You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Old New York.”
Right up until the time men started to stop wearing hats, the city was woven together by a network of pneumatic tubes that connected post offices and major buildings. A letter took seven minutes to go from Manhattan's 32nd Street to downtown Brooklyn through this Pneumatic Tube System, or PTS. Making use of the city's subterranean foundations, the tubes ran [...]
In the spring of 1902, the lawman swung down from the train. He was nearly fifty and a trifle stocky now. But he had worked for Wyatt Earp and known Doc Holliday, he had upheld the law in Dodge City and kept the peace in Tombstone. His shooting hand had lost none of its cunning, the .45 still swung on [...]
Every year on March 30th, Brooke Astor’s birthday, I think about the time I killed her. Here is how it happened: In 2000, Brooke Astor kindly lent her name to the Gotham Center for New York City History. Mike Wallace (the historian, not the reporter) was starting up a center at the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate New York City [...]
I should have made a film about my landlords. A documentary. A document. It would have started in darkness. You’d hear an odd skrik...skrik...skrik. Fade in on the inside of a window; zoom close to peer down into a backyard. A man pushes a hand mower across a tiny lawn. Words appear: Brooklyn. 1990s. The man hitches up his pants, [...]
It didn’t matter that I had been awarded scholarships to three universities – my parents needed money to send to their families in war-torn West Germany and Austria. The last day of high school coincided with the start of work in the mailroom at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, the next day. “You’re a smart kid. You can go to [...]
It was 1969 and cats were everywhere in Morningside Heights. Multitudes of feral alley prowlers, storefront dozers, and the gray cat who was allowed to sit in the open, unscreened window of the fourth floor apartment across the street. He was always reaching toward pigeons with a wistful paw, even though the pigeons were never anywhere close. Whenever I returned [...]
Melting orange popsicles, dripping ice cream cones, slushy cherry ices and candy all day long--all reminders of lazy summer days spent growing up in Harlem. A day that began for me not long after dawn. Peering out of my living room window, I see that the Harlem world is just beginning to stir, but I am wide awake and bursting [...]
The garden in Riverside Park is fragrant and full of kids playing, but only several hundred yards away Grant's Tomb maintains its atmosphere of austerity and stillness. The sign on the plaza outside the Tomb, under the sycamores, reads NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. And immediately one thinks of whiskey and of the General in his Union-blue private's coat and of the [...]
Having finished the Blue-plate Special And reached the coffee stage, Stirring her cup she sat, A somewhat shapeless figure Of indeterminate age In an undistinguished hat. When she lifted her eyes it was plain That our globular furore, Our international rout Of sin and apparatus And dying men galore, Was not being bothered about. Which of the seven heavens Was [...]
Every day when I come home from a very hard day of school, I walk up the gray stone steps of my old dusty yellow house. And every day there this old lady with a large housedress and old decayed leather slippers is sitting at the top of the steps. She is always sitting in the same spot, nothing budging [...]
The name: Stillman's Gym still is magical to old ring veterans--rapidly vanishing--but it's mostly just a revered icon like Jack Johnson or Boyle's Half-Acre that fight purists have read about in an old issue of Ring Magazine or on the internet in vintage columns of Dan Parker and Jimmy Cannon. For me, Stillman's isn't like talking about Benny Leonard or [...]
We were natives. We were cool, urban sophisticates who would never admit to being otherwise. If anyone asked, we were from New York City, even though we’d been raised in the suburban sprawl—my cousin was from Jersey and I was from the Island. He and I had legitimized ourselves as New Yorkers by boasting we’d never been to any tourist [...]
Along about now, dozens of shaggy guys prowl the streets of New York, looking for a new barber, wondering where and from whose hands their next haircut and a shave are going to come now that the State Barber Shop has closed and Giorgio Campli retired. George left for Italy a few weeks back. There, he’ll live off his social [...]
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 [...]
Sal: "You want it short?" I needed a barber not a stylist, in a barbershop not a salon, owned and operated by one man, not a local franchise of a national chain, who would cut my hair, not tag my head like some graffiti artist. I wanted a barber. "I know what you need," my friend Nick said as he [...]
I like food, and I like books, but I'm not that into books about food. So when a friend of mine suggested we visit a great new store that sold old cookbooks, I was reluctant. Eventually, though, I got curious about the woman I saw sitting behind a busy desk in the window of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, and went in. [...]
On Saturday, August 6, 1988, I was possibly even more abstracted than usual, because it was well nigh midnight before I realized that I had neglected to eat dinner, and that the refrigerator contained nothing but half a jar of horseradish. So I set out for a greasy spoon on Second Avenue, in the heart of the sidewalk market district [...]
It never occurred to me that Norman would chicken out and become a stool pigeon. He was aggressive, a good athlete, a gambler, (for baseball cards and streetcar transfers), a veteran explorer of our neighborhood and Crotona Park. He was a very persuasive talker, a take-over guy and besides, he loved banana and mustard sandwiches. It was his idea that [...]
In 1969 I took some time out from New York to slow down and try to patch it up with my husband, Lee. I called him in New Mexico and he sent me a ticket to Albuquerque. The last time I had seen Lee he was scuttling down Macdougal St. glowering over his shoulder and lugging a pillowcase full of [...]
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