You are currently browsing the stories about the “Jackson Heights” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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 [...]
-1- Once upon a time, there existed a New York City economy where a young person fresh out of college could, with a straight face, think in terms of “building a career.” Imagine such optimism. The notion of “career” seems so trite now, forty-plus years on, so immaterial, in this age of downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring. But in 1975 there we [...]
A group of Asian teenage boys with shaved heads slows down in front of me. It is around 7 pm, not yet dusk, not really day, and we're passing by a series of low brick row houses with bar-covered windows on 73rd Street in Jackson Heights. The boys look kind of tough, but they are polite as they let me pass by; one [...]
I don’t know who invented the game or whether it is still played today. Slap Ball had a brief vogue in New York City schoolyards in the early Sixties, and in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I grew up, it attained minor cult status as the game of choice for the physically challenged. A welcome alternative to punchball, softball, and baseball, [...]
What is it, I wonder, about the German fondness for the flesh of the pig and the Jewish abhorrence of it? Like lust, revulsion too is a visceral thing fueled by the same hunger, only in reverse, a passion linked to the salivary glands that passes down the gullet to tantalize and taunt the gut. For Viennese Jewish refugees like [...]
