You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Upper West Side.”
The year was 1950. I was five years old. There was barely room for my mother, much less me, when we moved into my grandmother’s small, crowded apartment on the 9th floor in the Ansonia Hotel on 74th Street and Broadway, where my mother had lived before marrying my father. When she and my grandmother moved after my grandfather’s death, [...]
Mid-morning, I set out for a short walk—ten blocks, twice a day, prescribed for my aging heart and arthritic body. I clear the lobby and make my entrance on to 106th Street. I’m ready to start my hike to health, ready to laugh—or at least snicker—in the face of mortality. I take my first step, then pause, thinking, why push [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Last January, days before I was due to return to New Orleans from New York, a fire broke out in my parents’ apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I had come to the city in the midst of the pandemic to repopulate my life, albeit temporarily: the first week belonged to my then-girlfriend, the second to my [...]
Out early yesterday morning after the big snowfall. The streets are being cleared. God, it’s been years since I did any of that.Now I have no car to dig out, no store to clear the street for; nothing special to worry about (save for not slipping on the ice and cracking my old bones). In my neighborhood there are a [...]
