You are currently browsing the stories about the “Upper West Side” neighborhood.
I took the train to school alone. My Brooklyn friends didn’t live along the 2 or 3 lines, plus I’m somewhat hostile within the first hour of waking up. The commute was like a prolonged orchestral swell. The first leg of my trip, sprawled across a few of those '70s sunset-toned seats, the sounds of the subway – muted by [...]
The year was 1950. I was five years old. There was barely room for my mother, much less me, when we moved into my grandmother’s small, crowded apartment on the 9th floor in the Ansonia Hotel on 74th Street and Broadway, where my mother had lived before marrying my father. When she and my grandmother moved after my grandfather’s death, [...]
My father and I emerge from the long green canopy and stand outside the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway where we live. It’s Sunday afternoon. 1949. Winter. A chill wind blows. I am four. My father wears his gray felt fedora at a jaunty angle, the shadow from the brim hiding one eye. That fedora with the grosgrain ribbon is my father. He’s [...]
In the beginning, there was a man who preached on the streets of my Upper West Side, Manhattan neighborhood. He was a Black man—actually, coffee-bronze would be a better description of his color. When I first became aware of him, he appeared to be in his early sixties, though he might have been a little older. It was hard to [...]
On the fourth morning of my visit, I clung tightly to the girl I loved while riding the C train. She had a warm Jewish face, silky brown hair, and an aura that reminded me of a coffee shop on a brisk fall day. I had spent the weekend staying in her apartment on the Upper West Side and felt [...]
The First Thing You Do A man at the Public Library at Lincoln Center was looking at me. He told me he was an artist and asked if he could draw my portrait. The man insisted we take the elevator one floor down, rather than the stairs. I was nervous about being trapped there with him, but I went. In [...]
I’m sitting in Straus Park at 107th Street, where Broadway bifurcates. No need for alarm about this. Things created by God bifurcate. Adam would have been just another lonely guy moping around Eden if he hadn’t bifurcated after Eve stepped out of a dream and into his life. Directly across Broadway is The Garden of Eden©—the supermarket, not the [...]
“Let’s go around the circle,” the writing instructor began. He was a small wiry man with a trim brown beard. “I’m Alan. I graduated from SUNY Buffalo and last year I got my master’s degree in fine arts. I’m from Long Island, Great Neck,” he told us. “Everyone give your name and anything you want to say about yourself.” “Hello,” [...]
My Martz Trailways bus rolled into Manhattan from Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1969, landing me in Port Authority. I dragged my big, ivory-colored, plastic suitcase up the escalator, stepped onto Eighth Avenue and a cab screeched to a halt at my feet—a lucky break, since I hadn't the vaguest idea how to hail one. I had been discovered by an affable, [...]
ROUND ONE: JAY Walking out of the crowd, my ears are still ringing. It’s late. I’m more than tipsy, but I haven’t felt tired in hours. I bounce down the stairs that lead from the East Village dance floor and head to the bar. There, I shift my weight around on the balls of my feet in my black knee-high [...]
There is a saying in New York City that you can either have a job or keep a car on the street. Garages in my neighborhood cost upwards of $700 a month, and street parking is free, sort of. I do not have a job, other than walking my two dachshunds, Henry Longfellow and Hanna, and playing the intricate game [...]
Every now and then, someone in my apartment building posts a sign on the bulletin board next to the lobby elevators—often about something that was lost, or possibly taken by mistake, from either the laundry room or the lobby. Usually these notes are simple, straight-forward requests. A typical sign might read: “Lost in laundry room—pair of blue wool socks. Please [...]
Back then, I lived alone in a terrible apartment on the Upper West Side. I was twenty-six. After five years of shitty roommates, I’d decided to suck up the cost and make a go of it. The rent was $467 a month. This was actual money in 1985, which might be why I still remember the amount, when I’ve forgotten [...]
Mid-morning, I set out for a short walk—ten blocks, twice a day, prescribed for my aging heart and arthritic body. I clear the lobby and make my entrance on to 106th Street. I’m ready to start my hike to health, ready to laugh—or at least snicker—in the face of mortality. I take my first step, then pause, thinking, why push [...]
72nd Street subway station 2001 How many years since “needle park”? In the late 60’s, in the evening on the way to the 72nd St and Broadway subway station, I would make my pass through the park and see junkies nodding out and discarded needles on the pavement. The underbelly of con artists, thieves, prostitutes, and addicts, all lurking in the [...]
In the spring of 1967, a year after my parents’ separation, my older sister and I returned from an extended stay with family friends in California and moved into an apartment our mother had rented on the sixth floor of the Hotel Bolivar on Central Park West and 83rd Street. At the time, the decaying, 1920s era building was still [...]
Everything got worse in New York except my jump shot. Though I looked the part — white, six foot and fair featured, like some towhead from the Midwest — shooting was not my ticket on the court. In the small school league in Washington where I had starred, I got my points going to the hoop. When I did hit [...]
Last January, days before I was due to return to New Orleans from New York, a fire broke out in my parents’ apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I had come to the city in the midst of the pandemic to repopulate my life, albeit temporarily: the first week belonged to my then-girlfriend, the second to my [...]
Out early yesterday morning after the big snowfall. The streets are being cleared. God, it’s been years since I did any of that.Now I have no car to dig out, no store to clear the street for; nothing special to worry about (save for not slipping on the ice and cracking my old bones). In my neighborhood there are a [...]
It's the swinging 70’s. Everyone I know has tons of sexual partners. I am 28 and only lost my virginity two years ago to a farm boy I met at The Guthrie Theater. The romance continues for a while when I get back to New York, but then, he writes me a Dear John letter. I'm sobbing hysterically when the [...]
One morning not long ago, from a bedroom in suburban Maryland, I called the Upper West Side. I sat, hunched down, knees up, on the area rug at the foot of the bed. I like being on the floor when I make calls that make me nervous. The phone rang, and I felt not only nervous, but also guilty. Tail [...]
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,” [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 state Department of Housing and [...]
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 that though he was a [...]
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 vibe he was glad that [...]
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 was nothing like the New [...]
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 hero, sitting shotgun with my [...]
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 and raised in the Williamsburg [...]
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 of the woman and they [...]
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 and follow my passion to [...]
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 find. She adored Jake, and [...]
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 cut. We came to a [...]
On a blustery December evening on my way to a friend’s dinner party, I stopped in front of a jumbo cardboard box on the steps of the church around the corner. “Jim?” I called out. A moment later a hand emerged and gave a little wave, followed by a head with tousled, graying hair. “Hi,” Jim said, extending his arm [...]
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