You are currently browsing the stories about the “SoHo” neighborhood.
New York is a city of extremes—extreme weather, extreme rent, extreme dreams, and just as often, extreme disappointment. As I wandered through the stories in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood this week, I didn’t land on a clean takeaway like “hope” or “loss.” Instead, I found something messier and more human: a kind of nervous laughter that lingers after the punchline fades. Each [...]
Excursion #2: Public Bodies, Private Meetings In my second walk through the neighborhood, I was reminded that the personal and political don’t just collide in headlines. Sometimes they brush up against each other in a spa room, a Starbucks, or the shoulder of a stranger on the subway. This time, my excursion took me through three very different stories, all [...]
Zapkus. His name was almost an onomatopoeia: its electric prod forcing me to sit up and pay attention. “Design Fundamentals” had to be, in theory, the most yawn-inducing chunk of time in the Parsons School of Design illustration curriculum for Spring 1972. I looked at the course card and envisioned the need to occasionally cut class and dip into the [...]
The Blues Brothers: Dan Akroyd and John Belushi It may be ever-present, this sense that we are teetering on the edge of apocalypse, but these days it seems the custodians of volatile and otherwise crazy behavior are on a whole new level. I won't pretend that when I was in my 30s and running around on weekend nights with my [...]
The Literary Life: NYC 1982 I recall distinctly The famous author Standing over me As I scraped the plaster Off her bathroom floor Left behind by Workers renovating The building The first time I talked to her She called me up To express her Indignation About the bathroom I felt I’d done Something wrong Like I was in trouble With [...]
I was two weeks old the night we met in SoHo and you showed me how the world works. Back then, I still couldn’t sleep through the night. I’d lie face-up on the bed I’d bought from the last roommate, listening to the traffic on the BQE a block away. The cars whooshed all night and it sounded like the [...]
It was night when we heard it, the air cold and chalky. We were returning home from a dinner party. Being around other couples had made us pleased with each other, our hands clasped inside his coat pocket. We moved to the sound and saw a tiny frog perched on a pile of discarded palm fronds on the sidewalk outside a thrumming, [...]
For thirty-five years its posture has been folded into a deep curtsy, dormant over a hanger, as if waiting for a curtain call. After that one moment in the spotlight, it’s never been worn again. Unless we consider fleeting fantasies of varying scenarios I’ve had over the decades that flash-forwarded to, well, the age I am now. Sixty. I am [...]
Two days after the Occupy Oakland police raid, where an Iraq War vet was shot in the head with a police projectile and hundreds more were sprayed with tear gas while they were sleeping, I get a text from Denise as I’m wrapping up dinner with some friends at Teresa’s Diner in Brooklyn Heights: Show the police and the world [...]
I moved to New York City on Friday, August 19, 1994. After twenty-one years in South Jersey and four more in Philadelphia, a move to New York seemed to be the most momentous event of my life. As I hooked my gypsy rental van around the Turnpike to face the skyline, even the cars’ lights seemed to make jazz hands. [...]
“No, it should be to your left,” I whispered into my cell, trying not to disrupt the hushed conversations of the infatuated couples around me. Jeremy couldn’t find the bar, it was tucked away upstairs from a bakery, so I guided him to it over the phone. With each direction I spouted out, I grew giddier, like a sixteen-year-old thinking [...]
When you buy a secondhand coat, you never really know what you’re getting into. The lining was a little ripped but something about this vintage coat spoke to me, though I couldn’t tell you what. This coat, with its uncelebrated designer, I found at Legacy on Thompson Street in SoHo. It is fitted on top, cinched at the waist, before [...]
Hello. The 6th Anniversary of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is here, and the time has come to pay tribute to the site's past. So many pieces are coming in all the time, piling up on the surface of the site, that it's easy to forget how much terrific work has accumulated in the deeper layers of MBN's very own geological record. [...]
On my way down the steps I was stuck behind a man with a cane, so I missed the D train. In my head I said, "Curses," then clarified out loud, "Not you," to the guy with the cane. He had enough problems. I didn't think the next train would be long, though, because it wasn't late and it was [...]
I sent a valentine to Richie but the mailman brought it back. I have sent valentines to Richie every year since 1985, but I knew this day eventually would come: the valentine would be there, but Richie would be gone. Richie ran the news and candy shop on Sullivan Street in SoHo, just a few steps south of Houston. [...]
A ten-foot painted head bobs down Grand Street, feet furiously shuffling from below the neck. Close on his heels are three metallic-haired 20-year-olds dressed in flimsy black sheets, cinched in a manner that make them look like punk Roman centurions. I can tell I’m getting close. Destination: Deitch Projects gallery in SoHo. A few days earlier I had RSVP’d for [...]
It was my last few hours in New York City, enough time to swig several drinks with a friend before catching a shuttle to La Guardia. I was booked on a red-eye flight back to San Francisco, so with soliciting a few gin and tonics foremost in mind, I headed straight to the bar. Denial was a darkened, narrow den [...]
At the Outsider Art Fair – held in the Puck Building from January 23rd-25th - there were as many men with ponytails as there were terms to describe the art they had come to buy: grassroots, vernacular, folk, visionary, Nueve Invention. Yet there was little question as to who were the most important artists in the show. Marquee outsiders include [...]
As most everyone by now knows, a little family of French bistros lies scattered over the lower half of Manhattan, as if arranged by the single pass of a great pepper mill. Named Le Gamin (save one Le Deux Gamin), each is a neighborhood place, a paradox of quiet and noisy, sunny and dark, boring and piqued, where woody rosemary [...]
Adrian Dannatt is not a man easily persuaded to perform manual labor, or labor of any kind. Anything that requires physical effort usually elicits from him an expression of mild horror and incredulity, as though you'd asked if he'd like to stroke a pet cockroach. Therefor it was a memorable occasion when I came upon Dannatt carrying a night table, [...]
"I want to crawl head first into a small cave and curl up into a fetal position." -From Tanya Corrin's journal, February 7, 2001 Tanya Corrin and I are having brunch in Little Italy and discussing reality TV shows like 'Survivor' and 'The Real World.' She's saying that she doesn't think that they're real at all, that they're almost comletely [...]
It's been ten years, but I still keep it on the resume. I would venture to say it's gotten me every job I've had since college, not to mention a book deal and more than a few birds to die for--one of whom is currently on her third Cosmo and showing no signs of slowing down. "You were really good," [...]
We decided to visit Manhattan and everyone agreed that was a good idea. In the weeks before we left Scotland emails and telephone calls arrived telling us all the places which we absolutely must see, and all the things which we absolutely must do. On arrival, we followed instructions and headed down towards the World Trade Centre like true tourists. [...]
This very quiet bird, with whom I am hoping to build a relationship, is called Number Two. I received Number Two and his ex-companion, Number One, as a Valentine's day present from a woman I used to go with. Her name was Johanna. Johanna used to work in my office--in fact she used to work for me. I felt a [...]
The elevator doors open and all I see is pasta drying on cardboard tubes. Multi-colored striped pasta, as if the most important costume from a prep school’s production of Sondheim’s Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had been passed through some improbably large papershredder. Lasagne sheets from the kitchen of Mimi Oka and Doug Fitch, co-founders of OrphiCorp, co-creators and [...]
First dates are about inventing a new language, minute by minute. Smoking is the first level of communication. The realm of intergender semaphore is entirely bottlenecked through nicotine. If there's no smoking then the glances, brushed hair, knuckle touching can reach comedy. Push the date even further and meet in a restaraunt in Nolita, the effective dmz for the new [...]
I haven't dressed up in several Halloweens. I've been reluctant to do so since third grade when I came to school as Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall." I blew my wad that year. This year would see no disguise. The better part of the day would be spent with my friend Sabine killing time before our respective Halloween parties by [...]
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 [...]
