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Underground Analysis
by Dan Baum 02/08/2016Neighborhood: All Over
On the subway Thursday morning, a man sat beside me, with his wife or girlfriend (no ring) standing over him. He was about 35, with long wavy hair pulled into pony tail, and a scraggly beard — kind of a 21st-century beatnik look. She was done up like a character from My Cousin Vinny — […]
Hell’s Kitchen and All That Jazz
by Sharon Watts 04/09/2015Neighborhood: Hell's Kitchen
I was dropped off in Hell’s Kitchen with my turquoise vinyl trunk, my art school scholarship, and the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy sensurrounding my dreams. Everybody’s talking at me I don’t hear a word they’re saying Only the echoes of my mind I was eighteen, and ready for the 1970s. On my own. My stepfather-to-be […]
Wild Thing
by Elizabeth Cohen 03/11/2015Neighborhood: Upper West Side
I was walking down Broadway near Lincoln Center at noon on a Thursday afternoon in May with my old friend Ruth Lopez when we came upon two people on the sidewalk, doing it. It was daytime, it was close to lunch even, and yet there they were in flagrante dilecto. The man was on top […]
Scented
by Melissa Bouganim 08/26/2014Neighborhood: Financial District, Manhattan
I’m not the girl who woke up from another one-night-stand. But I could be, in the view from the Sephora window. It’s raining: The dull Saturday too-early morning pitter-patters against the makeup counters; my nerves, pounding on the exposed brick. I feel like a quasi-well-dressed spy. Partly because “quasi” is the word that won me […]
I Just Want to Stay In and Get High and Watch Netflix
by Alexandra Wuest 07/20/2014Neighborhood: Bushwick
I was not where I wanted to be. This was because I was out. I was out at a bar called the Narrows in Bushwick–or East Williamsburg if you’re a real estate broker. The bar is called the Narrows because the building is very narrow. But really every building in New York City is narrow. […]
Kant’s (Revised) Critique of Judgement
by Kaila Allison 05/16/2014Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
I’m quite sure I could have killed the whole lot of them. I’ve drawn too many skull and crossbones on the margins of my handouts. It’s difficult for me to concentrate on the enthralling discourse on Lacan because I am too disturbed by that Babushka girl and her heinous turtle-neck (not artistic, just embarrassing). Does […]
Vesuvius Ave.
by Samuel Howard 05/08/2014Neighborhood: All Over, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island
May and the city rejoices in spring, in light and color, in the sheer goodness of life and its improvements. Spring shows us that things do indeed get better; it’s not all decline — old buildings sparkle, trees quiver in green, mundane streets are remade as pageants. However, let’s not get carried away. Sure, it’s […]
Old Brownie
by peter nolan smith 02/09/2014Neighborhood: Midtown
Yesterday was a quiet day on 47th Street. A winter snow was having its way with New York City. Snow piled up on the street. The porters had a hard time clearing the sidewalk and I was having difficulty looking busy. There was nothing to do. No one came into the store. No dealers, no […]
No Slices
by Jaime Mishkin 02/04/2014Neighborhood: DUMBO, Union Square
Pizza had been on my mind that summer. Who could forget the ever-present sensation of melting? Our skin like sweating cheese, like crusts toasted to a golden brown. We stank, all of us — the garlic you had for lunch, everyone could smell it in the subway car, hiding behind a juicy fragrance. Even nature […]
After the Graveyard Shift
by Coree Spencer 01/28/2014Neighborhood: East Village
Always wear a bag on your head if you don’t want people to bother you. I figure this out in 1989 while I’m working the midnight to 5am waitressing shift at 7A Cafe in the East Village. It is right across the street from Tompkins Square Park during the height of the riots. The park […]
My Neighbor Cries a Chain Link Fence
by Abigail Frankfurt 12/31/2013Neighborhood: Astoria
To the young beautiful woman with tears in her eyes who lives above me: now I know why you run in the apartment for hours backandforth backandforth. I know why you don’t talk in the hallway. I know because the building is old and my ceiling is thin. I heard the furniture thunder last night […]
Fighting For What
by peter nolan smith 07/01/2013Neighborhood: Bowery
Everything happened quick in CBGB’s subterranean toilets. The release of body waste was rivaled by magic-markering a band’s name atop the thousands of previous honorees in the toilet’s hall of fame and while the inhalation of cocaine or heroin in the stalls was more popular than shooting up dope or speedballs, sex within the battered […]