You are currently browsing the stories about the “Upper East Side” neighborhood.
My primary focus in grammar school was scheming ways to get out of class. At the start of seventh grade, I weighed my options. The parish claimed it needed money all the time. It ran fifty/fifty clubs, cake sales, bingo, casino nights, you name it. The low earner on the ledger was the religious article store in the rear of [...]
The Dallas Cowboys losing -- my number #1 Schadenfreude trigger. As you get older the word hate drifts from your conversation. It’s a bad word, and a silly emotion to hang onto. Life’s too short. If you’re lucky, you lose it all together. If you’re really lucky, you save it for one person, one particular thing, or in my case, [...]
Roberto is giving Vince the usual changing-of-the-guard rundown: who has dry cleaning, who’s expecting guests, who left keys for the housekeeper, etc. When he’s done, Vince shakes his hand and says, “Good luck.” What’s that about? “I gotta get my pengé fixed,” he tells me. He has prostate cancer. It is in times of crisis that friendships are truly tested, [...]
December 2001. Like every other New Yorker, it still feels like the towers just fell. Bush said spend, Bloomberg called upon you to stimulate the economy. Niketown, Your Town. The makeshift commercial plays in your head as you peruse the store; it is after all one of your favorite places. Just do it. Besides, it’ll motivate your fitness students when [...]
Little yellow post-it sticky notes were posted all over the apartment. “Help yourself” was on the refrigerator, “coffee’s here” was posted on the silver Gevalia canister. In big red letters atop the post-it note was, “Warning- Caffeinated” and a postscript, “I know how you are on caffeine,” all this accompanied with a little bewildered looking take on a smiley face. [...]
At first one or two left, dignified and quiet, as if they had to get home to relieve the babysitter. Then coats started rustling, whispers became impolitely perceptible, and the audience grew ever more restless. The Kaufmann Auditorium in the 92nd Street Y was turning into an unhappy, however cultured, hubbub. But David Mamet droned on, inexorably reading what I [...]
It’s brick outside, thermal-brick, coffee cup lids have coughing fits and a blind man with two good legs gets into my pocket by saying that I could be him one day. At the 116th stop Jane runs into Dick, all surprised and shit, she says, Wow, when did you move up here? Dick gives her the inside on a dirt [...]
We went into Calypso, on Madison Avenue and 69th Street. The first thing I noticed upon entering the store was a young woman paying for something at the register while she distractedly texted. Then, as she texted, she got an actual phone call. She picked up and announced her coordinates and her purchase, “A gray cashmere sweater!” And then a [...]
I return from my break to hear Vince screaming in Maltese. It seems two women, a real estate broker and her client, had been getting a little impatient waiting for the elevator and gave the button several long pushes. This would infuriate the most mild-mannered of elevator operators. Vince is not mild-mannered. “Who the fuck you are?! You wait like [...]
Luciana, my aesthetician, is administering my facial. I come to see her in this upscale New York city dermatologist’s office about every three months or when I just need a pick me up. As she is stroking my skin with a warm creamy make-up remover, we are sharing our usual catch up questions about kids, work, exercise and then the [...]
At the risk of sounding insensitive - I normally have zero patience for whining panhandlers. I had an unpleasant experience a couple of years ago when I bought a homeless guy a slice of pizza. He then showed up five minutes later, with his friend, asking if I could buy them both a beef patty. Another source of my harbored [...]
It’s a freezing Friday night at the Guggenheim, 8:00, and technically the museum closed 15 minutes ago. Two gallery guides, as their bright red tags indicate they’re called, are following Cate and me down the spiral that swoops around the building’s atrium like some giant half-stretched slinky. In their early twenties, at times during our forced march they are some [...]
Harry’s back. It’s Wednesday, the middle of the week, and that means Harry is back to visit Winslow Homer. Harry visits his old friend Winslow Homer as if the two old friends were going to play their weekly game of checkers, as if this congenial game has been going on for fifty years with breaks only for the occasional war [...]
Herman the German waited for his prey. He turned a small Iron Cross over in one hand slowly measuring the length of each of its four silver edges. His quivering lip shook an inch long ash off his cigarette’s end. It fell onto the top of his Austrian sandals with the matching black socks. A loose thread sizzled. He didn’t [...]
Last year, after the indictment of Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Maureen Dowd wrote a column praising the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. “It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.” At first, I was gratified to see Ms. Dowd recognize [...]
I have just taken over the passenger car from Roberto. There are three tenants in the elevator and they are discussing their vacation plans. 3A and her family will be hitting the slopes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; 5C is going to work on his tan and try his luck at the blackjack tables in Aruba; and 12B and his girlfriend [...]
Sometimes I acquire personal training and kickboxing clients simply by correcting a stranger’s form. To put it bluntly, 90% of people in gyms are without a fuckin’ clue when it comes to proper training techniques. These folks can negotiate deals for zillions during the day at the office, yet they’re incapable of a quality bicep curl at night. Therefore, a [...]
It was an unseasonably cool Sunday evening in July, and, like the weather, I was feeling a bit out of sorts. I was looking for a new job and getting used to the pressures and angst of being in my first serious relationship. Walking on 78th Street between First and York, heading to the subway station after spending the weekend [...]
In October of 1960, Mom was pulling for Kennedy and Dad was rooting for Nixon. I couldn't have cared less one way or the other—my thoughts were on baseball. The Pittsburgh Pirates had just crushed my heart by beating the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series (to this day, I still wonder if Mickey Mantle cried as [...]
I was bounding down the stairs into the subway, three steps at a time, hoping to make the train. The stairs were wet. The air was cold. It was a day of harsh weather, a gusting snowstorm, but I had my iPod and was experiencing everything dreamily. To say it was a new iPod was only half of it. I [...]
The monthly meeting of the co-op’s Board of Directors is tonight at 7:30, so I clean the basement a little earlier than usual. I am just finishing mopping the floor when Mrs. 11B, the President of the Board, steps out of the elevator onto the wet floor. She apologizes for ruining my hard work and slowly tiptoes across the floor [...]
Jimmy, the boss, and I are in the basement still mourning the passing of 16A, when the passenger car opens and a white envelope dances out of the elevator. The white rectangle shimmies and gyrates obscenely, beckoning us. We are powerless to resist. As we near the object of our desire, the envelope, and the hand to which it is [...]
I have an idea for a new diet book. Dress up as a cartoon character for an hour. It is guaranteed to take off at least five pounds. At the behest of my friend Dawn, who works for the non-profit PBS affiliate Channel 13/WNET, I answered an ad for volunteers for a function sponsored by her station. They were seeking [...]
It took me a while to realize that Kenny was missing. I had been out of town for the holidays, visiting family in California. After almost a week without seeing him since my return, I began to grow concerned. I live on the Upper East Side in an area that used to be, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a thriving [...]
Because I’m Jewish, my Christmas decorating habit started small. Creating yards of silver sparkle, I drizzled hundreds of tinsel strips on hanging plants spanning my living room window, which overlooks 77th Street near First Avenue. I clustered evergreens in vases too. Although my husband David came from a more observant family than mine, he didn’t mind the white poinsettias I [...]
My first after-school job was delivering the long-defunct Long Island Press but I really entered the working world when, at the age of seventeen, I started as a temporary summer worker at Gimbel's department store (my Dad knew someone there...lucky me). I eased my way into the good graces of the bosses until I got into the union. Ultimately, I [...]
12:15: Heading downtown in car for two o'clock appointment with lawyer. Half-listening to Leonard Lopate on WNYC. Callers telling stories of bizarre summonses for unfair parking tickets. Mentally pat self on back for six months ticket-free. Cop calls in. Defensive. Won't give name. Claims cops have no ticket "quotas" to meet, just "production goals." Claims he's "just following orders." Sounds [...]
I stink. It’s not a good stink, musky, that hints of a hard workout but doesn’t offend. I’m offensive. I’ve been in New York for a month-and-a-half. I still haven’t done laundry. The one suitcase I brought held seven shirts, six pairs of boxers, four pairs of pants (one pair only for occasions), two pairs of shorts, and three pairs [...]
I used to see her in the elevator. She was finely dressed, her white hair piled high, her dark red lipstick ennobling her mouth. In those early years she'd be with her husband, a kind-looking gentleman in a wheelchair—the result, I later learned, of the beating his knees took as an Olympic runner. He’d won a gold and two silver [...]
Seventy-five degrees, August, Sunday evening, Manhattan, yet no one is out on the street except for your neighbor and his geriatric Maltese. On nights like these you can’t help but wonder if you’re missing something; maybe everyone you want to be with is just around the corner jammed into a block of bars, restaurants, delis, while you sit on a [...]
On a cold icy Thursday in a duplex on the Upper East Side with high windows: well cared-for plants and a spiral staircase lead to a mirrored room. There stands an erect youthful female figure, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, with a dancer's sillhouette. Her name is Anita Koffler. She awaits her devoted exercise participants and fellow exercise pupils who have [...]
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in May of 1996, she was sent for treatment at the Hospital for Special Surgery. This gave my father and I a reason to trek to NYC almost every night to pay her a visit. I was thirteen and considerably naive at the time. Yet, now almost ten years later, I vividly recall [...]
The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here. ** I am here less than an hour before I slice my finger with a box cutter while breaking down some boxes 8B left in the hallway—her weekly fix from the Home Shopping Network. I should probably put a bandage on it, but the boss is bellowing [...]
“It’s nice today,” says 15B as he enters the elevator, taking off his gloves and Dartmouth Alumni Association baseball hat. “Maybe a little chilly.” “Yeah, it’s nice,” I agree. I close the elevator door behind him. “Forty now, but they say forty five later on.” “Great.” We’ve reached his floor, but the retired cardiologist won’t get out until he’s [...]
Photo: Lincoln Karim It looked like a crime scene. Yellow ticking cordoned off part of the sidewalk next to the awning of 927 Fifth Avenue, at 74th Street. Across the street a two-person camera crew stood shivering next to their tripod. They were journalists, it appeared from a distance; on closer inspection, they were journalism students from the graduate school [...]
I immediately rediscovered my stance - Kruger's signature red boxes, the bold typed messages upon entrance erased the damage the glossy magazine had done. I remembered whose side I was on when viewing Kruger's commands: "you are a captive audience", "your body is a battleground", "we are your elaborate holes", "your comfort is my silence." Every picture and its copy [...]
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