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Hell’s Kitchen and All That Jazz
by Sharon Watts 04/09/2015Neighborhood: Hell's Kitchen
I was dropped off in Hell’s Kitchen with my turquoise vinyl trunk, my art school scholarship, and the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy sensurrounding my dreams. Everybody’s talking at me I don’t hear a word they’re saying Only the echoes of my mind I was eighteen, and ready for the 1970s. On my own. My stepfather-to-be […]
I Remember I Forget, And Why
by Wayne Conti 02/18/2015Neighborhood: West Village
I’ve lived in the neighborhood practically forever, but to my girlfriend it’s all new. She’s always making some new discovery. Once she came home with a small box of Japanese chocolate wrapped inside a perfect silver bag and with a sleek packet of dry ice. I asked her where it came from and she told […]
There Will Be Blood
by Thomas R. Pryor 04/23/2014Neighborhood: Yorkville
At 16, my dream job was working behind the deli counter at Daitch Shopwell. As a stock boy this would be a coup. Watching Milton or Marty cut thin slices of rare roast beef and Jarlsberg Swiss, I cried with pain. Pain that some son of a bitch was going to eat that tasty mound […]
Last Night at Mrs. C’s
by Jacob Margolies 04/16/2014Neighborhood: East Village
When we were kids, starting at about 15-years old, there was a bar we’d frequent on Fifth Street east of Avenue A, just past the Con Edison substation. It was called the Chic Choc, but we knew it either as Chic’s or Mrs. C’s. Customers addressed the woman behind the bar who owned the place […]
An Education on Avenue B
by Jacob Margolies 03/23/2014Neighborhood: East Village
In 1971, when I was 11 years old, my world was turned upside down when my parents decided to send me to a Jewish Day School on the Lower East Side. From grades 1 to 5, I’d gone to the Downtown Community School, or DCS as it was called, on East 11th Street. It […]
Sliced Tomatoes
by Joseph Scalia 03/16/2014Neighborhood: Boro Park
In the Jewish neighborhoods he was “Morris, the Maven of Tomatoes.” The orthodox women hardly talked to him, except to call out their orders in Yiddish, enough of which he understood, or to haggle about his high prices or to complain about the accuracy of the scale that hung from the side of his wagon. […]
The Laughter of the Maestro
by peter nolan smith 03/09/2014Neighborhood: Fort Greene
Last week I was walking home through a snowstorm. Turning the corner toward Fulton I called Cecil Taylor, who lived in the last unrenovated brownstone on that street. We knew each other from back in the 70s. The jazz pianist’s manager James Spicer had been a mutual friend, until the silver-haired impresario ripped off my […]
Good Humor
by Jacob Margolies 12/06/2013Neighborhood: Bowery, East Village, Lower East Side
The week before my high school graduation, I wandered into the Good Humor ice cream garage on East 3rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, just a block from my apartment. I was looking for a summer job. A friend of the family, a college kid named Keith, was working the books there, and he […]
Katya
by Eliza Berman 08/09/2013Neighborhood: East Village
Yellow police tape stretched across the doorframe of Apartment 5. I had walked past this door every day for the last two years, past its tortured wood, pockmarked like the cigarette-burned arms of its inhabitant. The door was so battered, a neighbor told me, from all the times Katya’s parents threw her out and all […]
Red Socks
by Debbie Nathan 07/28/2013Neighborhood: Midwood, Sheepshead Bay
Ran into my neighbor Traubman, a regular Gary Shteyngart except much older, on the sidewalk outside our apartment building near Kings Highway, while headed to the B train to Manhattan and wondering how bad my sciatica would be that day. “Where’ve you been, I’ve been thinking about you,” Traubman said. He was wearing shorts, scratching […]
Below 14th
by Jacob Margolies 05/30/2013Neighborhood: East Village, Lower East Side
In the summer of 1984, I sublet an apartment on East 3rd Street between Avenue A and B, about one hundred yards from the building in which I had spent the first 18 years of my life. I’d been away for six years—the first four at a small college in the midwest followed by two […]
Body English
by Tom Diriwachter 05/25/2013Neighborhood: Clifton, Staten Island
In the summer of ’77, I met Mark Roth in Pathmark on Hylan Boulevard. Heading home from a Sunday drive, my parents stopped to pick up groceries for dinner, and waiting in the Express Lane, he got behind us with a bottle of Mott’s Apple Juice. I was sure it was him, but then, what […]