch of skylight in my bathroom and a tub with feet where I could sit and contemplate the black starless sky. Decorating [...]
All photographs and captions by Ricky Powell Mike. No shirt, a slight paunch (new), a lot of tattoos. Green, mostly, with some red. A dragon that snaked over his arm and shoulder, other stuff. He’s getting old. Or older. Still the belligerent, bemused, pug face, though, wondering what fun the playground might have to offer. It’s a face full of [...]
Charles Lane is a narrow cobblestoned alley that connects Washington Street and the West Side Highway. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it, except it feel like one of those narrow crevices in the city which time has forgotten, even though it is tucked into a peculiarly modern housing development. A rehearsal studio called Charles Lane studios was once in [...]
Approximately 350 dogs reside in London Terrace. For the most part, these hounds aren’t mutts but creatures of high pedigree. Madonna’s stylist owns one. Deborah Harry keeps a critter here. I knew pugs, basset hounds, basenjis, scotties, weimaraners, and schipperkees. The twelve-building complex is in, in fact, a kennel. In September of 1995, I organized a dog show during the [...]
I found this lovely pamphlet at the Union Square Market. Or rather, it found me: Carla Gahr approached me amidst the bustle of The Union Square market. She has pale skin and tends towards dramatic make up, and her handsflutter when she speaks. She is, on the whole, somewhat less than relaxed, but the small, brightly colored photograph book she [...]
Style and Structure With Helmut Lang By Thomas Beller Helmut Lang spent his boyhood years roaming the alps in shorts. He was a country boy until he turned ten, when his father re-married and moved to Vienna, whereupon his step mother proceeded to enforce a strict dress code of suits and ties. Needless to say, he did not like his [...]
It's a cold winter night, and something unusual is going on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A huge white tent is set up at the entrance, it's pointed canopy suggesting a medieval military campaign, and limousines are spawning celebrities onto Fifth avenue in bunches. They shimmy up the grand staircase while the paparazzi scream out their names. The occasion [...]
In 1949 I arrived, aged seven, at the threshold of P.S. 26 in Fresh Meadows (Queens), and saw there, graven in the imposing door frame above, the words: Rufus King Public School. Who, I wondered, was Rufus King? It was quite likely my first historical query, though I wouldn't have been able to conceptualize what I was experiencing in that [...]
Since September, my family has experienced an unusual barrage of schizophrenic divisions on personal and global levels -- our kids’ schools, the subway series, the election, and Christmas/Hanukah overlap – each of which raised unique parenting dilemmas, the kind they don’t write about in those "What to Expect" books. Because our daughters are 3_ years apart, we are now in [...]
It was bitter cold, about 2 pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and yet people were waiting in a helluva line: it wrapped from the entrance on Fifth Avenue around the corner onto 88th Street like a caterpillar stretching its limbs. The line was full and restless. Photo by Miles Aldridge, 2000, of woman's evening gown, fall/winter 1997-98 People bought hotdogs [...]
The brass-plated elevator door opens, revealing it's operator, a man named Kenny Coleman. A horde of cops, assistant district attorneys, and clerical workers bustle inside as if they're heading to a sale at Macy's rather than for work at the state court building at 80 Centre St. In his mid-40s, thin-faced and short, and wearing a fedora, a Western string [...]
I wanted to be a writer for The Jon Stewart Show and figured that sending them a resume would be like sending junk mail; it would get tossed. I needed to do something with impact. So I did the logical thing. I bought a pair of white jockey shorts (size large, so there would be ample space for me to [...]
It was around 5 p.m. and I was on my way home. It was hot. I was tired. Feet hurt, and that's not all. Spent all day standing in a heated sardine can courtroom in Housing Court. My back hurt. And my ego - after dumbass judge beat up on me for something I had no control over - as [...]
"Have you thought about what your Parks nickname should be?" Parks Commissioner Henry Stern asks me. He sits hunched over on a couch at his office inside a turret at the Arsenal, a red brick castle overlooking Central Park that for years was a military base and now serves as headquarters for the New York City Parks Dept. Dressed in [...]
When the car nipped at my bike tire it made a ‘zzzzow’ sound like a mosquito on uppers buzzing in my ear. The muscles in my arms and legs got tense at once and that’s probably why I didn’t tip over. City sounds sang out in a cacophony of car horns and screaming pedestrians. Potholes dropped the earth out from [...]
These days, it is she who gets on her tip toes when we greet each other or say good-bye. But she still wears that same perfume for special evenings, and when I smell it I’m transported, without even being aware of it, not so much to a particular time, but to a feeling, that wondrous, excited, slightly worried feeling that [...]
I have been flirting with the coffee man for about three weeks now. Every morning, as I am about to round the corner into the construction site I work near, I ask him for a large coffee, skim no sugar three Equals. The first time I went to him, he asked me how many sugars I wanted. “No sugar,” I [...]
There were police all around the fruit man. He stood there next to his fruit. His stand is on the North East corner of 87th and Lexington, across from Starbucks, and whenever I pass by I buy an apple for fifty cents. Or sometimes bannanes. He is a gracious guy, am immigrant, his softness of manner has made him many [...]
Since last April I've been living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and managing a pet shop which is part of a five store chain. A lady and a gentleman came into my store the other day to buy dog food and it was obvious that they'd been arguing. They continued the argument while they shopped, with the lady getting louder and angrier [...]
Ê To members of the snoopy national media who still call to inquire, Brian Brown, a junior at Wesleyan University, insists, at articulate length, that he is no aspiring porno king. His favorite book is Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire", and he is currently immersed in the films of avant-garde German directors like Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, part of a [...]
She listens to me. She comforts me. She keeps all my secrets. She knows me inside out. She is not my mother. She is…my therapist. The note sat on top of the July issue of Vanity Fair in her waiting room: “I will be on vacation from July 27-September 5th.” “Where are you going?” I demanded as soon as our [...]
It was just after 2 am on Tuesday, December 5, 2000 at Key Food on the corner of 4th and Avenue A in the East Village. I felt the sudden urge for some Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. After removing a box of Spirals from the top shelf, I proceeded to the check-out. There were a few neighborhood boys hanging around [...]
I tried to break into the Marble Cemetery . One Tuesday, towards midnight, I changed out of my office clothes into jeans, a sweater, and narrow-toed tennis shoes, because I would have to climb a chain-link fence entwined with barbed wire. I gathered up supplies--a bottle of Poland Spring water, a Power Bar, and a flashlight--rejecting the Swiss Army knife [...]
I used to gloat about it. Somebody would ask for my work mailing address and I’d reply slowly, evenly, Two-World-Trade-Center. And then pause a beat, just for effect – seventieth floor. Seven –zero. That’s right. There’d often be a comment, sometimes even a gentle, "wow." My reply varied depending on circumstance or mood. Occasionally, however, I was dead honest. It’s [...]
I am--and I do not necessarily advise this--walking through the meatpacking district in a miniskirt. Pastis and co. not- withstanding, this area is one of my favorites in the city—- one of the only remaining places where, when the clubsters hail their last cab, the trucks still rumble up and haul in their real, tangible, old-fashioned, actual blood-and-guts commerce. At [...]
He looks like someone's grandfather. We are, after all, in Washington Square Park, in a playground fueled by the energy of cooped-up city kids desperate to climb plastic treehouses, while their parents, grandparents, and nannies watch on. Slightly stooped in a well-worn but tidy blue blazer, he smiles as he admires the children. My five-year-old daughter likes him. So does [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
It’s after five on Friday and I have pleasing, twenty-something plans for the evening. Judging from the look of Larry, a diminutive agent at the literary agency where I am director of operations, he does too. A tanned, old-school publishing guy, he’s a middle-aged romantic, known to still hold his handsome wife’s hand in public. We arrive at the elevator [...]
"Congratulations!" read the subject heading of the e-mail. But no, I hadn’t won a free cruise, or a much larger penis. My short novel, Northern Gothic had made the final ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. The Stokers, managed by the Horror Writers Association, celebrate horror fiction, poetry, comics and "alternative media" by holding a banquet and giving out statuettes [...]
This essay appears in "How To Be a Man: Scenes From A Protracted Boyhood." For more information about the book, click here. Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Books were stacked in piles around my new apartment, looming like weird stalagmites in a cave. They were encroaching from all directions. A bookcase was badly in need, and yet months slid by without [...]
Not until we took custody of Molly, seven years old more or less, more or less cocker spaniel, did I become aware how bountiful were the sidewalks of New York, at least along the several Upper West Side blocks Molly now calls home. It’s no surprise that New Yorkers litter the streets with their candy wrappers and matchbooks and newspapers, [...]
It was a quiet block. Then one cold March day in 1971 a house blew up. It was a bomb. When it came to light that it had been the (accidental) work of the Weathermen Undergound, it changed the face of radical politics on a national scale. More locally, the explosion set off a wave of bomb scares throughout the [...]
In 1969 I took some time out from New York to slow down and try to patch it up with my husband, Lee. I called him in New Mexico and he sent me a ticket to Albuquerque. The last time I had seen Lee he was scuttling down Macdougal St. glowering over his shoulder and lugging a pillowcase full of [...]
Twice Told Tales is a feature that asks authors to revisit previously published pieces and write a brief introduction from their current vantage point. Cycles of Love, Sin, and Redemption at the Corner Bistro was originally published in September, 2000. The introduction, below, was published in May, 2018. You get to a certain age and many of the most vivid moments [...]
There are few retail establishments in New York that try as hard not to be noticed as Gallagher's Magazine Archive and Gallery at 126 East 12th Street. A sign the size of a Post-it announces the store's presence and directs one down a flight of stairs to the basement entrance. Stepping inside reveals a dim labyrinth of hallways and tiny [...]
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