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You are currently browsing stories tagged with Redeeming the Inanimate
Scaffolding
by Thomas Beller 04/18/2013Neighborhood: 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 Alba Brunetti 04/01/2013Neighborhood: 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 Linda Umans 01/15/2013Neighborhood: 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 Christina Maile 01/07/2013Neighborhood: 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 Kevin Kinsella 12/04/2012Neighborhood: 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 Sara Lippmann 10/23/2012Neighborhood: 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 Thomas R. Pryor 10/21/2012Neighborhood: 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 Zola Acker 10/10/2012Neighborhood: 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 Elizabeth Farkas 08/22/2012Neighborhood: 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 Sam DeFazio 07/26/2012Neighborhood: 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 Chris Pomorski 05/10/2012Neighborhood: 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 Nicholas Soodik 08/02/2011Neighborhood: 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 […]