You are currently browsing the stories about the “Multiple” neighborhood.
The snow is beautiful and magical as it begins to come down in light flakes in the early morning hours of late February. The roads and sidewalks are still manageable, the seagulls playfully carving the air a few blocks away from the Hudson, children throwing snowballs, people out walking their dogs. As the hours pass the snow continues to fall [...]
This past 2nd of November, I walked two blocks from my apartment to 4th Ave in Brooklyn to watch the 38th running of the New York City Marathon. However, rather than being inspired, I immediately felt jealous. The cheering crowd shouting the runner’s names and shared nationalities as they ran by giving a quick nod in the direction of the [...]
The Craigslist murder of Julissa Brisman has left me wondering about my own choices as well as those close to me. Brisman’s murder by alleged killer Philip Markoff is a scary fact of what can happen when using the Internet for dating or other activities. I’ve been an avid fan of online dating for years and with much luck. I [...]
March 2009 will mark the ten-year anniversary of returning to New York City. The first year I lived here, in 1993-94 was a blur: an apartment in the Bronx, working with kids at a neighborhood center, $10 all-you-could-drink Saturday nights at Rockridge on Bleecker, 6 a.m. 4-train rides home, and smoking blunts with the janitor who also dealt crack and [...]
About a hundred of them went. They left their wives, children, friends and girlfriends. Some left school, others their jobs, to fly halfway across the world to fight in a war for, they say, their people, their identity and their independence. The independence, gained almost a decade later, came at a cost. For Florim Lajqi (pronounced Lie-chee), 30, of the [...]
I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on my last day of classes. It was a beautiful day in May. I had walked over the bridge many mornings this year, dropping my daughter at her school in Brooklyn Heights and continuing to work. I teach the essay to first-year college students and it is a good opportunity to see the city [...]
I spent a good nine months of my life dedicated to Paul Newman. I wasn’t training to eat eggs, or living a strict Newman’s Own diet. I was developing and writing a screenplay that had roles for not only Paul, but his wife, Joanne Woodward, and long-time cohort, Robert Redford. It was a far-fetched idea with high stakes, but few [...]
My subway epiphany came when I moved back to New York after a seven-year absence in the early 1990s. In the time I had been away, the subways had been vastly improved, and were no longer a place of thoroughgoing menace. The interior surfaces of the well-ventilated car I rode in were gleaming and graffiti-free – nothing at all like [...]
I troll craigslist searching for traces of my ex. He dates trannies and the dregs of society. I had lunch with him the other day and I said, "Hey Luke, did you put this ad up?" "Oh my god! How the hell did you know!" I wanted to say, it’s really not that difficult when you date someone for nearly [...]
The campus of my public school building in New York City is a fortress these days. Gazing through the mesh caging of any stairway window, I can spot faculty deans, campus security (a branch of the NYPD with arresting powers), as well as regular NYPD uniformed officers patrolling the grounds like medieval sentries. As I move through the halls of [...]
Hello. The 6th Anniversary of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is here, and the time has come to pay tribute to the site's past. So many pieces are coming in all the time, piling up on the surface of the site, that it's easy to forget how much terrific work has accumulated in the deeper layers of MBN's very own geological record. [...]
[Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is proud to share the following, a chapter of a new book from Soft Skull Press called "America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York" edited by Robert Polner and with a preface by Jimmy Breslin. The book is an anthology that includes reminiscences and critical dissections of the Giuliani Administration by a variety of [...]
Luck was on my side. The "Q" train pulled into the 34th Street station headed to Brooklyn. I was relieved, not just because I would be whisked home by the air conditioned subway train. It meant that I wouldn't have to stand on one of the hottest subway platforms in the city, forced to breathe a particular stench that I [...]
So you’re teaching again. No, not the cushy adjunct work at the college where you got the MFA. This will be the crack your knuckles, roll up your sleeves type of teaching that New York City has to offer. Once you realized that The New Yorker was just as happy to ignore you with or without those precious writing awards [...]
It was a muggy Manhattan afternoon in August, and I was between movies. Not because I didn’t have air conditioning, but because I needed to distract my angry, heartbroken self, and movies, carefully spaced, were my drug of choice. I had seen La Ultima Baci at the Sunshine on Houston Street and was on my way to whatever was playing [...]
"And three weeks later I found him dead in his apartment," I overhear an old man say to his friend as I pass them on a street in the West Village. It's all I get--the one, disembodied line. Another day, another street. I pass a man and a woman, and at that instant the man says: "I LIKE eating raw [...]
THE GOD OF HIGH SCHOOL by Rachel Cline ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF NOT SEEING HER AGAIN by Alex Jablonski CHRISTINA by Snooder Greenberg WEDDING PROPOSAL AT CAFE LOUP by Meghan Daum and Thomas Beller MAKING IT by Kendra Hurley THE KEPT BOY by John Epperson SEGWAY SIGHTINGS by Maud Newton BUTCH & NANCY by Jenni Olson THE JEWISH HOLLY-GO-LIGHTLY by [...]
June 21, 2004 Straight Talk on Hair Village by Rachel W. Sherman No one who does Japanese hair straightening at Hair Village is Japanese....(more) November 24, 2002 The Politics of Hair Removal by Alicia Erian She was dirt cheap, and we shared an interest in politics....(more) Sal The Barber In The Make Believe Ballroom by Jim Merlis July 12, 2003 [...]
Midway through The Warriors, a lesbian gang called The Lizzies lures a detachment of Warriors back to their party pad, treacherously plying them with music, dancing, and the promise of good loving. Waylaying the Warriors just as Circe waylaid Odysseus and his crew, these jaunty lesbians proceed to transform the street-tough Warrior boys into randy and helpless Sweathogs. That’s when [...]
A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam, Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the River I counted the echoes assembling, one after another Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers. Lights, coasting, left the oily tympanum of waters The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under, Tossed from [...]
It is 7:00pm, and I look down at my vibrating phone. It’s from Mr. Cheese. Interesting. I had met him awhile back, and he seemed nice enough, so we exchanged numbers. But I rarely hear from him, and have never had more than a 5 minute conversation with the guy. Hm. I wonder what the occasion is. “Diedre? Hi, this [...]
Merchants and police had the first say, but in no time, countless others got into the fray. “They are jackals, that’s why,” said a city councilman who represented a heavily looted Brooklyn neighborhood. “Jackals who took advantages of the darkness to destroy our stores and services.” “Why do they do it?” asked an eighteen-year-old, as if the answer were obvious. [...]
The air on the fourteenth floor of 1 Police Plaza is a little thick, and Captain Z. wheezes. "You’re wheezing," I say. "I am not," he says, and pulls out his asthma inhaler, shakes it, and takes a puff. His lung sounds immediately clear. It’s 4:30 on Thursday, August 14, exactly nineteen minutes after the power went out. I had [...]
I was a fat, strange kid for whome Forts were very important. My parents used to drive from our upstate New York home to the Big Apple twice a year. For my parents those visits meant fine dining and Broadway shows . For me however, those visits meant Forts. Yes. Forts. I was interested in anything “military,” but especially those [...]
At about quarter to five this past Thursday I got into a cab at 56th and Broadway; my destination was the Port Authority and the Short Line Bus to my home in Orange County. It was a rainy, miserable day and I was damned glad to get the cab. My driver was relievedly Haitian -- one checks these days. As [...]
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. [...]
I found "Timmy's Potty" laying on the carpet beneath our bed this morning. It's a toilet training video that my wife purchased for our son about a month ago. It was odd to see it again. I remember the day my wife brought it home from the hippie bookstore. More specifically, I remember how she and I watched it together [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper 1971. When I was still a student and first visited New York City, the couple at whose place I was staying suggested we take a walk to the piers near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. While we were crossing the roadway there, where the signs clearly prohibit pedestrians from crossing, a policemen who saw us [...]
Today, I walk the stairs up to the elevated platform, ready to join 3.5 million of my closest friends on the subway. Just a few days before a possible transit workers strike was to have happened. Being unable to get into Manhattan would have hurt my wallet but, I remind myself, there are bigger issues at stake. The N train [...]
The View From the Seventieth Floor by Sandy Gelpieryn Death Masks at Ground Zero by Kendra Hurley The Numbers by Bryan Charles The View From Silver Lake Park by Gabrielle Walter Don't Look Back by Kevin McLeod Scenes From The Brooklyn Bridge by Jim Merlis The View From Long Island Part Ii by Adam Baer Ob Gyn Wtc by [...]
First of all, and please note that this preventive axiom applies to many long and painful life detours, never take a job that you hate, particularly when it happens to be with a large company where people refer to working in their offices until 11:00 p.m. as “staying late” and recount it—“I could just relax. Everything flowed. I could have [...]
Once upon a time there was a drawing of a man and his dog. It was by William Steig. It was what the distinguished artist produced when we asked him to draw something that we at the Neighborhood could use as a, a, a.... (it's to the right)... something. A Logo is the word I am hoping to avoid. For [...]
Lately when I go for a walk I make a vow not to walk under any scaffolding, in protest of there being so much of it these days. Two minutes later I realize I'm walking under scaffolding. One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer and realized it had [...]
It's not easy to ask for a picture from a fireman's widow or a mother who has just lost a child. That's the worst aspect of my high-pressure job as a member of the New York City working press. I step into people’s lives, often for less than an hour, usually in moments of great joy or sorrow. My job [...]
It was the beginning of summer and my two young sons had taken to counting Jaguars. “There’s one!” Alex, then eight, would cry, elated, from the backseat of the car. “Oh, there’s another one.” “Look over there—there’s two more!” five-year-old Ferran would trill. Anyone unfamiliar with the Hamptons might have assumed we were on a safari, mistaking my sons’ enthusiasm [...]
In October 1965, the New York Times received a tip that a young man arrested at a recent Ku Klux Klan demonstration in the Bronx was, in fact, a Jew. His name was Daniel Burros, he was twenty-eight, and lived in Ozone Park, Queens. Until a few months earlier he had been a high-ranking member of the American Nazi Party, [...]
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