You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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 [...]
"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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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’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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
I was sitting in my 4th floor fire escape window on a hot summer afternoon, watching the sparse street life on 3rd St., a few people sitting around on our buildings stoop, a couple of guys had lawn chairs, a few guys standing outside the bodega...like that. Mine was a junky/hippie building, yeasty like the rest of the neighborhood, shit [...]
Junkies are ghost-slinking around the block, looking for their man, banging on window gates and ringing doorbells. I scan their eyes for some glimpse of what their lives are like, staring at their rumpled, smack-hunting clothes, matted hair and mottled skin. They only care about taking care of business, up their nose or in their arms, legs, eyes anywhere there's [...]
I was at the bar of Florent very late Sunday night. A snow storm was raging outside. Pastis, that seat of slutty mayhem, sat up the block. There are now tastefully bright lights all over the meat packing district, where there was once just meat and the people who packed it. It was strange to sit at Florent, whose entrance [...]
This story is part of the novel, The Sleep-Over Artist ** Arnold Gerstein often took friends to his father's club, the Harmonie, on 61st Street just off Fifth Avenue, where they could "use the facilities" (as Arnold's father put it) for free. They would shoot hoops on the small basketball court, whose wooden floor had taken on a yellow-orange patina [...]
I sometimes see a crowd gathered in front of a storefront on Broadway, between 88th and 89th Street, staring with rapt concentration into the window. Occasionally they break out in laughter. They are a random looking group--some in suits, some with groceries, some in shorts with baseball caps turned backwards--and they hardly ever look at each other. Most of [...]
If I didn't have the summer to look forward to, I might just cap myself. Think about the glory of planning a summer. The forward-looking nature of the enterprise is inherently optimistic. You're at the back end of a long winter and up ahead shining in the middle distance is the summer's three emotionally clustered months. They are so gentle [...]
"There is a certain shade of red brick--a dark, almost melodious red, somber and riddled with blue--that is my childhood in St. Louis," wrote Harold Brodkey in State of Grace. Well, there is a certain shade of red brick--somber and melodious--that is my neighborhood in the West Village, and Ferron Brown is the custodian of that color. Mr. Brown's material [...]
I once had a girlfriend who bought me clothes. At first this made me extremely happy, but then something changed, and these gifts, which had seemed such a pure expression of love, began to seem like little apologies. The first thing C. gave me was a blue T-shirt that she had embroidered, while on jury duty, with a little flower--a [...]
Lost And Found: Stories From New York, the latest anthology from Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, is now available at your friendly neighborhood independent bookstores and at the following online booksellers: Powells Amazon Barnes and Noble News and Notices: "Lost and Found can be jarring, making you feel happy at one turn, uncomfortable at the next. It is unsettling in places, serendipitous [...]
New York in the summer of 1981 was everything it wasn’t in the winter of 1979. Punk died instead of disco. The city was no longer bankrupt. Even the East Village showed signs of regeneration, since abandoned tenements can only be burned so many times before the ashes won’t catch fire. People had work. Mine was menial construction on an [...]
It is our enormous pleasure to announce that Sunday, Nov. 12 at 8:00pm, four of the many outstanding contributors to Mr. Beller's Neighborhood will be reading live at Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction in the East Village. This is the first in a monthly series of collaborations between the Neighborhood and Mo Pitkin's that will continue as long as possible. [...]
After conducting an extensive series of discussions with all of you, we have determined that Thursday, March 12 at 8:00 pm is the time that works best for all of our schedules. Friends of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood ELLEN SCHECTER, CAROLINE HENLEY, and PATRICK GALLAGHER will read at that time. As usual, the place is Happy Ending, 302 Broome St. @ [...]
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