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In 1981 I was working as a part-time super at 258 Broadway and taking graduate courses at NYU. For a time, in early spring, I was the only person living in the eight-story building. It was being converted from offices into co-op apartments, and the real estate company wanted a super for security and to be available for new owners [...]
If you want to call me a cool kid, please do. You see, back in 1975 when I was seven years old , I visited Tribeca for the first time…with my mom and dad. We didn’t go to the Mudd Club or Artists Space or anything like that; instead we went to a factory just south of Canal Street. One Saturday [...]
The Times Square ball has dropped, giving birth to 1982, unnoticed by me and my friends who have been prowling the city streets for hours. We ricochet from one dimly lit bar to another, drawn to brain-damaging music and access to drugs. In the Mudd Club, where we’ve landed, the entrance to both bathrooms is jammed; getting in or out [...]
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 [...]
It's a good night when shaking hands with Iggy Pop isn't the most memorable part of it. Pop and the late photographer Robert Matheu had been at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca, where they were signing Matheu's 2009 book, The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story. On 1973's "Search and Destroy," Pop refers to himself as a "street walking [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A 2010 article from Newsweek made international news with the headline, “Pakistan is the World’s Most Dangerous Country.” Growing up in Pakistan, I rarely experienced moments of panic. Pakistan could be dangerous—like when a bomb went off near my school—but I felt safe in my suburban neighborhood. When I decided to move to the United States for college, I traded [...]
It was one of those days where the sky was an azure sheet pulled taut against Heaven and the water was as flat and reflective as a mirror. This was the view of the Hudson from my then-boyfriend’s Battery Park apartment. We had both just graduated from college. I, with my bachelor’s, he with his phD. We were one of [...]
Friday, September 9, 2011. My friend and neighbor Judy the Therapist and I ponder the upcoming 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. On that terrible day, Judy and a young couple from my building had just picked up the morning paper at a news stand around the corner; they saw the first plane hit. Another friend [...]
She has just stepped out of her Tribeca branded content office and is leaning against the wall, wondering if she should buy some cigarettes, when she sees a man eating from the trash. His clothes are neat. T-shirt tucked into belted jeans. He must do this often, because he's wearing nylon gardening gloves, and, when he finishes, he picks out [...]
October 1915 - Shackleton's ship the Endurance crushed by ice after drifting for nine months. October 28, 2012 - 7:30 pm: Shearer hikes two blocks from residence at 90 Hudson St., #6B, to Hudson River with stated goal of checking out storm surge and keeping feet dry. Forced to wade through three feet of water at foot of Harrison Street, [...]
Last week I officially let go of my faux-boyfriend. The moment of truth happened in a lavender room with a gray sofa and wooden lectern at the Office of the City Clerk on Worth Street. Jamie and Tomoko said, “I do,” and smiled. They kissed each other and thanked the clerk. I waited for something to feel different, but it [...]
It was 1995. I was a junior in college, working full-time at a Fuddrucker’s restaurant on the Upper East Side. I wore a uniform three sizes too large, in custodial colors, bedecked with promotional buttons for mega-nacho platters and S.O.B. sundaes. (“Son of a bitch?” a customer asked me once, pointing quizzically at the pin over my left breast. “South [...]
[For earlier Brookti & Me, check here and here . --eds.] ** I’ve been reading a lot recently about our new “post-racial” world, where we have “transcended race,” where a black man is running for president and white people are actually voting for him. I’m wondering, if we have transcended race so successfully, why are we reading so much about [...]
The job sounded perfect: bartending a gay sex party in a private loft in Tribeca. If I had to be stuck in New York for New Year’s Eve – a very depressing thought after having spent four New Year’s Eves in Cape Town - then I might as well work, earn some money, and just maybe have some fun. There [...]
About a month ago, a terrible new smell turned up on North Moore Street in Tribeca. It did not coexist peacefully with the other smells on the street: the coffee and cooking smells from Bubby's, a local hangout; the sweet, strong smell of olive oil stored in Hillside Imperial Foods; pepper and nutmeg smells from Atlanta, a spice warehouse; the [...]
I'm savoring the last days of Pier 25, which closes next month for a three year renovation. I loved this funky wharf in Tribeca-- a rest stop on my daily bike rides through Hudson River Park. I would visit the Sweet Love Snack Shack for a lemonade or veggie burger grilled on an old fashioned barbeque pit. The guys who [...]
The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here. ** Episode #2: I expected freaky racial—and class—‘episodes’, which are inevitably intertwined, when Brookti touched down. I knew the most common ones to expect and assumed I’d easily brush them off. What I didn’t expect: how intricate the race/class hiearchys are (I did expect the level of [...]
Brookti came from Ethiopia 8 months ago when she was around two. Initially I'd tried to adopt domestically, but it turns out that adopting in the U.S. as a single mother, aside from being a 21st century version of some kind of slave trade, (i.e. black/interracial children are 'a third of the price' of Hispanic children), and assuming you're not [...]
This man is proud of his work. He's from Russia.
I wasn’t always a compulsive cleaner. Quite the contrary: I was once slovenly and slothful– an unmitigated slob. The cleaning disease crept up on me over the years like a bad case of the measles; until, lo and behold, I’d become a fullblown clean freak. The kind who, at 6:00pm, reaches for the Fantastik with a couple of paper towels [...]
Pictures by Josh Gilbert I dropped by the New York Academy of Art with my spiffy digital camera, feeling like an artist and ready to snap a few pics while I waited for my friend, Beag. Needless to say, it didn't take long for me to feel like a fraud. For one thing, my friend was taking an exam. An [...]
A few drunk men standing around the television in Puffy's Tavern on a Saturday morning is not that unusual for the historic watering hole--back before when Tribeca became DeNiro-ified, a man "Puffy" opened his bar at the corner of Hudson and Harrison at 6 a.m. and closed it at 4 in the afternoon so the local blue collar types could [...]
During the past few weeks, representatives from Red Cross have been going around to people who live below Canal St (in Tribeca, oddly enough, not Chinatown) offering them financial compensation whether they needed it or deserved it, or not. They came to my door. After they left,I wrote about the experience. It was an innocent act. That is, writing the [...]
I went to XO on Walker Street last night. It's a small Chinese restaurant, far enough from mott street that little English is spoken there. It's the kind of restaurant where i like to go by myself...sit at the bar, suck down the rice noodle with shrimp and chinese vegetable, and hide behind a paper watching ancient eating rituals unfold. [...]
We were from out of town. We had finished school, were about to get engaged, and were moving to New York at the end of the summer. They showed us a “model apartment.” They put the hard sell on us. They asked us for a deposit in the form of a money order (can’t cancel ‘em). Then they asked us [...]
Bogardus was a watch-maker and inventor who was awarded thirteen US patents and one British patent, for clocks, spinning machinery, grinding mills, gas meters, and devices for pressing glass cuttings, working with rubbers and making postage stamps. He built the first cast-iron fa?ade in history in 1848 at 183 Broadway (it has since been destroyed). In 1850, he patented his [...]
My buzzer rang. It was 4:30 in the afternoon on one of those eerie perfect blue sky 60 degree days--eerie partly because it was late January, and partly because in my neighborhood, Tribeca, those kind of days, for obvious reasons, never fail to trigger a deep foreboding. "Who is it?" I yelled into the intercom. I wasn't expecting anyone. "The [...]
On September 11th, I stood at Washington and North Moore for six or seven hours, near a triage center, waiting for all the lined-up ambulances and fire engines to be given the all-clear to go in. We waited for the injured to come for care and comfort. All the ripped-open bandages, makeshift guerneys, stacks of IV's and sterile dressings, every [...]
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 [...]
