You are currently browsing the stories about the “West Village” neighborhood.
"He tried to soundproof the basement, but he forgot about the air vents," she says. "And I had an air vent that went from the basement right into my bedroom." Christina describes Terry Richardson's strategy for getting this picture: "He kept saying 'Flirt with the teacher! Flirt with the teacher!'" She said. "It was really annoying." It is lunchtime at [...]
It is the dulled, flat end of the summer; a warm Saturday night in the West Village, September, 1982. It is 4 a.m. We who had fawned and flounced and guzzled and still received no takers in the gay bars this evening have resigned ourselves to last-minute comfort in the bowels of the Christopher Street Bookstore, a grotto at the [...]
First Cemetery--Chatham Square, on St. James Place, also very close to Confucious Square Second Cemetery--11th Street & 6th Avenue. Third Cemetery--21st Street & 6th Avenue. During the nineteenth century, the accelerating sprawl of New York City forced the relocation of almost all of Manhattan’s dead. From 1846 to 1851, nearly 20,000 bodies were moved off the island, and by the [...]
My name is David Zuva. I'm from Russia, from Odessa. I've been here twenty years. I'm a shoemaker. I repair shoes. This my profession. I worked in Russia in the same profession. I learned when I was small boy. My father teach me. All the family shoemakers--my whole family--my wife, me, my father, my brothers, my grandfather--all shoemakers. Zuva means [...]
All over the city, people leave their bikes locked up to fences, sign posts, whatever they can find, but there probably isn't a neighborhood with a higher bikes-locked-overnight density than the West Village. Our photo editor, Josh Gilbert went out one snowy January day and politely asked some to strike a pose or two. That's all for now.
I live where the wide expanse of Houston Street, in crossing 6th Avenue, suddenly dwarfs down to the little tributary of Bedford Street. It's an old Mafia neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop for hours. I've lived here 12 years, long enough so my neighbors and I know each other, or so I thought. I have one neighbor, Joe, [...]
Autumn, 2000 It is fall in London, where I now live, but I spent ten years in Manhattan so it comes as no surprise that I would remember early dark evenings, dark so suddenly that you know with a flash that summer has gone, and that I would think of crisp mornings when leaves first shuddered at my feet and [...]
Joseph Mitchell is famous for inventing, to a large degree, the tone and style of the New Yorker long profile, of which he is perhaps the unrivaled master (Calvin Trillin has said as much). He is equally (and perhaps a bit more) famous for enduring one of the most grueling and peculiar writer's blocks on record--it lasted from 1964 until [...]
They are like a set of bees fighting over a flower. The waitress waits as long as she can before taking our orders because she knows there is an order to everything, that I was the sort of homecoming queen who slept with half the football team before a Saturday night game. Used as I am to this sort of [...]
Johnny Depp slips me a twenty when we shake hands. Do that again, I say. "It's preparation, it's all preparation," he explains, and we shake hands again, more of a brush of fingers really, the sort of discrete low key maneuver any drug dealer in the park would be proud of. A twenty dollar bill appears in my palm. Johnny [...]
She was an old lady and for a moment I wanted to kill her. We were at the grocer, and she was taking an inordinate amount of time paying. After a long time spent peering into her purse she handed over a few dollars, and a couple of quarters, and a dime and a nickel, and was now very carefully [...]
I’d dashed in about a half-hour before closing time. This little toy store in the Village, whose shelves cheerfully overflow with cute wooden toys in primary colors, funny stuffed monkeys and bright plastic puzzles. A friendly, crowded little place devoid of Gameboys and electronic pinging, the kind of place where you can reassure yourself you’re in the company of rational, [...]
A psychic stopped me on the street today after having accidentally looked into my soul. “I see something in you,” she told me. “Something in your past!” “Be careful looking back,” I told her, concerned. “. . . Should you turn into a pillar of salt.” “I want to talk to you.” I felt compelled to stop. “There is something [...]
I looked out the window and saw a woman come walking up the street eating a cupcake. She was blonde, in sneakers, alone. The cupcake’s icing was white. The woman’s timing was perfect— I had begun reading on the computer at dusk; by the time it ran out of power, and the screen went suddenly black, the sky had become [...]
Tale of the Tiger #1: Three weeks ago. One of my best friends from growing up in Billings, MT, stand-up comic Auggie Smith, moved to New York after years of occasional visits and constant prodding on my part. We go out to celebrate and hit the Blind Tiger on a Sunday night. We settle in, get a beer and Auggie [...]
1. It was a cold, early evening in autumn, and the street was crowded with people. I walked down the street looking down. I was focused on the tiny people in my mind. A friend had been making pottery and attaching these tiny little people to it. She hovered over a large magnifying glass and held each tiny person between [...]
I came to Washington Park because I did not know where to go. Riding in a cab with my friend John, on his way to study at the NYU library, provided me with a sure and fast way out of his apartment. This morning, a fight had been close to breaking out between the two of us, and the sound [...]
It happened on an unseasonably mild February night around 9:30 between 23rd and Christopher Streets on the No. 1 train: I fell in love all over again on the New York City subway. I was on my way home from seeing a movie alone in Times Square, a depressing Oscar-nominated flick about a woman stuck in a vicious cycle of [...]
Emil Schupp always sat on the same stool at the end of the counter in Artie's Luncheonette at 223 West 14th Street. Artie was my father and he let me help out at the grill one summer. Every morning, same time, same stool, same toast and tea and tomato juice, Emil sat there for exactly an hour, calculating bowling averages. [...]
A Goat walks in with a camera, wants to document me, the Best Administrative Assistant in the World, diligently at work. I turn off the Atari emulator on my computer, open up a word processing document, and get to my Work, processing, retrieving, shrugging off calls in triplicate. Each call and customer needs to feel like they are wanted, even [...]
This is the first chapter of "How To Be a Man: Scenes From A Protracted Boyhood." (W.W. Norton) [35 years old] A little while ago I went to get my car and found that it was not where I had left it. The car is, or was, a huge, mint green 1977 Thunderbird; almost half of the car's considerable length [...]
I saw Ed in the shadows on Perry street. A streelamp must have gone out because it was very dark. There was a helicopter circling the neighborhood, it's spotlight straffing. "A sign of things to come," he said, as though they were looking for him. A couple of houses down from where Ed sat there was a thickly planted bed [...]
Across the street from my apartment is a vacant building known as the Northern Dispensary. Founded as a hospice for the poor in 1827, this wedge-shaped landmark is a West Village oddity situated at the oddest of intersections: the point at which two branches of Waverly Place come together, and where Christopher Street and Grove Street diverge off Christopher Park. [...]
If you are a female who loves shoes (or a male,come to think of it, more specifically of the queenly persuasion), you have not really lived until you’ve seen the Joseph LaRose shoe collection. The collection is showcased at Cherry, a vintage store in the West Village, known for its Fashion Meets Twilight Zone window displays that make Christmas at [...]
Rio Mar was a Spanish restaurant that once occupied a little wedge of space between Little West Twelfth and Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district. It had been there for decades, an obscure treat, and even when flashy Pastis opened directly across the street, it remained esoteric, hidden in plain site. From the outside you hardly knew it was there, [...]
We had coffee the other day at a little place in the West Village called The Brewbar with a man named Chistopher Hacker, who used to work there. Past The Brewbar's red-painted window frames, traffic careened silently up Eighth Avenue. The sky persisted with its threat of a Noreaster, but in here Carmen Miranda was doing a tiki-version of "Fever," [...]
Middlemarch was a bitch: all lace and wayside chapels and conversations hissed behind gloved hands. Eliot's prose was denser than a Dorset garden, and we were all lost. All except for Todd, the grinning mook genius in British Lit class, who would interrupt the torpor with irreverent debates. We craved the distraction. It was the Spring of 1980 at Syracuse [...]
Not too long ago I sprained my ankle playing basketball and was unable to walk for several days. I had no food in the apartment during my ordeal so I was forced to order all of my meals in. It was a great indulgence which I thoroughly enjoyed. Yet by the eighth meal on the fourth day, with my ankle [...]
Smalls--a tiny, 50-person-capacity club in a West Village basement where for the last ten years you could watch the city's rising jazz stars grow up before your eyes, where the jam sessions kept going past dawn, where musicians (and sometimes the customers, it seemed) often lived in some of the club's back rooms--is dead! On June 1, a rent increase [...]
All those who believe Tupperware parties have gone the way of Suzy Homemaker may have cause to break out the crinoline. As a party at PROUN space studio has recently demonstrated, Tupperware is alive and glib in the West Village. No longer the exclusive domain of Valium-popping post-WWII housewives, this particular Tupperware party, given by architects Gustavo Bonevardi and John [...]
Jason knew that some kind of incident was imminent the moment the tattooed monster crossed the threshold into the small space in front of the counter. The other customers shrank away as the monster ordered his food. He was overconfident, full of bluster, and trying desperately to project toughness and hardness. Even though it was a laughable display it was [...]
I went to Penn Station to snap a picture or two and perhaps in the process imbibe a feeling for my grandmother, Bubby, who went there ten years ago (this month) to catch a train... I didn't know Bubby growing up. She and my dad had a fight when I was 2 and didn't speak for the next 15 years. [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
My brother is a twenty-eight-year-old millionaire living in Greenwich Village. He drives a Boxster, owns a beach house in East Hampton, and recently bought an original one-sheet of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the bargain price of twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes he asks me, his older and poorer sister, what I want or could use—cable TV, a new set of bike [...]
I was at the bar of Florent very late Sunday night. A snow storm was raging outside. Pastis, that seat of slutty mayhem, sat up the block. There are now tastefully bright lights all over the meat packing district, where there was once just meat and the people who packed it. It was strange to sit at Florent, whose entrance [...]
I was waiting for the elevator on my floor when I saw a sign on the bulletin board that an elderly painter was going into a nursing home and her work was in the basement, free to residents. I live in Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village; the note was from the management office and it said something [...]
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