You are currently browsing the stories about the Upper West Side neighborhood
There Really Was a Mafia on the Upper West Side
by Thomas H. Haines 11/03/2019Neighborhood: Featured, Upper West Side
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, […]
The Tax Man
by Susan T. Landry 03/31/2019Neighborhood: Bowery, Upper West Side
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, […]
The Therapist Who Was Always Late
by Raanan Geberer 09/24/2018Neighborhood: Bronx, Chelsea, Co-op City, Upper West Side, Washington Heights
As a young man in my mid-twenties in the late ‘70s, I was in a precarious state. I had just failed miserably at an attempt to work at a job on the west coast and was back with my parents in Co-op City. I was on the list for a civil service job at the […]
Letter from Charlotte: Moms in Big Cars
by Claudette Bakhtiar 05/31/2018Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I am connected on Facebook to a fairly prominent writer whose Facebook page often feels like a Manhattan dinner party, full of witty, passionate discussions about art and politics among his many friends. I have never met him so I don’t usually join in but I like to watch. From his posts, I have learned […]
Easier Than it Looks
by Dan Baum 03/03/2016Neighborhood: Upper West Side
Waiting at the bus stop, I found myself next to a tall, nice-looking young man with a red-tipped, white, aluminum cane. Since it was none of my goddamn business, I asked him, “You get around the city completely blind, or do you have some vision?” “Completely blind!” he said cheerfully. So cheerfully, I got the […]
My Damn Love Affair
by Gloria Zimmerman 01/18/2016Neighborhood: All Over, Uncategorized, Upper West Side
The New York of the 80’s was not a town that met you halfway. It stopped well short of that, just looking right through you. It really didn’t give a damn what happened to you, daring you to ride the subway late at night and then picking your pocket and laughing about it afterwards. It […]
Bed Bugs and Rolling Stones
by Duncan Birmingham 01/11/2016Neighborhood: Uncategorized, Upper West Side
Does anyone move to Manhattan with plans of anything but taking over the city? Imaging the opening credits of my life, I could practically feel the crane shot tracking me as my mother drove me over the Brooklyn Bridge. The camera pushing in closer and closer, past hundreds of passing cars, to find me, the […]
West Side Judaica: “He had a chance to go big”
by Dan Baum 12/15/2015Neighborhood: Upper West Side
How many times do expect me to walk past West Side Judaica, right around the corner from us at Broadway and 89th, and not go in? I went in and met the owner, Yakov Saltzer. “So every time I drink a seltzer you get a royalty?” I asked. “Don’t I wish.” Yakov was born in 1958 […]
Wild Thing
by Elizabeth Cohen 03/11/2015Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I was walking down Broadway near Lincoln Center at noon on a Thursday afternoon in May with my old friend Ruth Lopez when we came upon two people on the sidewalk, doing it. It was daytime, it was close to lunch even, and yet there they were in flagrante dilecto. The man was on top […]
Dancing in the Dark
by Helen Mandlin 10/13/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Upper West Side
In 1974 I was twenty-five. I’d just left my secure job as a kindergarten teacher. The job: compliments of my, Bubbie, who was always yelling, “Get security. Be a teacher!” Deciding to leave the job? That was compliments of my Women’s Consciousness Raising Group. Every woman in the group encouraged me to leave my job […]
Pimping Trixie
by nancy stiefel 02/02/2014Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I won’t go into how our two-year old standard poodle got Lyme disease and died horribly, triggering a deep depression in my then 14 year old son, Jake. Lulu was smart and devilish and silly. She chewed a carved leg of our 120 year old Steinway, the molding on the walls, and anything she could […]
Respect for the Dead
by Claudette Bakhtiar 04/08/2013Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I was on the 2 Express uptown on my way home after work. It was about 6:30 pm. We straphangers who were standing were packed in like sardines. As the train pulled into the 79th Street station, there was a sound, a whooshing of air, a release. It felt as though the power had been […]