You are currently browsing stories tagged with “East Village.”
My first trip to New York as an adult was around a year ago. I went for only three days (to walk Peter Do’s Helmut Lang show) and was put up just off one of Times Square’s endlessly linear streets, in a VERY large hotel, constructed with long metal beams stretching endlessly into the sky. Stepping out of the taxi [...]
Eddie Boros' Tower of Toys, 6th St. and Avenue B (2008) --- I was walking along East Second Street in the East Village when I saw a man brushing out his long curly hair as he walked toward me. He stopped, pulled a clump of hair from the brush and let it go in the breeze. Not a huge fan [...]
The following series traces the shifting face of downtown New York City—a place of ghosts and grit, memory and reinvention. Born and raised in downtown Manhattan, artist-illustrator Aurélie Bernard Wortsman renders the city she calls home with quiet intensity, her delicate drawings capturing the rhythms of streets both remembered and imagined. Some scenes emerge from lived experience—lingering with friends outside [...]
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 [...]
Klaus Nomi and Cookie Mueller. November 3, 1978 - East Village - Journal Entry Last night THE NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE SHOW at Irving Plaza was a great success for the performers, but a debacle for me. Klaus Nomi was the headliner along with a horde of starry-eyed rockers and artists. My friends and I were asked to be the security. [...]
23 minutes away from the East Village, Manhattan, and Hua Tang’s mascara has already snowballed beneath her lashes. I don’t look any better — glancing at my window reflection, I register, my resemblance to the racist portrayals of Chinese people in 19th-century American comics. My eyes are swollen to the point where my field of vision is reduced. The Uber [...]
They say it takes a village…to raise a drunken man out of the gutter. I discover this is true while crossing First Avenue at 6th street in the East Village. After throwing on an inside-out sweatshirt and flip-flops to visit the corner fruit stand, I see someone lying in the street near the curb by Dunkin’ Donuts. As I get [...]
Beasties Charles St Shuffle I was scrolling through Twitter after midnight a couple of weeks ago when I read that the photographer and New York personality Ricky Powell had died. The news hit me because as kids we’d spent a lot of time together at the 14th Street Y in afterschool programs. Biddy Basketball and Sportsman’s Clinic, and the intensely [...]
I started writing these for my dear friend and frequent collaborator, the jazz saxophonist John Ellis. We both live in Village View, a Mitchell-Lama Housing Complex in the East Village, one building over from each other. When COVID hit, I started sending him material – “rough cuts” that we might eventually work on together to turn into songs. At least [...]
I’m sitting on the roof of a walk-up on East 11th Street, staring into the large glass windows of a penthouse apartment across the street. It’s an early evening in August, the perfect time of night for idling: not late enough to make you worry that you’ve wasted the night, but since the sun’s gone down, it’s no longer oppressively [...]
Sattley, California. Winter solstice 2016. We’re at my Aunt-in-law’s house, in the High Sierras, in the Egyptian room. Sphinxes, golden fabrics, a Nefertiti head. The rest of the house is faux Victorian, a modest ranch overstuffed with Costco products and kitsch. My wife, my toddler daughter, and I are curled up under an electric blanket in a bed so [...]
I am apologizing to Michelle because I’m crying and I don’t know why. I’m not sad or anything, I’m actually having a good time. This is one of the first times that Michelle and I are hanging out outside of class, and we don’t know each other well yet. But tears keep running down my cheeks and I’m really self-conscious [...]
Where East Village Meets West Village I’ve spent the last ten years of my life in the East Village of Manhattan, movin’ on up Avenue B. Quite literally: I first lived at 4th and B, then briefly moved to 6th between B and C, ending up on 13th and B. I lived in a shoebox of an apartment—sans a single [...]
The front of the White House wasn’t that bad. The reviews online had been awful but perhaps they’d been hasty. The doors were bright blue and no place with bright blue doors could be that bad. I heaved my suitcase over the step. At the train station, a frat boy had tried to help me with it. “Jesus Christ, how [...]
