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A Magical Oasis in Queens

by 01/21/2023
Neighborhood: Sunnyside

I grew up in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, during the 1950s, in an attached house between 48th and 49th streets. The houses had small gardens – front and back – with much larger communal gardens beyond our front yard. Small trees and flowering bushes were planted around the edges of two large square patches of well-mowed […]

Welcome to New York City

by 11/20/2022
Neighborhood: Ridgewood

The atmosphere seemed different coming home. You could feel it stepping off the train. A March chill penetrated our light jackets, and we caught ourselves shivering. Off to the west, fog obscured Manhattan’s glow. The empty subway cars clattered away, headed for the end of the line; oddly, we’d been the only riders in ours […]

Long Live Linen Boy

by 09/11/2022
Neighborhood: Astoria

When I stopped dating him twenty years ago, I never imagined he’d end up living up the street from me. We were two twenty-something Brooklynites having cocktails somewhere near Broadway and Lafayette, sometime in the late 90s, when I told him that the date we were on, our third, would be our last. He stared […]

The Saint of Linden Boulevard

by 04/19/2022
Neighborhood: Queens

*** Editor’s note: This is a true story. It happened in 1995. The protagonist lived in St. Albans. The church where he worshipped was in South Jamaica. M. A. Istvan Jr. was raised in Beacon, New York, in the 80s and 90s where, in addition to the soft bigotry of lowered expectations, a decades-deep tide […]

St. Patrick’s Day

by 03/14/2022
Neighborhood: Park Slope, Rockaway Beach

I was born in South Brooklyn in 1947. As a teenager I did not experience the Italian – Irish conflict that my parents, children of Italian immigrants, did. The fighting between Irish-American and Italian-American teen gangs had basically stopped. (Sadly, newer common enemies were found.)  Locals continued to tag walls and store gates with graffiti […]

Moving to Queens

by 03/06/2022
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights, Sunnyside

I lived in Manhattan for most of my considerably long life, until moving to Queens four years ago.  In my early adulthood, Manhattan was still affordable, so affordable that the people who worked the jobs that sustain city life—cops, teachers, garbage men, hospital and transit workers—could afford to live in certain areas of it. So […]

Together at Jacob Riis Beach

by 07/18/2021
Neighborhood: Jacob Riis Beach, Queens

It was my first time going to Jacob Riis Beach and it was with you.  We’d been together for two years. The first year, we were too new, and I felt a last minute anxiety about shedding my clothes in front of you and lazing in the hot sun, an anxiety that I hadn’t felt […]

The Irish Riviera

by 07/11/2021
Neighborhood: Queens, Rockaway Beach

On a muggy summer morning in 1961, with my parents still asleep, I crept into the kitchen and turned on the oven. I was seven years old. I closed the living room window to let the heat build in the apartment. After it did, I turned the oven off to let the metal cool and […]

The Cemetery Exercist 

by 11/01/2020
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Ridgewood

A cemetery was never a place I imagined myself doing squats. But in late March, when New York City shut down gyms and public parks and braced itself for a deadly COVID-19 outbreak, I found myself at the gates of Evergreens Cemetery in Queens, sporting black leggings and a pink hoodie, ready to sweat. Like […]

Haunted House

by 07/19/2020
Neighborhood: Flushing

In the beginning, it was an ordinary house on an ordinary street in Flushing, Queens, just around the corner from ours. There was an older girl, Mary Ann, who was our sometime babysitter, and a younger boy, Johnny, who was several years older than I.  A cherished childhood memory of mine concerns an afternoon (though […]

We Stand Together

by 07/12/2020
Neighborhood: Astoria

As I approached Astoria Park, I was struck by a wave of incongruities. It was a gorgeous day—the trees lush with leaves, a nascent summer sun beaming from a clear blue sky—but I had to keep it at a distance. I wore a mask for protection from the pandemic, which still loomed despite it being […]

Gone to Flowers, Every One

by 04/12/2020
Neighborhood: Ridgewood

“Okay, so now whatta my gone do? Phone won’t charge. Can’t read another word. Thirteen hours sleep. Chocolate’s gone. Weed guy disappeared. Seen everything on Netflix—twice! Corona’s a stone bitch, is what it is.” Sound familiar—maybe one or two nouns changed? It’s the plague—Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Neville […]