You are currently browsing the stories about the “Queens” neighborhood.
The other day I went to Sonbob’s—the long name is Sonnie’s Bits & Bobs—a little neighborhood café on 28th Avenue between 33rd and 34 Streets in Astoria, Queens. It’s my older brother’s favorite spot. I brought him in a wheelchair, because he was tired and it was hot. Sonnie, the owner, pronounced saw-nee, is a Korean woman of 60. She’s [...]
“Hey, girls!” Brandishing a lit cigarette, a guy in an army jacket beckoned my friend Robin and me. He was leaning against the wall of a warehouse near an elevated subway station in Queens, a few stops outside of Manhattan. Our new boss. I’d been hired over the phone the previous day, after answering an ad in The Village Voice. [...]
Something feels special about this year’s Mets. With over a third of the season completed, there’s a spirit of joy and anticipation among fans, and the stellar performance of our team has been exhilarating. But one thing is missing: We need a 2025 Mets rallying cry. The need has lingered, as our ability to produce runs has remained low. Gone [...]
It wasn’t easy for us to dress for Thanksgiving. Basically, we had interchangeable wardrobes in two sizes: Levis, BVD tees and plaid flannel shirts. Occasionally, I wore a leotard or a 1950’s thrift shop sweater, but there was nothing formal enough for dinner with his family in Queens. So, we dropped by my parents and in my old bedroom closet [...]
6:50 am Standing in a help-desk line at JFK airport seems as good a moment as any to analyze the catastrophe of my life. Everyone in this line is embarrassed to be here, and I’m no exception. We’re misfits, absent-minded millennials and oldsters who can’t get technology to work, and we have formed an instant community as airport rejects. Before [...]
From 1964 to 1974, I lived in a brown-bricked apartment building near the corner of Palmetto Street and Cypress Avenue in Ridgewood, New York. The Mathews Brothers built 650 of these 6-unit buildings, sometimes known as Mathews Flats, early in the 20th century. I lived with my brother and sister and our parents on the second floor of a five-room [...]
Yesterday afternoon my long journey from Sriracha, Thailand, ended with the 747’s touchdown at JFK in New York. I hadn’t slept much on the flight and jet lag threatened to seize my body and soul, as I unpacked my bag at my Fort Greene apartment. Sleep crowded my vision, but the writer Bruce Benderson was celebrating his birthday at his [...]
It was a drop, barely. On the busted tile in the kitchen. My floor. The apartment in Astoria. A drop. My feet were bare. I could kick the tile in and out of place with my toes. Like Tetris. I moved the piece with the splash of blood. I was making mac’ and cheese. Nine weeks pregnant and always hungry. [...]
I am in my apartment in Woodside, Queens, reading C.S. Lewis. It is my first apartment that isn’t school housing, and I feel like a woman born again: reading, writing, thinking, manic with ideas and desires in a space all of my own. Though I am not Catholic- I’m technically Jewish but not in any personal way- I am fervent, [...]
Approximate Odds I hope I break even - I could use the money.- overheard at Aqueduct Early in 1972 I went to Aqueduct racetrack with my father and my Uncle Nick. They had the day off, and I had a new telephoto lens that I wanted to try out. I wasn’t doing much of anything back then besides occasionally driving [...]
The two apartments I rented, one after the other, in Astoria from 2009 to 2011 were on the same block of lower Ditmars Boulevard in modest buildings, under the faded dominion of the Hell Gate Bridge, within sight and smell of the East River, and across the street from the Kodachrome canvas of Astoria Park. In 2009, I shared a [...]
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 lawns, separated by two marble [...]
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 since the Williamsburg Bridge. When [...]
Treehugger / Sanja Kostic 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 at [...]
*** 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 of negative stereotypes about his [...]
Three Pipers, 1997 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 featuring ethnic [...]
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 could a 20-year old, who [...]
Jacob Riis Beach 2012 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 as [...]
Barbara, Joan, Pat and someone at Rockaway Beach 1956 (photo by Robert A. Pryor) 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 [...]
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 many New Yorkers, I had [...]
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 there may have been more [...]
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 eclipsed by current events. People [...]
“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 Shute’s On The Beach. All of [...]
I blame Basquiat. He’s where my whole Trump grave fixation started, unlikely as that sounds. It was right after the holidays—January 2, 2018, to be exact (It’s nice of iPhones to keep track of photo dates isn’t it?)—that Carolyn and I first went to Green-Wood Cemetery. Generally we were there to explore: ostentatious tombs, towering magnolias—you know the whole Emily [...]
The red felt blanket hung over the kitchen doorway. It looked like Swiss cheese from all the dog bites. Somehow it kept the heat from the stove in the kitchen. I sat on the dirty linoleum floor, looked out of the frosted window and saw that it was dark. As my last eight of spades hit the pile of cards, [...]
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 [...]
I am learning to drive for the second time. On Sundays, I take classes at “Learn-Rite,” a school in Flushing. The school boasts a neon blue sign illustrating a yellow car and red stop sign. The graphics' cheap branding displays cartoon-like pictures as if to reassure students that this endeavor is simple, achievable, and above all, happy. The whole ordeal [...]
I was eleven when I got my first paper route. You had to be thirteen. “If the route manager approves it, I’ll give it to you,” Freddy Bullwinkle said. Kids called him Bullwinkle because he had big ears. A few days later it was mine. The Long Island Star Journal. “Remember, John, the most important part of the job [...]
I broke up with my first boyfriend one month, two weeks, and four days after I found out he was fucking his neighbor. I never told him that I’d overheard them. He never wanted to fight; he didn’t want us to be the couple who fought. It was important to him that we maintain a good reputation. He’d take me [...]
Rising, miraculous, precariously leaning in front of the attached one-family, red brick house in which I grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and for years thereafter when my widowed mother was the sole remaining occupant, a towering fir tree loomed twice as tall as the roof and climbing. Having felled all extraneous timber and reduced their own allotted front yard [...]
Editor’s Note -- These poems emerged out of oral histories of the American Left that Paul Buhle conducted forty years ago. They are not literal transcripts, but lyrically condense the stories he heard. Buhle traveled New York from Coop-City to Ozone Park to the Lower East Side to Brighton Beach for this project. The old leftists were octogenarians when Buhle [...]
When I was thirteen years old and in the seventh grade, I loved to go to Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets. I loved baseball and would sneak into the ball park all the time. When the Mets were on road trips, I practically lived there. It was my stadium. I would sit in the broadcast booth with [...]
My memories of high school are burdened by two deciding factors: the absence of girls and my aversion to math and science, both regrettable, given the fact that the prestigious institution I attended, Stuyvesant High School—then still in its old digs, a venerable building on East 15th Street—was all boys and all about math and science. Numbers made me nervous. [...]
I ran into Dad’s room after hearing my name called. “Take off your shoes,“ he said. I wondered what the heck was going to happen now. That morning my mom had told me that I would be going to Akron, Ohio with Dad to see the people who caused his nightmares and screaming. His war buddies. They were having a [...]
An el train chugged across the tracks, shadows cutting in and out from the sun beaming above it. Cars cruised along the streets of Corona, Queens, as though there was nowhere to go. Storefronts sat like rows of sleepy eyes, their riveted steel lids rising just enough for their doors to open. The sidewalks were almost empty. Men with leathery, [...]
I came up the stairs from the subway. The cold air on Queens Boulevard blew hard. I turned and looked back down to see where my sisters Sara and Carol were. I was relieved to see them coming up towards me. I’d been lost before and it wasn’t fun. Behind them was my dad. He already had a lit cigarette [...]
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