Author Archives: Ben
BUYING THE PREQUEL(Call Me Daddy: Babes and Bathos in Edward West Browning’s Jazz-Age New York)::::TO MY NEWEST BOOK THE DENTIST SHEIK: USE ONLY THIS LINK: (all others on Amazon are useless and being deleted): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D7N28WPK?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520
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THE END OF HIS ROAD
In my essay on this website entitled “All That Remains,” https://newyorkwanderer.com/abandoned-to-die/ I recounted a four year search to locate the rightful owner of a canvas-covered GI notebook from World War II (and earlier), kept by Eugene Arnold F. Denton and packed with personal memorabilia. It was found in a trash barrel on Bushwick Avenue in […]
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Channeling Henry Roth
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The factual details of Henry Roth’s life are taken from Steven Kellman’s masterful biography of Roth (Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth; W.W. Norton & Co., New York: 2005) as well as the four volumes of Roth’s autobiographical novel “Mercy of a Rude Stream” and his posthumously published last such novel, “Shifting Landscape.” My […]
William Braude’s Paduana 18….
Every morning this gorgeous paduana starts off my day and keeps me going. Try it out and be blessed…
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FULL CIRCLE
It was June 1st, 1971: still 18 years old, I’d signed a lease with no guarantors for a four room tenement apartment at 505 West 122nd Street, complete with mice and roaches just off heroin-ridden Amsterdam Avenue. Dormitory life was not for me at Columbia College, where I’d matriculated almost two years before. I had […]
Making Moxie from Misery With a Pit Stop in Between
Here at the northeast corner of 36th Street and 7th Avenue, the massive structure at 485 Seventh Avenue is undergoing yet another transformation, and a sorry one at that. The entablatured M (see below) memorializes a benevolent history, one that slowly deteriorated after War II, and then sank into the swamps of capitalistic greed and […]
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Among the Stones
My friend Russell shares my taste for all things historical, but he’s a hard man to visit, in the recent past working two jobs to pay the rent. Notwithstanding the pressures of his life, his brain remains as big and always open as a barn door. A complicated relationship he has, with memory and honor, […]
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A SAD GOODBYE [First published in The New Partisan 2006]
After a years-long adieu, the last major food exchange in lower Manhattan disappeared. some 11 years ago. The Fulton Fish Market is no more, moved lock, stock and barrel to a barren industrial park in the East Bronx. A site that nourished our souls for generations has vanished. The loss in incalculable. No longer […]
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Oradour-sur-Glane
Visits with my younger daughter who lives in France are fewer than I would prefer: once or, if I am lucky, twice a year. We plan our time together when I arrive serendipitously, choosing local sites, repairing things in her house side-by-side, doing laundry, cooking together and enjoying a normal and pleasant adult relationship. But […]
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Picking a Beautiful Bronx Mansion’s Lock
[Acknowledgement: The author graciously acknowledges being introduced to the Keil Mansion described below by Frances Stern, some many years ago.] On a chilly November morning I knocked on the door of 381 East 165th Street in the Bronx, a short walk from the busy, modern stretch of the Bronx Judicial Center complex on 161st Street, […]
