Category Archives: NEW YORK

October 18, 1978 – Journal Entry – East Village

Alice’s trip to West Virginia was five days long. She returned Tuesday morning fifteen minutes before I went to work as a waiter in the Ventron Executive Dining Room off Wall Street. Somehow she looked different and acted the same. It took a full day until Alice became the love of my life again, although […]

Snow in Spring NYC 2010

JoJo, the security guard at the diamond exchange, was a betting man. He gambled the left-overs from his monthly NYPD pension on baseball, basketball, and football. His losses outweighed his wins. JoJo also wagered on odd parlays and on March 1st in 2010 I said that there wouldn’t be another snowstorm. Two days ago the […]

QUEEN OF THE PLAZA March 17 2009

St. Patrick’s Day promised to be another disaster for the Retail Collection of the Plaza Hotel. Hordes of green-clad spectators streamed down the escalator into the basement. Their eyes averted the luxury goods on offer, as their destination was the hotel’s public bathroom. Within the first hour I had given directions to the toilet over […]

St. Valentine’s Day Massacre / BET ON CRAZY by Peter Nolan Smith

Every Valentine’s Day diamond dealers and jewelers on 47th Street anticipated a winter spending spree by lovers for their loved ones, but each year of the 21st Century the sales numbers dropped drastically, as the economic downturn cut into everyone’s surplus, but the rich. Valentine afternoon in February 2011 shoppers crammed the chocolatiers along 5th […]

The Genius Of Bertell Ollman

I’ve just gotten a job cataloguing the 10,0000-volume library of Professor Bertell Ollman, renowned Marxist scholar. The eighty-nine old has just retired from NYU. His loving son, Raoul Ollman has asked me to going through the books. I’m adapting the Evelyn Woods method of speed reading to the task. Search each book for a meaningful […]