You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Ridgewood.”
From 1964 to 1974, I lived in a brown-bricked apartment building near the corner of Palmetto Street and Cypress Avenue in Ridgewood, New York. The Mathews Brothers built 650 of these 6-unit buildings, sometimes known as Mathews Flats, early in the 20th century. I lived with my brother and sister and our parents on the second floor of a five-room [...]
The atmosphere seemed different coming home. You could feel it stepping off the train. A March chill penetrated our light jackets, and we caught ourselves shivering. Off to the west, fog obscured Manhattan’s glow. The empty subway cars clattered away, headed for the end of the line; oddly, we’d been the only riders in ours since the Williamsburg Bridge. When [...]
A cemetery was never a place I imagined myself doing squats. But in late March, when New York City shut down gyms and public parks and braced itself for a deadly COVID-19 outbreak, I found myself at the gates of Evergreens Cemetery in Queens, sporting black leggings and a pink hoodie, ready to sweat. Like many New Yorkers, I had [...]
“Okay, so now whatta my gone do? Phone won’t charge. Can’t read another word. Thirteen hours sleep. Chocolate’s gone. Weed guy disappeared. Seen everything on Netflix—twice! Corona’s a stone bitch, is what it is.” Sound familiar—maybe one or two nouns changed? It’s the plague—Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Neville Shute’s On The Beach. All of [...]
I blame Basquiat. He’s where my whole Trump grave fixation started, unlikely as that sounds. It was right after the holidays—January 2, 2018, to be exact (It’s nice of iPhones to keep track of photo dates isn’t it?)—that Carolyn and I first went to Green-Wood Cemetery. Generally we were there to explore: ostentatious tombs, towering magnolias—you know the whole Emily [...]
