You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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