You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Ancestors.”
I shift from foot to foot as I wait in line to see the Mona Lisa. The line snakes around the corridor of the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother and Aunt Regina insist that we must see this wonderful painting. Helen holds my hand and tells me that Leonardo da Vinci was one of the [...]
When my father walked onto the construction site of the Western Electric Building on Broadway and Fulton, he asked a dark-skinned guy in hard hat where Richie Two-ax was. The construction worker eyed my father’s neatly pressed slacks and asked, “Who are you?” “I’m his friend? He told me to meet him here for lunch,” my father said. “Your name [...]
In the spring of 1980 I was a cocky new teacher of English as a Second language, fresh from education grad school, with innovative pedagogy that I couldn’t wait to try out on students. My first job in New York was a gem: "Vocational ESL." It was funded by the feds and I'd gone to the French Quarter in New [...]
This is a story about my grandmother, who was young in Manhattan in the 1920s. Speakeasies, nightclubs, drop-waisted dresses, bobbed hair, cloche hats, waist-length strands of dime-store pearls. Even for a middle-class workaday office girl like Frances Thornton, those were heady times. She was among the first of the gals in her office to bob her hair, which caused Chub, [...]
The old upright piano was in the living room from my earliest recollection until the day my father died. He must have brought it sometime in the early ‘50s, soon after he'd gotten married. Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song called “Two Guitars” and [...]
Our hands had not touched--other than to acknowledge each other’s presence or successes--in over thirty-five years. Now his open right hand lay by the side of his softly draped figure, a whisper’s distance from where I was sitting. A curtain, walling off a roommate, shadowed us from the bright day. “Remember how we agreed I’d tell you when something major [...]
My family has a particular vulnerability, a fatal relationship really, with public transportation. Aunt Aneila, running to catch a bus, was hit and killed by a post office truck on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn long before I was born. “Mowed down like a dog,” my mother used to say. Uncle Donald had a heart attack and died on the subway [...]
“Hi George,” I said, with a wave, as I rushed toward the subway. George, who was sitting in his low-to-the-ground folding chair at his usual post in front of the liquor store, sat up bolt straight, as if I had touched him, giving him a shock of static electricity, and said with some outrage, “How do you know my name?” [...]
My radiant, delusional mother, my two older brothers, and I lived in second-rate hotels and one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan from 1961, when I was five, until 1967. We’d sporadically get locked out of wherever we were staying for not keeping up with the rent, have our possessions confiscated, and spend the night sleeping in Central Park, or nursing hot chocolates [...]
After work on Tuesdays, my mother comes home to the apartment in the Ansonia Hotel where we live with my grandmother and takes me to acting class. The year is 1952. I hate acting class even worse than I hate second grade! My mother says I will learn how to speak with “charm and grace.” But she doesn’t fool me. [...]
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 [...]
My dad was the Ralph Kramden of St. Peters Avenue. He always had some plot, some scheme to try to make extra money. The first I remember, he played the number. No, not “Lotto,” but the real, old-school number “played” to scary old men in the back rooms of candy stores that sold wormy Chunky bars and pretzel sticks so [...]
The Ansonia Hotel was not your usual hotel. But we were not your usual family. By the time I was born in 1945, the Ansonia had suffered years of neglect. The live seals that once frolicked in the lobby fountain were long gone. So was the fountain when I lived there as a child with my mother and father. Many [...]
A few years ago in my father’s eighty-first year, my brother Patrick and I went to his house to spend Thanksgiving. My father lived in the Bronx at that time. We are the only children in the family still living in New York. Neither of us particularly wanted to spend the day in my father’s unkempt, dusty place, but he [...]
“Now, you know, when I was a young girl, before your Granddad came along, I lived in Chicago. And boy was that an experience.” My grandmother takes a sip off her still steaming coffee; black the only way she’ll take it. “It was a grand time. So much energy, so lively. And then we moved to Wichita, Kansas and I [...]
On my corner of 167th Street and Grant Avenue in the Bronx was a small grocery that sold “Appetizers”—dairy foods, pickles, milk, eggs, and fresh tub butter and cheeses in large refrigerated glass cases. The owners were refugees. From the War, my mother said. I was twelve and that War had ended fifteen years ago. One white-jacketed worker behind the [...]
First Cemetery--Chatham Square, on St. James Place, also very close to Confucious Square Second Cemetery--11th Street & 6th Avenue. Third Cemetery--21st Street & 6th Avenue. During the nineteenth century, the accelerating sprawl of New York City forced the relocation of almost all of Manhattan’s dead. From 1846 to 1851, nearly 20,000 bodies were moved off the island, and by the [...]
Patricia Bosworth, the author of biographies of Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus and who has been at work on a biography of her father, Bartley Crumb, for the last 10 years, recently had the idea that it might be nice if a group of biographers could gather now and then and commiserate, perhaps over lunch at the China Bowl, a [...]
1. Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high--I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the unusual cos- tumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than [...]
Photo by Morris Engel McNulty, with cigarette, in his element. This drunk came down the street, walking in the gutter instead of the sidewalk, and a truck hit him and knocked him down. It was a busy corner there at Forty-second Street and Second Avenue, in front of the Shanty, and there's a hack line there. Naturally, a little crowd [...]
