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Washington Square, A Place Apart

by 12/03/2022
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village

On January 23, 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan, poet Gertrude Dick, and three actors from the Provincetown Playhouse broke into a hidden spiral staircase in the Washington Square Arch and ascended to the summit. They dangled Chinese lanterns and red balloons, fired off toy cap pistols, and galivanted until dawn, whereupon, with Bohemian […]

Dead Weight

by 10/14/2022
Neighborhood: East Village, Greenwich Village

When I was a teenager, during the second half of the 1970s, I pretty much lived in Washington Square Park during the summer. I sometimes joke that in some ways I was raised there. In some ways that is not so funny. Yippies, Jesus Freaks, drug addicts, tourists, and street performers were my friends and […]

Selected Observations on Urban Fauna

by 05/15/2022
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Manhattan

Insects The following is a contemporary take on the medieval bestiary, featuring descriptions and characterizations of the actual and apocryphal creatures that share our constricted urban space. This second installment is devoted to insects. Stomped, smoked out, asphyxiated, and trampled underfoot, they elicit a degree of fear and disgust disproportionate to their size. Quietly going […]

One Wheel, Two Towers

by 08/19/2018
Neighborhood: Lower East Side, World Trade Center

  They say everything happens for a reason. Construction began on the World Trade Center in August of 1968. Some months before that when I was in the second grade, our teacher, Miss Spellman, handed out a Weekly Reader, an eight-page magazine with short articles designed to encourage the habit of reading in elementary school […]

Washington Square Park

by 01/26/2014
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

I have a friend. For the purposes of this story, let’s call him Monte. When I was a kid there were lots of guys in the neighborhood named Monte. Now I don’t know anyone with that name. From the time he was 13, just after his bar mitzvah when he first had a few bucks […]