Category Archives: Uncategorized
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
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 […]
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 […]
Also posted in Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
William Braude’s Paduana 18….
Every morning this gorgeous paduana starts off my day and keeps me going. Try it out and be blessed…
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 […]
Also posted in Lost New York
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, […]
Also posted in Lost New York
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces
