Where Am I?

You are currently browsing stories tagged with Redeeming the Inanimate

Scaffolding

by 04/18/2013
Neighborhood: Financial District

Once upon a time, when I was a teenager working as a bike messenger, I would stop midway across Central Park, somewhere along the North side of the Great Lawn, and take a break to regard the skyline along the park’s southern edge. I was always hoping to see signs of new construction. This would […]

Of Love and Real Estate

by 04/01/2013
Neighborhood: Park Slope, Prospect Park, Windsor Terrace

Breaking up is hard. That’s true even if you’ve been thinking about it a long time – weighing the scales back and forth. Am I better staying in this thing or am I better getting out? Sometimes it can go on for years, like it did for me. Because parts of it were perfect and […]

I Know The Way To Brooklyn

by 01/15/2013
Neighborhood: Prospect Heights

I went to the Bob Dylan concert at the Barclay’s Center around Thanksgiving. We are contemporaries. I love his recent work and I thought it was about time I went to one of his live performances. I got a ticket, took the subway from the Upper West Side to the newly-christened Atlantic Ave.-Barclays Center stop. […]

A Dark and Stormy Night

by 01/07/2013
Neighborhood: Uncategorized, West Village

Three days after a storm that could have easily been called Gidget or Bob in keeping with the unintended frivolity of its real name – Sandy, two people are sitting on a bench in a dark chaotic lobby of an artists’ residence on the west side of Manhattan. One, a sculptor, is waiting for her […]

Starry Night

by 12/04/2012
Neighborhood: Downtown Brooklyn

“If stars are lit…” – V. V. Mayakovsky Had the receptionist been Dante Alighieri, he might have strung a banner along the wall of the windowless waiting room advising visitors to “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But the person who pointed me in the direction of this circle of Hell was no Dante–nor […]

Crust, Mantle, Core

by 10/23/2012
Neighborhood: Bay Ridge

A sinkhole is threatening to swallow up 79th Street in Bay Ridge. Police, fire, city workers are on the scene. Supposedly, the sewers had something to do with it.“The beginning of the end,” laments a longstanding neighborhood resident on local TV. He is wearing a trucker hat and gold chain and undershirt. Behind him, elders […]

The Love Seat (A Ghost Story)

by 10/21/2012
Neighborhood: Yorkville

As a boy in the early 1960s, I’d go up my grandparents’ second floor apartment on York Avenue several times a week. Their hallway was lit by one low watt exposed bulb. The dark hall frightened me. Sometimes my fear was compounded when I’d hear fuzzy radio sounds coming from the usually locked basement. I […]

It’s Not A Cult

by 10/10/2012
Neighborhood: All Over, JFK/LGA, Letter From Abroad

“I have to get to New York” says the woman in front of me at the Portland, Oregon airport. “You don’t understand, I have to get there.” She repeats this urgently, in a slightly hysterical voice to a man in uniform behind a counter. I smile at her sympathetically. The flight to JFK has been […]

The Bed Story (Or Why I Never Sell on Craig’s List Anymore)

by 08/22/2012
Neighborhood: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights

Over the course of two years living in Brooklyn, I moved six times, including a failed attempt at cohabitation with my then boyfriend in what turned out to be an illegal sublet. The first thing I did when I moved into my second place, located in the West Indian section of Crown Heights was buy […]

The Liquor Store Bag In The Tree

by 07/26/2012
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

It’s been there for almost three years now. I first noticed it on a bleak January morning as the lifeless branches of the tree across the street from my front window swayed in a wintry wind. At first I thought it was a large bird. After all, raptors had been spotted down the block in […]

Old Enough To Die In Brooklyn: The Mortician’s Lament

by 05/10/2012
Neighborhood: Cobble Hill

When the previous resident of my apartment, who was still living in it when my girlfriend and I viewed it for the first time, told us that the funeral home downstairs hardly ever held services, the effect on me was less than palliative. Jenna nodded thoughtfully in the way real estate shoppers are prone, apparently […]

Trying On A House

by 08/02/2011
Neighborhood: All Over, Brooklyn

For the past several weekends, I’ve peeked through the homes of strangers when they weren’t there. I’ve tiptoed through brownstones, crept up the stairs of detached Victorians, and cased the backyards of garden unit condos. In Bay Ridge, I studied the diplomas that hung in a home office. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, I thumbed a […]