Features

Walking down Greenwich Street recently, I came upon a sight that chilled my West Villager’s heart: a giant For Rent sign in the main window of Garber’s hardware at 710 Greenwich and Charles Streets. It’s a store I have relied on ever since I moved to the neighborhood in the 80s, with particularly heavy patronage […]

A few days after the January snowstorm, I started to get cabin fever. I couldn’t believe I was actually looking forward to having lunch at the senior center in my building. That’s how limited my life had become. It had been five years since we had a foot of snow in New York City, then

The first book I ever bought that was written by someone I knew was a French memoir called Frany, one of those nifty European paperbacks whose cover folds inward to serve as a bookmark. The author was my theater professor when I was lucky enough to do a junior semester in Paris, a gentle, roly-poly

Hanging on the walls of T.J. Byrnes are a couple of funny little plaques, one entitled “A Mother’s Letter,” and the other, “An Irish Tribute.” But don’t ask Tommy Byrnes for an Irish joke (as I did). He claims not to know any. It’s not that the owner of T.J. Byrnes isn’t friendly or doesn’t

For this month’s “Coffee Corner,” I spoke to Paulina Stachnik, who runs Madman Espresso & Bakery on 332 Bleecker St. Madman opened its doors in 2012, and currently have nine locations in Midtown and lower Manhattan. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. What about New York City makes running a coffee business

On Friday afternoons, the community room at Westbeth artist building performs a small act of defiance. The room itself is not terribly remarkable: a low ceiling, a row of stackable chairs, the linoleum has the matte tiredness of civic space. Nothing about the room announces transcendence, except maybe the grand piano. By a quarter past

My husband and I went to Boston for the weekend for a friend’s surprise birthday party. I used to go to Boston for the weekend all the time when I was in my teens and 20s. What a strong pull it exerted then: all those smart students swarming the umpteen colleges, including my sister at

  “It was so romantic,” my best friend Jennifer said, “the way he’d walk you home after he made you dinner.” Yes, and after I put my key in the door of my beach bungalow, Ian would sweetly hug me and say, “I love you.” I’d tell him the same. I was so happy when

I lived on the Lower East Side in the 1990s. The neighborhood was very different then. There were still vacant lots and crumbling brick buildings. Every morning at dawn, I’d hear a rooster. My boyfriend and I lived in a studio near Avenue C. An old man lived below us, and when his son would

The cold hurt my bare fingers and my phone was almost dead, making me loath to double-check the directions on Google Maps. I arrived at what I thought was my destination, but instead found HiLot, a fancy cocktail bar that requires you to ring a doorbell to be let in. Confused, I tried the bell