Category Archives: semi-fiction

QUEEN OF THE PLAZA by Peter Nolan Smith

March 17, 2022 – 7:46 am

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 […]

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George, Washington 1972

February 21, 2022 – 6:08 pm

Back in late August 1972 my college friend Ptrov Sinski and I hitchhiked west from Seattle. A rancher left us off at exit 149, serving George, Washington, a small farming community surrounded by endless fields of ripening wheat. The two of us ignored the sign forbidding hitchhiking, but within ten minutes a Highway Patrol car […]

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KOSHER CHINESE FOOD by Peter Nolan Smith

February 15, 2022 – 5:24 pm

After Valentine’s Day business on 47th Street slowed to a halt. The rich were vacationing in St. Barts and Palm Beach. Oil bills bled normal New Yorkers to the bone and purchasing a diamond was the last thing on most people’s mind in a bad economy during the harshest winter in modern memory. Hlove the […]

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

February 14, 2022 – 4:18 am

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 […]

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HAPPY HEARTS by Peter Nolan Smith

February 14, 2022 – 1:30 am

Every Valentine’s Day diamond dealers and jewelers on 47th Street anticipate a mid-winter spending spree by lovers for their loved ones, yet year after year sales numbers have fallen by double-digits, as the economic downturn cut into the income of the middle-class. Diamonds might be a girl’s best friend, but not this year. Yesterday the […]

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