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New Beginnings

by 02/18/2023
Neighborhood: Meatpacking District

“Careful with that!” I exclaimed to my new husband, Harry, as he carried my Art Deco stained glass window up the stairs to our new apartment. I had gotten the window, a gift from my parents, when I married Harry in 1967. We were both so excited to move into an apartment over a diner […]

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 […]

Cocaine in the City

by 12/05/2021
Neighborhood: West Village

I first tried cocaine off of a chessboard, while listening to Lou Reed in my West Village studio apartment with a girl named after the Central American country in which she was conceived. I remember thinking that for brief moments life really could be a movie if you made it one. The girl and I […]

The Life and Times of Ricky Powell

by 02/14/2021
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

I was scrolling through Twitter after midnight a couple of weeks ago when I read that the photographer and New York personality Ricky Powell had died. The news hit me because as kids we’d spent a lot of time together at the 14th Street Y in afterschool programs. Biddy Basketball and Sportsman’s Clinic, and the […]

Nostalgia for the Norm

by 05/10/2020
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

Observations in the Vale and Vector of the Virus It’s late. And again, I survey the silence, inverting wakefulness and sleep. Again, in place of dreaming, I listen to the refrigerator humming. The construction site that had been growing like a giant metal bean stalk outside my window, down the block, has suspended activity, its […]

Viva La Vita

by 01/16/2014
Neighborhood: West Village

For a frustrating period of several months, my roommate decided on a daily basis if she was vegan or not. Her daily choice depended on a combination of the selection of food in our ragtag dorm room refrigerator, and the strength of whatever moral tug she felt on any given day. And so, it was […]

Where East Village Meets West

by 01/18/2011
Neighborhood: East Harlem, East Village, West Village

Where East Village Meets West Village I’ve spent the last ten years of my life in the East Village of Manhattan, movin’ on up Avenue B. Quite literally: I first lived at 4th and B, then briefly moved to 6th between B and C, ending up on 13th and B. I lived in a shoebox […]