You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Bronx.”
City owned buildings in the Tremont section of the Bronx. All photos by Larry Racioppo. --- In the summer of 1988, I applied for a job at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). For the two years prior, I had been managing low-income properties in the Bronx and Manhattan for a management company and also [...]
Self-portrait as a carpenter, wishing to be a photographer, 1981, in my studio. ___ As the Labor Day holiday approaches, I’ve been thinking of all the jobs I’ve had since I turned 24 in 1971, the year I began trying to “make it,” that is support myself, as a photographer in New York City. Between 1971 and 1989, I worked [...]
I first met Ari Horwitz in front of a pizzeria near the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal in 1978. I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know, but Ari was about my age, mid-20s, and we seemed to have an immediate psychic connection. Ari, it turned out, lived with a roommate on Barnes Avenue near Pelham [...]
Schenk's Paramount Hotel My home base in the 50s was Wyatt Street, essentially, a one-block middle class Jewish enclave in the East Bronx. Theirs was a few miles away, on Fox Street in the South Bronx, then a tough area of mostly poor Jews, Italians, Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Our paths were unlikely to have ever crossed, except for our [...]
Most people see the “Police Academy” movies and laugh. I went through the real Police Academy, and felt nothing but pain. In May, 1975, CETA, a long-defunct government jobs program, announced that it was hiring people who had some college education. It was the middle of a recession, and I remember standing on a long, long line that went around [...]
New York Yankees Dirt Pen with Authentic Field Dirt from Yankee Stadium (Amazon.com) In 1992 our middle school band was chosen to perform at Yankee Stadium on Opening Day. Not the national anthem, just a few songs from our repertoire. The performance was slotted for about two and a half hours before game time. When we arrived there was hardly [...]
Blanche, my mother, was past thirty, an old maid by the standards of the mid-twentieth century. She finally picked herself up and hauled herself off to a lefty resort in the Catskills, the kind of place where people were more likely to play Twenty Questions than tennis. There she met my father, Harold, who was apparently quite good at playing [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Of all the places in New York City during the 40's, “paradise” could be found in the East Bronx. Adjoining the Bronx River, when it was clean and frisky, a magical park with a huge pool in the round, surrounded by beach sand. In a world where basketball was king, here was a lovely but rarely used soccer field. For [...]
In a school full of hard cases, Theresa Fulife was the hardest. She looked like the oldest kid in the eighth grade because at 16 she was. Her scarred, nearly six-foot muscular frame looked like it had been tattooed by a drunken sailor. Her face resembled the pitted surface of some foreign planet. Her hair rose knotted and wild above [...]
“Mommy—Don’t go to work,” said my two-year-old daughter said, who’d just started speaking in sentences. As I put on my jacket, she began to cry. I kissed her cheek, and said, “I’ll be home later.” The babysitter fed her, and I closed the door. I heard her sobbing as I charged down the hallway. I had 5 minutes to catch [...]
Decades ago, when my brother was about ten and I around fourteen, he began to spend an extraordinary amount of time in his room. We lived in an apartment in a sketchy neighborhood in the Bronx. There were muggings, petty and not so petty thefts, and a few cases of violent crimes. Still, we played outside and often in the [...]
The John Kieran Trail in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx is cut through sturdy black locust and black cherry trees, their crowns bending the day's sunlight. As it veers towards the water, the trail mixes with wet mossy woods with willow branches hanging over the path like Rapunzel’s hair, patches of skunk cabbage and pitcher plants, and a feathery [...]
Angie Xtravaganza This is the story of Angel Segarra, a Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx who became Angie Xtravaganza, doyenne of the drag world made briefy famous by Jennie Livingston’s acclaimed 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. Angel, neé Angie, died in New York City on April 6, 1993, at the age of 27. She died of complications from [...]
