You are currently browsing stories tagged with “In Search of Lost Time.”
In a city with an Irish pub on every corner, where are the other kilt-wearing Celts to be found? Since returning from a trip to the Scottish Highlands, I have noticed a distinct lack of Scottish presence in New York, particularly when compared to the Irish. I searched in vain for the Whisky Mac, a mellow drink of equal parts [...]
"S-s-s-s-h-h-h-t. I love that sound," says the second-generation seltzer man Barry Walpow. He's at the Seaview Diner in Canarsie, simulating the joyful noise of seltzer squirting from a glass siphon bottle, before heading off to make an end-of-the-day delivery in Williamsburg. The tall 51-year-old, wearing a battered black baseball hat and glasses as thick as the bottoms of the seltzer [...]
Angela and I stopped to investigate the South Williamsburg street. We lived in Queens (not together, mind you – the sexual need between this former cheerleader and me had long since expired) and were exploring a new locale. Neighborhood pride and a grass-isn't-greener mentality often create a chasm between boroughs, but we'd scoured most of our Greek neighborhood and craved [...]
The summer of 1952 I was ten, and the center of my universe was Brooklyn. The Dodgers were still Brooklyn's team, and Ebbets Field was where they played baseball and not a hous ing project. Everyone hated the Yankees. With the end of school still close, the pinch of freedom felt as unnatural as the stiff pair of dungarees my [...]
Charles Boromeo Eder (Charlie) and Hermine Fleckenstein (Minnie) were immigrants, Charlie from Vienna, Minnie from Habichstal (a 300 person farm village about 80 kms. east of Frankfurt). Both had immigrated to New York City in the late 1920s. Charlie, a waiter at the Essex House met Minnie one afternoon in Central Park, as she was nannying. After a three year [...]
I don't think I thought of Eli every single time I walked down lower Seventh Avenue, but I may have. His parents' West Village brownstone had been a shrine to me in high school insofar as Eli, himself, had been a god. When passing it back then, I craned my neck at the upstairs window and said whatever magic words [...]
Since I wrote my piece about Fresh Meadows a year ago, the sleepy little Klein Farm has exploded into public prominence. In late 2001, word spread that the elder Klein, now happily ensconced out in Jericho, had indeed decided to sell the no-longer profitable farm, despite the younger Klein’s desire to continue the enterprise. ("It’s the only job I’ve had," [...]
My mother was a talented seamstress so for the earlier part of my childhood most of my clothes were homemade. She loved embroidering tiny flowers and animals on dress pockets, basting collars and hand-sewing French hems. This was the late sixties and early seventies and downtown parents had two choices in clothing for kids: shopping for the cheap polyester items [...]
Fresh off the train from Westfield, New Jersey, our family stood on the corner of 42nd Street and Park Avenue. Exhilarated by the fact that his breath was suddenly visible, my ordinarily quiet seven-year-old brother James began to speak loudly and quickly, pushing air from his lungs in great hyperbolic gushes. I followed suit. Soon the shivering began, and we [...]
During my junior year of high school my mother announced to me that I was unfit to be lived with. I was rude, obnoxious, wild, irritating, irresponsible, undisciplined, unpleasant, and ungrateful. I was therefore to make arrangements to move in with my father and his new wife at the soonest possible date. I was being released from my mother's sprawling [...]
A favorite phrase of my mother’s, those early days in Brooklyn, was “See you later, Alligator.” She would send my brother Wally to play with his friend next door. And she would leave me with Fanny, the so-called cleaning lady, a monolithic black woman who took perverse pleasure in threatening to scrub my mouth with Joy. When I complained about [...]
In 1949 I arrived, aged seven, at the threshold of P.S. 26 in Fresh Meadows (Queens), and saw there, graven in the imposing door frame above, the words: Rufus King Public School. Who, I wondered, was Rufus King? It was quite likely my first historical query, though I wouldn't have been able to conceptualize what I was experiencing in that [...]
So such of my life then was seasonal. As kids we had yo-yos, marbles, water pistols, pea shooters and box scooters, and appeared in the street with whatever the change of weather called for. Now it was carpet gun time. I was the best carpet gun maker on the block -- in the whole neighborhood -- except maybe for Frank [...]
I was born in a moviehouse in Brooklyn, New York in the middle of the 20th century. I can swear only to the Brooklyn and 20th century parts. But whatever hospital records say, the moviehouse part seems equally likely because I grew up with all the common symptoms of placental exposure to such places. That is to say, I was [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
There are few retail establishments in New York that try as hard not to be noticed as Gallagher's Magazine Archive and Gallery at 126 East 12th Street. A sign the size of a Post-it announces the store's presence and directs one down a flight of stairs to the basement entrance. Stepping inside reveals a dim labyrinth of hallways and tiny [...]
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