You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
(photo credit: Elizabeth Schoettle) Sometimes it seems New York will get hotter and hotter until the greenhouse glass breaks and we are all dead. But this was the winter of 2006. The night was cold, bitter, the swelling sky would not let loose, hair hit my face, and my coat blew open before I pressed my hands to keep the [...]
My very first marriage proposal came from the guy behind the counter at H&H Bagels on 80th and Broadway. I was around twelve and realize now he was most likely just looking for a tip or playing with the shy girl who was only recently allowed to go out from her school to buy her own lunch. I said, "No,” [...]
When my son and I moved to the Bowery in the late 1970s, we took our place alongside the slow-marching parade of men and women who moved through those streets like ghosts. Some were devoid of identity and shape and earthbound spirit; others were vivid and sublime. A black man, a vagabond who trolled the streets with a pirated shopping [...]
I’ve been spending some jobless time in Central Park during the pandemic with other New Yorkers, where we are, seemingly, at times–aimless–roaming the park’s eight hundred and forty-three acres. What are we doing here, I often want to blurt out. We should be in our offices, attending boring meetings, typing away at our computers, picking up our kids from flute [...]
"Hi Jim, it's Dad, just touching base to see how everything is going and how you're feeling and how everyone is today. Looks like the first day of spring, the weather is horrible, I'm sure you agree. Give me a ring, let me know how things are going?” My Dad, Bill, spoiled me for fine dining out. He decides where [...]
Observations in the Vale and Vector of the Virus It’s late. And again, I survey the silence, inverting wakefulness and sleep. Again, in place of dreaming, I listen to the refrigerator humming. The construction site that had been growing like a giant metal bean stalk outside my window, down the block, has suspended activity, its girders rearing midair untrussed. Who [...]
“Can you help me?” I said this to the young woman who was opening boxes in front of the aisle of fish tank decorations. “Sure,” said the woman. She pulled herself up from her squat by pushing off the edge of the box. “What can I help you with?” “I’d like to see your goldfish,” I said, “because I’d like [...]
I’m sitting on the roof of a walk-up on East 11th Street, staring into the large glass windows of a penthouse apartment across the street. It’s an early evening in August, the perfect time of night for idling: not late enough to make you worry that you’ve wasted the night, but since the sun’s gone down, it’s no longer oppressively [...]
I have an old Polaroid of Dolores, Roni, and me. I was finally painting my kitchen, after not dealing with it for years. There’s a stepladder slanting diagonally across the snapshot and I am in the center, sitting on the bottom rung, a glass of wine in my hand. Dolores is vamping toward me from the left, looking directly at [...]
Bellevue was a dark castle in my childhood imagination. In grade school, long before I knew that my own mother had once landed there, my classmates and I spoke of Bellevue in a chilled whisper, as the place you’d end up in if you lost your mind. A straitjacket and a padded cell would be your lot, and you’d live [...]
Waterbugs Before I was a super If you asked me what A waterbug was I’d of said One of those little things That kind of runs on the top Of ponds or quiet pools On the sides of streams But at 258 Broadway Down in the sub-basement where I had to make my way through The cavernous half lit Cement [...]
My daughter Hazel, after ten years of listening to what her parents wanted to hear and wanted her to hear, found music that neither her father or I could lay claim to, pop music designed for girls her age: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera. We'd taken her to see Bob Dylan at Jones Beach when she was one, Hazel [...]
Was I a fool to think this relationship could be saved by an upholstered storage bench? I spent weeks in deep contemplation on my go-to furniture websites, activating coupons and letting them expire, looking at measurements, colors, prices, patterns. Jonathan and I had already discussed it in couples’ therapy. The plan, sanctioned by our therapist, was to get rid of [...]
I began using cannabis regularly in 1968, when I was about 14 years old, and since then have had innumerable encounters with dealers. The ones I will write about here are the dealers with whom I had long-term relationships. With cannabis becoming legal in so many places, there’s not much future left in the business for individuals who operated on [...]
In honor of the closing of iconic department store, Barneys, shuttering its doors, here is a tale of what happened to me there back in 2004. *** It was right after Thanksgiving. Christmastime. The streets had a distinct holiday chill to them; they were crowded with tired, overworked shoppers carrying store bags. My boyfriend Chris decided he would get me [...]
From 1966 to 1969 — grades 1 to 3—I attended the Adams School. Occupying three separate buildings, in the East 30s near Lexington Avenue, it was a “private school” for roughly 400 students aged four to 21 facing learning or emotional challenges. In reality, the school received most, if not all, its funding from the New York City Board of [...]
In the early 1960s, as a recently married City College professor the closest I’d come to the Mafia was in movies and newspaper articles. Back then, New York City was rocked by Mafia scandals as investigations revealed that the police and other municipal unions were cooperating with mobsters in numbers rackets, loan sharking, business shakedowns, and other crimes. In October [...]
In the midst of a particularly grueling winter, I met Wren on OK Cupid. Unlike my slim, brown-skinned fiancé who had deserted me the week before Christmas, Wren was bulky, with a ruddy complexion and pale blue eyes like my father’s. The day after my third date with Wren, my father died of congestive heart failure. That man had battered [...]
__________________________ At Von on November 7 at 7:30 FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Von is located at 3 Bleecker Street: phone: 212 473 3039 ABOUT THE SERIES: Author Thomas Beller founded mrbellersneighborhood.com in 2000. The site has been publishing non-fiction stories that take place in New York City for 20 years—slices of life, portraits of memorable characters, scandalous encounters, [...]
I’ve spent time in over 20 countries and at least 40 US states. In my travels, many people have told me that though New York City might be a nice place to visit, it’s certainly not a place for a person to live. But thank God there is a New York. One of the best life decisions I made was [...]
[caption id="attachment_10213" align="alignleft" width="612"] 83rd Street Gang[/caption] Summer 1965 in Yorkville, two street rides would begin to show up at night after dinner: the Bumper Cars and the Half Moon. Each ride sat on a flat-bed truck, whose driver doubled as the ride operator. He’d park at a hydrant opening. The admission for each ride was a dime. [...]
[caption id="attachment_10184" align="alignleft" width="519"] Untitled by Harold Shapinsky[/caption] Twenty New York blocks gets you a mile. Back in "our time," a motley crew of urban youth crossed the Manhattan landscape with that formula in our heads. We understood distance. We got time. We lived the algebraic formula of Time x Speed = Distance. If we started peddling our bikes at the [...]
One way or another, everybody needs to get on the A train. I'm leaning against the back wall of the car, in that tiny corner beside the conductor’s compartment, still managing to read despite all the other people crammed in around me. It’s the afternoon rush hour and you don’t need a watch to tell. The doors open and a [...]
Wandering Two Cities, a Youthful Diary Edward Hopper once said that he identified all the places he’d known according to their architecture. I used to be the same way. I noticed people as backdrops to overblown dramas in light and shade. I looked past them toward ogee roof and filigreed transom; I marveled at the heady volumes of imagination-translated [...]
If 115 East 23rd Street in Manhattan’s Flatiron district rings a bell, you’re probably of a certain age. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the address was plastered in thousands of comic books and magazines. The 12-story building, constructed in 1913, housed the offices of Angelo Siciliano, better known as Charles Atlas. It was at this location that Atlas sold [...]
It took two weeks for my first HIV test results to come back. Naturally, as I waited, I thought I was going to die. For two weeks, I ate Ben & Jerry’s and sang along to a Discman on the streets of Manhattan. I spent each night on a different barstool and serenaded strangers about the price of my poetry [...]
For twelve years there was a convenience shop I frequented in the Manhattan office building where I work. It was a cramped place, essentially a hole in the wall with a door attached to it, at the back end of the lobby. The sign on the door said Headline Newsstand, but as newspapers gradually disappeared as a necessity of daily [...]
I’ve been accused of many things, but never of false modesty. You’d have to be pretty old to remember the catchy TV ads that the long departed Braniff Airways used to run. They hired celebrities like New York Jets star quarterback Joe Namath to recite one line: “If you’ve got it … flaunt it! Evidently Braniff did not quite [...]
Anton and Lelo were scared. They had seen them every day at the bar where we work for the past several months—lurking in corners, hiding behind shelves, disappearing into cracks in the walls, into drains, into boxes. Not roaches. Not rats. Ghosts. It was practically an infestation. A ghost infestation. I wanted to laugh with Anton. Every time he [...]
Sattley, California. Winter solstice 2016. We’re at my Aunt-in-law’s house, in the High Sierras, in the Egyptian room. Sphinxes, golden fabrics, a Nefertiti head. The rest of the house is faux Victorian, a modest ranch overstuffed with Costco products and kitsch. My wife, my toddler daughter, and I are curled up under an electric blanket in a bed so [...]
Editor’s Note -- These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old leftists were octogenarians when Buhle [...]
I work at a bar on the Bowery. Drunk people are funny. Also incredibly forgetful. Here is a list of some of the strange things we have found at the bar at the end of a long night: a single shoe; an antique baby stroller (it looked like the stroller for Rosemary’s Baby); a banjo; a dog; the image of [...]
It was tax time, April 1989, the cold and merciless spring a further insult to what had been a turbulent year for me. I’d been struggling with sobriety and was trying to bounce back from a failed romance. Some days, I felt like I walked through the world with my skin turned inside out, raw as a newborn. On [...]
Because I sat around Reading Joyce and Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare and spent Time checking out Museum shows and Galleries and walking Up and down the streets Of the city I had A superior attitude And even thought I was hot shit Compared to pawns And poor assholes Who had to wear Suits and lug Briefcases around And sit [...]
[caption id="attachment_9765" align="alignleft" width="470"] NCSC[/caption] Etan Patz disappeared forty years ago, on May 25, 1979. I was seven then, in second grade, and right around that time, perhaps even that same month, is when I started walking home from school on my own. We lived on 4th Street and Avenue A, maybe three quarters of a mile from Grace Church [...]
My memories of high school are burdened by two deciding factors: the absence of girls and my aversion to math and science, both regrettable, given the fact that the prestigious institution I attended, Stuyvesant High School—then still in its old digs, a venerable building on East 15th Street—was all boys and all about math and science. Numbers made me nervous. [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
