You are currently browsing the stories about the “West Village” neighborhood.
We met by way of the New York City Marathon; the roller skating marathon. It is little known Big Apple trivia, but in the Fall of 1980, there was a roller-skating marathon that covered the same mileage and territory throughout the five boroughs. One of the participants was my boyfriend T.J. A draft resister who had lived in Europe during [...]
It was January 1st, 2001. New Years Day. The sky was exceptionally blue. Snow had fallen heavily two days earlier. It was still on the ground in drifts, white and pretty, but the air was balmy. My girlfriend and I were taking a long meandering stroll in search of a place to eat brunch. It was such a nice day [...]
What follows are some stories about David Brown and his flower shop. But before I tell you about him, I have to explain why, whenever I look into the store window I now see, in addition to all the flowers, a face. For a period of several months David Brown was absent from his own store. He wasn't well. He's [...]
There is usually classical music playing on the radio. Arty stands patiently behind his counter at the back of the store, his hands resting on the top of the counter like a dealer at a blackjack table that is momentarily devoid of players. Old cameras in glass cases. Old super Eight movie cameras. And new cameras, too. A photographer's paradise. [...]
On the 4th of July my girlfriend and I took a friend visiting from Richmond, Virginia out to dinner in an area of the West Village that we refer to as Charm Central. We parked the car on West 4th, which is my favorite street of its kind in the city. It’s quiet, tree lined, narrow, and it, as well [...]
So then we had enough for a full court and in the April heat we wandered over to the full court where they often fence the whole thing off to shoot commercials because of the way that building rises dramatically up above it, the massive open space of all that asphalt the smack of a softball, your head jerking up [...]
I get on the downtown F train at W. 4th street, it’s a Saturday at 1:30 a.m. The car is pretty crowded, there’s nowhere to sit but that’s fine since I’ve been sitting for the past 4 hours listening to Elvis Costello speak about his career for a TV show. He sang a little too, wish he would’ve chatted less [...]
My mother was a talented seamstress so for the earlier part of my childhood most of my clothes were homemade. She loved embroidering tiny flowers and animals on dress pockets, basting collars and hand-sewing French hems. This was the late sixties and early seventies and downtown parents had two choices in clothing for kids: shopping for the cheap polyester items [...]
During my junior year of high school my mother announced to me that I was unfit to be lived with. I was rude, obnoxious, wild, irritating, irresponsible, undisciplined, unpleasant, and ungrateful. I was therefore to make arrangements to move in with my father and his new wife at the soonest possible date. I was being released from my mother's sprawling [...]
I met the homeless man during a late night cigarette break on my apartment's stoop. He was a black man wearing a tan barn jacket in the dead of winter; it was stained and full of holes. The man was friendly, though, and he smiled at me with a toothy, unshaven face. He pointed at my pack of Winston's and [...]
The play was going to be close. The runner, my best friend Sam, was trying to go from first to third on a ball lined into the gap in right center field. But the guy in right had jumped off with the bat-crack and knifed in smoothly. He’d gloved the ball and was launching a low hard wicked throw to [...]
Brother Theodore astonishes David Letterman Brother Theodore was always a ghost to me. When I returned to Manhattan in the early 1990s, Theodore was a specter haunting downtown. His one-man show, terrible and comic all at once, was still running on 13th Street, and posters boosting the show were everywhere. I saw them at the buildings at the New School [...]
There were a lot of things that should have been taken into account before our plane even touched the ground, but they were not taken, and we just kind of sat there. It rained all week. I'd come about three days earlier and Travis showed up later, his plane was a little delayed. I'd been highlighting things in the back [...]
I was a regular at the Café Feenjon, on MacDougal Street, in the West Village in the early '70s. I was in my mid-twenties then and my older sister and I frequented the spot at least once a week. The club showcased Middle-Eastern Music: Israeli, Arabic and Greek. The menu featured non-Kosher Middle-Eastern food, which I couldn't eat. But it [...]
Photographs by Josh Gilbert The New Face of CBS News? Ed, in winter. Electronic Ed called out to me and I pulled my bicycle over and heard his news: CBS is interested in his story. He was lounging on a stoop on West eleventh street, in the dappled shade. "This Girl, this woman," he corrected himself, "from CBS. She saw [...]
Proposals of marriage are becoming the most public moment of people's private lives. By Meghan Daum Every Sunday the local newspaper in the midwestern town where I live prints engagement and wedding announcements that look like the pages of a high school yearbook. The faces are fair skinned and robust, some still marked with acne. Their pictures are taken at [...]
Fedora is a few steps below street level-- one steps down and pushes open the door into a red hued room that feels like another world, or at least another time: warm, unpretentious, exciting, wonderful. Photographs by Josh Gilbert, who has a story of his own Alfred H. Lane passed away on March 20th, 2002, at age 85. More here. [...]
1. So my doctor said it is true: You can get AIDS just from snorting cocaine. I decided to visit my doctor’s after I was unable to donate my vital juices at the Port Authority Blood Drive in the fall of 2000. I left without getting the needle after reading a form given to all potential donors that said anyone [...]
I like food, and I like books, but I'm not that into books about food. So when a friend of mine suggested we visit a great new store that sold old cookbooks, I was reluctant. Eventually, though, I got curious about the woman I saw sitting behind a busy desk in the window of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, and went in. [...]
Charles Lane is a narrow cobblestoned alley that connects Washington Street and the West Side Highway. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it, except it feel like one of those narrow crevices in the city which time has forgotten, even though it is tucked into a peculiarly modern housing development. A rehearsal studio called Charles Lane studios was once in [...]
It was a quiet block. Then one cold March day in 1971 a house blew up. It was a bomb. When it came to light that it had been the (accidental) work of the Weathermen Undergound, it changed the face of radical politics on a national scale. More locally, the explosion set off a wave of bomb scares throughout the [...]
Twice Told Tales is a feature that asks authors to revisit previously published pieces and write a brief introduction from their current vantage point. Cycles of Love, Sin, and Redemption at the Corner Bistro was originally published in September, 2000. The introduction, below, was published in May, 2018. You get to a certain age and many of the most vivid moments [...]
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 [...]
"There is a certain shade of red brick--a dark, almost melodious red, somber and riddled with blue--that is my childhood in St. Louis," wrote Harold Brodkey in State of Grace. Well, there is a certain shade of red brick--somber and melodious--that is my neighborhood in the West Village, and Ferron Brown is the custodian of that color. Mr. Brown's material [...]
I once had a girlfriend who bought me clothes. At first this made me extremely happy, but then something changed, and these gifts, which had seemed such a pure expression of love, began to seem like little apologies. The first thing C. gave me was a blue T-shirt that she had embroidered, while on jury duty, with a little flower--a [...]
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