Features

Once I stood on a rock in Manhattan’s night with everything to come and death out of sight, listening to the terrifying music of Venus in Furs, the biting satire of William Burroughs reading “Thanksgiving Prayer” to 10,000,000 people on T.V. And I recall Muhammad Ali asking me, “To take my message to the white

I love autumn in New York; it always seems like a time to reset. Time to look forward and backward. As I celebrate almost 30 years in the West Village, I decided to look back on my 22 years in the East Village. I lived there from 1975 to 1997, a pivotal time period. With

There is a lot of focus these days on health and wellness. Many people are realizing that if they take better care of themselves, they can be a better colleague, friend, parent, sister, brother, etc… One of the ways that people are taking care of themselves more so is to look at skin care and

My husband and I have long lived in a converted early 20th-century cold-storage warehouse in the Far West Village. When we arrived in 1989, less than a decade after the residential conversion, our super told us the building once stored spices. It’s a charming idea, seeing as how Nabisco used to have multiple factories in

We Villagers have been watching our bohemian neighborhood character leach away for a very long time, but we remain blessed with movie theaters. It’s true that many are just a memory (the Art Greenwich Twin, Bleecker Street Cinema, two theaters on Eighth Street, Theater 80 St. Marks, the Landmark Sunshine), but we are still richer

Would two inches really make a difference? No, I wasn’t taking a sex quiz. I was buying a new beach chair. After my first trip to the Jersey Shore this June, I had to admit I could no longer get up from my sand chair without a struggle. Another sign of getting older.  My neighbor

In 1968, a friend of Dr. Alec Pruchnicki returned from study abroad with a revelation: in Italy, healthcare doesn’t require insurance. “They don’t ask how you’re going to pay”, Pruchnicki’s friend told him, “they just take care of you.” That moment inspired Pruchnicki’s decades-long advocacy to bring that very system to the United States. Last

I was a Person of the Village many years ago, when graffiti slathered the subways, fires devoured the Bronx, doggy doo marbled the streets, and a weirdo named Son of Sam ran around killing people, and the city was “broke as a fish,” as my grandfather used to say. But people were connected, they talked

At six in the morning, long after last call, Daniel Root is most at home. The dive bars and restaurants are closed and empty and no one is there to notice he’s taking photographs. Even if someone did, they wouldn’t care. Root drifts around the Village, and when something reveals itself, he photographs it. This