You are currently browsing the stories about the “Washington Heights” neighborhood.
Born and raised in New York City, I spent my formative years dwelling above 110th Street. As a tot I lived with my mom and grandmother in the Lenox Terrace, but in 1967, when I was 4, we moved to 628 West 151 Street. Living in a two-bedroom first floor apartment with wood floors except in the bathroom and kitchen, [...]
It’s 2011. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. I’m trying to figure out how to pay the rent for my small, dim apartment in Washington Heights. I have two weeks to come up with it. I have no prospects. I’m sixty-six years old. Sitting there, I think that after thirty-five years living in New York City, I should [...]
I was too young to comprehend “dark energy” that pulls apart the human psyche. But at 19, I was a witness. New York State Psychiatric Institute, high up and hovering over the Hudson in Washington Heights, was, and still is, a special teaching hospital connected to Columbia University. In the 1950s, when I worked there, it catered mostly to the [...]
I first met Ari Horwitz in front of a pizzeria near the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal in 1978. I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know, but Ari was about my age, mid-20s, and we seemed to have an immediate psychic connection. Ari, it turned out, lived with a roommate on Barnes Avenue near Pelham [...]
I’m sitting on the rooftop of my 31-floor apartment building looking down on a laughing couple drinking White Claws. Looking on like a creep–or maybe like an ever-watching god. Is there a difference? On an adjacent rooftop, a man probably my age is smoking a cigarette and crushing a six-pack. He’s been staring at the sunset above [...]
In the midst of a particularly grueling winter, I met Wren on OK Cupid. Unlike my slim, brown-skinned fiancé who had deserted me the week before Christmas, Wren was bulky, with a ruddy complexion and pale blue eyes like my father’s. The day after my third date with Wren, my father died of congestive heart failure. That man had battered [...]
One way or another, everybody needs to get on the A train. I'm leaning against the back wall of the car, in that tiny corner beside the conductor’s compartment, still managing to read despite all the other people crammed in around me. It’s the afternoon rush hour and you don’t need a watch to tell. The doors open and a [...]
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 [...]
“Lemuel,” my mother cried out to me. “No puedo ver.” I looked up. Her eyes were shut, her grip was tight around my hand, and she was telling me she couldn’t see. We had been walking home, enjoying the lull that comes over Washington Heights at the end of the day. I was six and relished any chance to be [...]
It had become a habit that week—reading Richard Rodriguez’s “Brown” on the A train, riding a gradient line between the ochre of Washington Heights and the powdered white walls of NYU. I reveled in holding the book upright, spine stiff, and the bent paperback cover like a sail at full mast. It was a silent rebellion. A drama I could [...]
I shift from foot to foot as I wait in line to see the Mona Lisa. The line snakes around the corridor of the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother and Aunt Regina insist that we must see this wonderful painting. Helen holds my hand and tells me that Leonardo da Vinci was one of the [...]
I met Mychal Judge in the spring of 1985 when my boyfriend, Javier, and I decided to get married. As a lapsed Catholic, estranged from the Church for over a decade, I was tormented with guilt and worry, yet I wanted to have a church wedding without having to account for prior errant ways—our daughter, for example—or making any commitments [...]
When Jeffrey and I argue, my mother always weeps. "Shame on you," she says. "I wish my brother, Shmuel, was still here for me to argue with. Shame on you!" My brother and I hang our heads. We wait for her to leave the room, but she is not yet finished. "Is this what I survived Hitler for?" she mumbles. [...]
So you’ve got the wife and the kids. You’ve got and are just barely hanging onto, the co-op in the chic enclave, you’re so middle-aged. Some men, finding themselves adrift in a wood in their middle years, go to the gym: I troll whores for coke. After you’ve seen the horrors of Chelsea Pier’s ice rink on a weekend afternoon, [...]
I met Dan Dinnerstein at a party in 1982, when we were young, single guys in our late twenties. We had a lot in common: we were both were products of the New York State University system, we both came from the same neighborhood in the Bronx (although we hadn’t known each other there), and, at the time, we both [...]
The day I moved to Washington Heights, a kid stood on the sidewalk and stared at me. And not a trying-not-to stare, either; a slack-jawed, wide-eyed, rooted-to-the-spot stare. It was sweltering that day—the first day of summer—and even though it wasn't the most practical choice for moving day, I wore one of those tank tops with the built-in bras. Horrified, [...]
My friend John promised a world away from the gray of Boston, but the Cloisters seemed equally cold and dim when we paid our admission fee (ahem, suggested $20 donation). The cold from the stone floor seeped upward through my shoes as we began to wander around, approaching the tapestry in which the unicorn sits entrapped. “I always found the [...]
“This would be a great place for making babies,” Kristal said to me, in the same longing way she often asked to go to the bathroom during city and state exams. Kristal was fifteen. They were all fifteen, even the other ones, the white ones from New Jersey, whose names reflected the suburban streets where they lived, who had come [...]
175th Street, between Audubon and Saint Nicholas Avenues was the playing field for hundreds of boys each year, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Anchored mid-block by Incarnation Grammar School, 175th Street was a four-car-wide, smoothly paved, level, treeless, usually-blocked-off-during-school-days street. The sidewalks were also wide and level, the street curbs sharp and unbroken, and the six floor apartment [...]
In a city that purportedly never sleeps (but does take frequent disco naps), there is a population of workers who must keep the place running while most inhabitants are in fact snoozing. Our commute begins as most are bedding down with Letterman or curling into a vodka-drenched stranger. We are the skeleton crew operating the machine while the rest of [...]
Twenty-one children (the first of whom were triplets), and twenty-one grandchildren. And two wives, if you're wondering. Thirteen with the first wife, nine with the next. He's not married anymore. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when it was still Brownsville, Brooklyn. Now he lives in Springfield Gardens, Queens. On public transportation it takes him two and a half hours [...]
Charles Boromeo Eder (Charlie) and Hermine Fleckenstein (Minnie) were immigrants, Charlie from Vienna, Minnie from Habichstal (a 300 person farm village about 80 kms. east of Frankfurt). Both had immigrated to New York City in the late 1920s. Charlie, a waiter at the Essex House met Minnie one afternoon in Central Park, as she was nannying. After a three year [...]
When I hear about the plane crash in Queens, all I can think is, "I can't believe no one's talking about it." Then, after sunset, I'm thinking, "God, it's clear out tonight. Look at these stars." Our season of caring seems to be over. Later, at 3 a.m., I'm at 145th Street, waiting for the 1/9 train. There's a guy [...]
