You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Subway.”
I took the train to school alone. My Brooklyn friends didn’t live along the 2 or 3 lines, plus I’m somewhat hostile within the first hour of waking up. The commute was like a prolonged orchestral swell. The first leg of my trip, sprawled across a few of those '70s sunset-toned seats, the sounds of the subway – muted by [...]
If you want to call me a cool kid, please do. You see, back in 1975 when I was seven years old , I visited Tribeca for the first time…with my mom and dad. We didn’t go to the Mudd Club or Artists Space or anything like that; instead we went to a factory just south of Canal Street. One Saturday [...]
At the Prospect Park station, I sit across from a Hasidic couple on a three-seater bench on the Q train. Parallel to them, in a wheel-locked stroller, is a toddler with unshorn blonde hair, dark eyes that reflect no light, and a suckling baby mouth. He has been dressed in a Canadian tuxedo of many layers: a miniature pair of [...]
72nd Street subway station 2001 How many years since “needle park”? In the late 60’s, in the evening on the way to the 72nd St and Broadway subway station, I would make my pass through the park and see junkies nodding out and discarded needles on the pavement. The underbelly of con artists, thieves, prostitutes, and addicts, all lurking in the [...]
“So, when you’re not here at Barney Greengrass serving smoked fish, you’re a writer, eh? That’s interesting. Interesting. We should talk. I have a big idea. We’ve got to talk, yeah.” These weren’t the first words Dr. Jonathan Zizmor had ever spoken to me, but they marked a transition in our relationship from my simply being his server to something [...]
Cars and Crimes and Trains My wife (we weren’t yet married at the time) had a fairly new ’81 Toyota Starlet stolen in Brooklyn. We took a city bus to the police precinct to report it stolen (no over the phone reports back in those days). Halfway there, we insisted that the driver stop the bus, because there on the [...]
I lived in Manhattan for most of my considerably long life, until moving to Queens four years ago. In my early adulthood, Manhattan was still affordable, so affordable that the people who worked the jobs that sustain city life—cops, teachers, garbage men, hospital and transit workers—could afford to live in certain areas of it. So could a 20-year old, who [...]
Before the interwebs, it required more ingenuity to get noticed. That’s why I conjured up my “underground poet” scheme in the early 90s. I was already a published poet by then, and at a huge art show at the Javits Center two of my framed one-liners were purchased by a French art dealer. When he compared me to Marcel Duchamp, [...]
Illustrations by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman __________________________ A contemporary take on the medieval bestiary, featuring the actual and apocryphal creatures that share our constricted urban space. The following is the first installment in a series of observations on urban fauna, text and image gleaned from the lifelong perambulations on asphalt and cement by two native New Yorkers, a father-daughter team, author [...]
One afternoon this summer I was on the subway. All was normal. Well, except that we are in a pandemic, which makes venturing down into NYC’s netherworld -- one with poor ventilation and tons of non-mask wearers – feel like I am putting my life in my overly sanitized hands. It all seemed surreal. The recent crime surge in New [...]
It was not so long ago that I would ordinarily drive into Manhattan from my home in Park Slope. However, I had a rule that I wouldn’t take my car to anywhere above 23rd Street. About five years ago, because of an increase in traffic, I moved my boundary to 14th Street. But recently, things have gotten so out of [...]
Flushing Ave. on the M The train stops and the doors open, except one door panel is cut out (locked closed, to prevent it from opening). A tall, skinny, black dude on the platform tries to board the train and, wham! He walks right into the closed panel. He steps back and catches his breath. "Whoa...," just like Keanu Reeves in "Bill [...]
On the evening of April 17, I was waiting for the train like always, far enough away from the edge—standing sideways to brace myself from that wildebeest who might push me onto the tracks. I waited and looked for the train to arrive, as if staring would make it come faster. It never works. We all do it. Like pressing [...]
We are driving in from the country, out where we go to school, a little town in a valley and a school on the hill. We come in from the west, over the Bridge with the sun sliding around the tip of lower Manhattan, mocking the Lady’s little torch, basking in its own reflection off the river. It’s autumn, an [...]
