You are currently browsing the stories about the “Upper West Side” neighborhood.
It is rare, in New York, so I’ve noticed, that conversations pop up with strangers but I have experienced a few. I was in the bakery down the street from my apartment on the Upper West Side, the one with only two tables and a line out the door, and I was searching for the extra chair they have hidden [...]
In 1963, the year my father killed himself, I was obsessed with Bob A. I was crazy about him. My father hated Bob A. and flew into a fury whenever he heard his name. In Bob A., my father recognized himself, especially when he was young. Though Bob A. was not, as far as I know, a gambler like my [...]
Living in Manhattan and dwelling in an apartment depletes a person of standard, taken- for-granted privacies and idiosyncrasies that I believe every person and family exhibits. Here, on this grittiest of islands, we are intimate and strangers. Think of all of the people you comfortably smile at and gossip with, not knowing (or caring) about the intimate details of their [...]
The Ansonia Hotel was not your usual hotel. But we were not your usual family. By the time I was born in 1945, the Ansonia had suffered years of neglect. The live seals that once frolicked in the lobby fountain were long gone. So was the fountain when I lived there as a child with my mother and father. Many [...]
During a packed, standing room only ride on an uptown No. 1 train, I tried to shut out the crowd, absorbing myself in the free AM New York newspaper I picked up that morning. Two men who were squeezed against each other began to argue. Their voices grew so alarmingly loud that I could no longer concentrate on my reading. [...]
August 1987. New York City shimmers in the heat. Everyone we know is on vacation. “Where’s Daddy?” Anna whimpers. She’s two. “I want Daddy.” “I do, too, but he’s at work, Annie.” I try to edit the anger out of my voice. “He’s very busy. He’s getting ready for a trial. Do you know what a trial is?” “I know, [...]
Pretty much every woman in New York City gets her nails done and why not? There are at least six or seven per two-block radius, give or take. It’s a cheap and standard luxury here, courtesy of lots of supply, lots of demand. For those who tote their bright all-smiles and pleasant politeness, it’s the respite, “Ahhh-I’ve-been-looking-forward-to-this-all-week”. For others and [...]
It was a chance encounter a few years ago in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side where I peeked into the shadowy universe of the “junky.” After the meeting I invited Harry to my office to continue to tell his story which goes back thirty years when the island on 72nd Street and Broadway was known as “needle [...]
I buy my morning paper from a little shop on the corner of West 83rd Street called the Columbus Avenue Food Corp. & Convenience Store. When you walk in, standing behind the counter on your left is Shahid, a very sunny and trim Pakistani man in his 50s with a thinning salt-and-pepper comb-over and a wardrobe of fresh-pressed button-down shirts [...]
I never shared my life with any pets – unless you count a legion of uninvited cockroaches. Until I got married, that is, and my wife brought a black cat home from the gym. “This cat has been rescued, my instructor was offering him up,” she said. “Cat’s poop inside,” I said. “You’ll love him.” “What’ll we call him?” “Felix,” [...]
I have three different nights confused in my mind. It was raining each night--a sentimental story. This is a sentimental story. I have been living in Vermont so long now that when I come back to the city its cleanliness and prosperity seem obscene to me. These nights were different--in my memory it was darker then, it was raining and [...]
We are driving in from the country, out where we go to school, a little town in a valley and a school on the hill. We come in from the west, over the Bridge with the sun sliding around the tip of lower Manhattan, mocking the Lady’s little torch, basking in its own reflection off the river. It’s autumn, an [...]
They have never heard of the Sturgeon King, even though they might easily visit this small slice of piscean royalty for a lunch—excuse me, an appetizer—of an individual can of salmon or individual can of solid white tuna. It’s quaint, it’s charmingly atavistic, who the hell orders an individual can of salmon but a cat? Yet the menu items persist [...]
On Election Night two weeks ago, I was laying on my couch whiling away the hours, aiming to stay awake until I could officially note that my homestate was instrumental in saving the State of the Union. (I made it to 3 a.m., but it wasn’t Rocky Mountain solid until the next afternoon anyway. Give ‘em hell, Senator Seven-Digits!) I [...]
The date seemed to be going well. Not mine—I wasn't on a date. The one behind me. "Which do you think?" I whispered to my best friend, Alex, leaning in over my moo goo gai pan. "First? Third?" "You always skip second," she said. She was right. Alex and I smirked at each other. Second dates at kosher places? How [...]
I am sitting at my desk in my coop one day on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, paying my monthly expenses: coop mortgage; coop maintenance; coop insurance; four other kinds of insurance--health, for four people (I’ve got a stay-at-home wife and two kids); life, in case I die on them; disability, in case I collapse; and car, in case [...]
The Joan of Arc Junior High school had just let out across the street and a crowd gathered right away. The man in the headlock, the captured man, was impossibly skinny, and wore faded jeans that were a bit too short, and sneakers. He had a beard and shaggy brown hair. He could have been a progressive librarian or mentally [...]
This essay appears in Thomas Beller’s essay collection, “How To Be a Man.” * There are those for whom a T-shirt is just another name for an undershirt, the sort of thing that never sees the light of day. But for others, myself included, T-shirts often are the main event, and the arrival of spring has prompted me to reconsider [...]
My writing teacher Sue said getting published would change my life. But as I prepared to dart past the security guard at the library, a stolen copy of The New York Post hidden in my parka, I sensed this wasn't what she had in mind. Only a month ago, everything had seemed so promising. An editor from The Post had [...]
It was 1978 and I was in sixth grade at public school I.S. 44 on the Upper West Side. A group of boys robbed me- daily. Tyrone, a mean little black kid in a blue down coat, which he wore regardless of whether it was summer or winter, grew up in the projects just a few blocks north of where [...]
The flat palm of my hand slammed into the steering wheel again and again. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck ME!" Yes, I was being vulgar -- and a bad driver -- but it had taken more like five or six hour to get from Washington, D.C. to New York, and now it was going to take another hour before we [...]
When I take the subway I like to stand in the front car and look out the window. The window is long and narrow and through it I begin to watch the moving narrative of traveling through the underground on my way to wherever it is I want to go. I must keep my balance standing or else sit with [...]
For three years my girlfriend, Erin, lived in Dakar, Senegal, and though I never even made the trip there, I developed an attachment to Africa. There was something in knowing, truly knowing of her life there that became a part of my own life--acquiring not a working knowledge of Wolof (the language native to Dakar) but an understanding simply of [...]
I can't help but think about The O'Jays when I ride the C train. And not just because I used to commute back and forth from my boyfriend's place on 105th and Manhattan to my studio on Suffolk and Houston. The C train officially became the Love Train one day four years ago somewhere between Manhattan Valley and the Lower [...]
It started in a house. A bunch of guys playing music. It turned into a rambling, on again off again musical adventure, with numerous incarnations. The band's only record, Hell House, was released in 1997 by Grand Royal Records, thirteen years after most of the material that appears on it was recorded. John Berry, an original member of The Beastie [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper In the sixties and seventies watching the balloons being blown up wasn't such a big NY "happening" and the only people their were residents of the neighborhood, building and neighborhood employees and business owners, the volunteers who inflated and walked the balloons, and the police. The street was closed at around dusk the night before the [...]
La Tacita De Oro, the Chinese-Cuban restaurant on 99th and Broadway has a roast chicken special: One-half chicken (breast, thigh, back and wing) is served with yellow rice and black beans, or salad and fried plantains, for $4.85. I've come to learn that a small population of Chinese migrated to Cuba in the 1930s and then eventually came to America [...]
I had come to New York for spring break in search of fixing a broken heart. Probably a silly reason, but the cause and focus of that broken heart was spending the semester in New York at the Hotel Windermere with other theater students from my college in Indiana. Why I thought I could patch things up I'll never know. [...]
It's 10:20 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the air is filled with the unmistakable sound of coins hitting metal. The multi-colored machine generating all the noise stands almost six feet tall and looks like a cross between an oversized Lego kit and something that toddlers would be crawling over at Playspace. The high tech liquid crystal display on the front [...]
On a summer evening in 2001, after work and after grilled cheese in the Greek diner on Amsterdam, Jeremy and I are walking through Verdi square, past the 72nd Street station on the 1 and 9, the most treacherously narrow subway platform in all of Manhattan, forever poised on the precipice of disaster. The streets are packed with nervous life [...]
In April, 1992, I was in Los Angeles preparing to go to the Academy awards as the date of someone who had been nominated for an Oscar--my mother. The Oscars are about Hollywood, about bright, ephemeral glamour, about surfaces that reflect. My mother is not about these things. Yet there we were, an unlikely pair, preparing for our big night. [...]
The Indian food was 39 minutes late and our guests were hungry. My wife called the restaurant and after a lengthy interrogation determined that the food was actually in the process of being delivered to an apartment in our bulding, on our floor. The only problem was, it wasn’t our apartment. We were apartment E, and somehow, at that very [...]
I go in the afternoon, before the hordes set in and children are let out from school. Your Fairway, my speedway, basket in hand, I dash past soft, yielding cheese;/crisp baguettes and spears of tender green, fast as I can. Racing through the crowded market, I avoid the stew of white-haired ladies with heavily laden carts/ and elbows, pointy and [...]
I’m in the McDonald’s on Broadway and 82nd one morning, walking towards the counter, about to order a Sausage McMuffin with Egg: a special breakfast vice that I allow myself in exchange for having given up cigarettes, which makes two breakfast vices now that I’ve started smoking again. Floating in a compact mirror above a table, turning pink to red [...]
I'm sitting in the essay aisle at Barnes & Noble trying to change my socks. I don't have an apartment anymore so this is my pit-stop, Broadway and 83rd. On one side of me is Vivian Gornick's "At Eye Level," and on the other the complete essays of Montaigne. I'm planning to take a look at both, but first things [...]
While walking down Columbus Avenue by the Planetarium one day I saw a man on his hands and knees, pulling weeds under a big tree in Theodore Roosevelt Park. He looked like he might have the lowdown on the area—and whether it was pigeon-friendly. “Why do you ask?” he asked. I told him that my friend and I have rehabilitated [...]
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