You are currently browsing the stories about the “Other” neighborhood.
Every other Friday — when I was six to seven years old — my Uncle Lou would pick me up from school to take me to my dad’s for the weekend. He would wait in the parking lot of my Montessori elementary school in Stamford, Connecticut, idling in his Lincoln sedan, as though he were my elderly chauffeur, emerging once [...]
My husband’s Manhattan apartment overlooks Fraunces Tavern—a three-story brick building with dormer windows and a columned portico. Apparently, George Washington said goodbye to his officers there at the end of the Revolutionary War. But now, as I sit in the deep windowsill sipping coffee and watching the bar revelers below, I see a horde of men in banana costumes filing [...]
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 [...]
In the hip nightclub world of 1985 Manhattan, many people were ashamed to admit they were card-carrying members of the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, the unfortunate who lived in New Jersey and the outer boroughs but worked and played in Manhattan. Not me. I was proud to be included in that group, even at that moment of truth when my [...]
I didn’t know that my father was a bad driver, a reckless and dangerous driver, until I was in my mid-twenties. During my childhood, in the 60s and 70s, my father drove a white Cadillac El Dorado. He saw himself as a player, and he traded it in every two years for the latest model. The caddy was a boat. [...]
It was 1985 and the “Jewish Club” was a social club that seemingly popped up from nowhere at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. One day, we were told this club existed and that a woman named Akiva would be coming to the school every few weeks to run the club’s meetings. Akiva wasn’t a teacher, and this club was [...]
In the summers we would go to a cottage on the North Fork of Long Island, near Greenport. We rented the same one each year. It’s a great spot that my wife heard about from, well, I don’t remember where. She is always hearing about things, discovering ways for us to get away, do things, be a family, moving around [...]
Chestnuts bloom in Paris Memory undoes me. I am wistfully envious of folks whose past unfurls behind them with focus and drama, like a highway seen from the back of a childhood station wagon, or a vast Midwestern plain viewed from an airplane window above. The clarity of their vision, its narrative continuity and expanse, seem so exotic as to be [...]
I don’t get paid enough for this shit, I whisper, looking at my frightening reflection through the tiny knit film of my costume. Let’s just say I would not have picked this outfit: blue overalls, a singular metal goggle, black gloves, and boots stark against my yellow frame. Allegedly, I am Stuart, a Minion and one of the protagonists from [...]
Avant Gardener/Brooklyn Mirage I didn’t get invited to go to Fire Island this year, which makes me feel like a gay pariah. I’m painfully aware of this after watching the movie, Fire Island. I loved it, but it reinforced my feeling that I lacked a queer community, and notably, one with a summer share in the Pines. My best friend [...]
Red leather and chrome trap my eyes. I could be in the kitchen washing dishes or helping my mom cook dinner. Maybe walking home from my best friend Lynda’s house or reading a book in the backyard. When I think about the white Cadillac, I feel happy. When the Cadillac is parked in the driveway next door, I pay attention. [...]
Hanging out in Washington Square Park Joanie finished bending over the ironing board, her freshly-washed hair nice and flat. She pulled the plug out of the socket, wrapped up the cord, and looked in the mirror and smiled. Her own natural curls would be given free rein in a few years, but right now she wanted to match the long, [...]
What is it about anniversaries? Is it that the earth is again in the same place relative to the sun, and that we are occupying the same spot in the cosmos? You were here, but differently. Something has changed from when you were at this position before: you got married; planes hit the twin towers; you stopped smoking. The sameness [...]
It’s the summer of 1978. I drive from New York to Los Angeles to try to make it big as an actor. I camp out at my friend Karen’s one-room apartment near Paramount Studio for a few days Then her married boyfriend shows up. So I move on to several Hollywood flophouses before finding a studio apartment in Burbank. The [...]
I was only five, but I knew my mom and dad were in court that day fighting over custody rights. The rainy gray outside—plus the turmoil of yelling and crying, nighttime stirrings, and mornings waking up in different rooms or houses or cars, and not understanding what was going on or where exactly was home—had me nodding off at my [...]
It’s the morning after the election, and the results are unexpectedly close. It seems like vote counting will be going on for a few days. I speak with the Bureau Chief for the Japanese newspaper where I work. We decide to go to Philadelphia to report the counting there. I stick my computer in my briefcase and stuff in an [...]
Ordinarily, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Supreme Court. I practiced law for forty years, reluctantly. But the news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death tonight has me very agitated. Ruth was a tough old bird, a borough girl. Like her sisters on the Court, Sonia and Elena. All three are borough girls. I am obsessed with [...]
I work at the Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville, New Jersey, about an hour south of New York City. The sickest I've ever been was my first winter there. I’d applied earlier that year, in the fall of 2018, because the four-day workweek was appealing, and the wage was better than the temp construction work I was doing through an agency [...]
My 10 year-old son, Ryder has autism. Ryder is the sweetest boy ever, but he still surprises me and catches me off guard with things, mischievous things. Ryder's always been very physical and that helps him, and hurts me, when he's carrying out the crazy and creative (in retrospect) and impulsive thoughts that come to him. He has been up [...]
I’ve spent time in over 20 countries and at least 40 US states. In my travels, many people have told me that though New York City might be a nice place to visit, it’s certainly not a place for a person to live. But thank God there is a New York. One of the best life decisions I made was [...]
My dad reached inside the closet for his new jacket, single breasted, two button, and straight off the rack. It was pencil gray with flecks of black in it and may have had those professorial looking patches on the sleeves, but I’m not sure. He didn’t care much about clothes and the jacket was nothing special. “See this baby?” he [...]
Wandering Two Cities, a Youthful Diary Edward Hopper once said that he identified all the places he’d known according to their architecture. I used to be the same way. I noticed people as backdrops to overblown dramas in light and shade. I looked past them toward ogee roof and filigreed transom; I marveled at the heady volumes of imagination-translated [...]
The phone call came on a steamy summer morning, while I was stuck in traffic on the Central Park transverse, the Met’s Temple of Dendur off to my right. A nurse from my father’s hospital equivocated her way through the call. He had been in failing health. “Where are you now?” she finally asked, with some urgency. “You should see [...]
I. From a distance the crown almost looks like solid gold. But as I walk farther up 30th Avenue in Astoria, I can tell there is something not quite right about it. It is glinting, sure, but I realize the crown is made of curled paper. It’s from Burger King. I am now only a few paces behind the man [...]
A vintage piano stood alone on a deserted city street. Moments earlier, the piano had been saved from oblivion by a man named Oscar, who had stepped out of his apartment just as the workers of the New York City Sanitation Department had been struggling to lift the piano into the whining maw of their garbage truck. With the woodwindy [...]
To the young beautiful woman with tears in her eyes who lives above me: now I know why you run in the apartment for hours backandforth backandforth. I know why you don't talk in the hallway. I know because the building is old and my ceiling is thin. I heard the furniture thunder last night and I heard him - [...]
N train I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. N train, two dollars and twenty-five cents. N train; go fuck yourself with your Sunday Schedule. N train you are making me lose my mind. You will never be angelic N train, 40 minutes to Queensboro Plaza! N train you are full of excuses. We passengers don’t have many demands. [...]
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There is something unsettling about having a therapy session at the home of your therapist. It is on par with a Halloween night of childhood trick or treating and having to step through the threshold of a nameless neighbor’s doorway for handful of candy corn or tootsie rolls. Your seven-year-old nose inhales a waft of scents that aren’t those of [...]
In the glory days of Steinway Street, there was an establishment called Record Spectacular. A combination record store/head shop, it was located between 30th and 31st Avenues, on the west side of the street…and was a meeting place of sorts for music aficionados, potheads, and other 1970s misfits. I still remember walking wide-eyed into Record Spectacular as a pre-teen with [...]
When you live in an apartment building, you never know who the hell is gonna move in next door. I remember being in my late teens when a Greek family moved out two doors down and an older couple took the apartment. The guy's name was Dom and he fixed televisions for a living. A congenial guy with white hair, [...]
I slept on my fire escape one night last week but it wasn't due to martial strife or a daredevil spirit. Rather, the sight of yours truly three flights up sporting boxer shorts and a death grip on the bars came courtesy of Con Edison (with a nod to Mayor Bloomberg). The lights first dimmed on Monday, July 17—smack dab [...]
On the way to the laundromat I passed a message chalked out on the sidewalk. In large, neat block letters on a square of pavement it read: “The best part about the night was taking the train home with you.” The note seemed to be directed at the building across the street, but looking up it was impossible to tell [...]
Basketball has always been my favorite sport to play. I guess that came from living in an urban environment and not always having money. If you had anywhere from 2 to 10 guys, all you needed was one ball and at least one basket. It was a little more complicated in the winter. Fortunately, a local junior high, 204, had [...]
Wanting to see the new exhibits at Socrates Sculpture Park, I walked down Broadway from my Astoria apartment. I passed beneath the elevated subway station as an N or W train thundered through. Down past grungy supermarkets and massive discount stores, with their outdoor displays of toilet paper, sandals, fake Persian rugs, and baskets of brooms. The last time I [...]
Whenever I took my second grade special education class to the playground, they'd make a mad dash for the swings. Though, the winners would seldom swing. They would spin in circles by twisting the chains. I'd warn them about becoming dizzy, but dizziness gave them an excuse after their turn was over to stumble into each other and see how [...]
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