Like the mountains that labored and brought forth a mouse, the ongoing eruptions of charges against New York City officials for bribery, extortion, and racketeering over the past two years have brought forth two quips. The first belongs to Murray …
We beg delinquents for our life. Behind each bush, perhaps, a knife; each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub, hides a policeman with his club. —Robert Lowell, “Central Park” …the block is burning down on one side of the street, and …
Every place and time has a representative personality. For downtown New York in the period just ending—the New York of Soho and the East Village, middle 1980s—the representative personality is a certain type of bohemian, similar to other bohemians we …
I was born in New York City, and I have lived in or around it for a good part of my life. Some neighborhoods, although altered nearly beyond recognition, are still charged for me with the emotions of past events—at …
Nowhere is the meeting between pluralism and paranoia more apparent than on the subway. Despite all our high-minded rhetoric about the marvels of diversity, there is a wariness bordering on extreme caution when strangers are confronted with the dizzying mix …
The New Park Pizzeria in Howard Beach, Queens, is not a place you go to if you’re looking for trouble. It’s too small and too neat, and so close to Cross Bay Boulevard, the main street in Howard Beach, that …
I came to New York City in the fall of 1966, and began teaching in Central Harlem a few months later. Within the next two years the schools were embroiled in two strikes. Parents were organized and vocal; teachers believed …
I was doing some research at the Library of Congress, going through crime films of the 1940s for an article on that distinctive American genre, the film noir. This was still the era of the great studios, which could simulate …
Now in my illness I see something…And how it comes to me that I am a representation. The way I suspect that I’m not well represented. That I’m not well. This complaint was aired by the Mabou Mines theater collective …
I cannot give the precise date when I first met Ed Koch. Encountering this unassuming if enthusiastic man, I had no idea that he was going to play a major role in the political history of New York City. Koch …
New York’s economy is divided into three parts: upper, lower, and under. The first two—upper and lower—are old hat, retailored now to fit the service economy. The third—the underground economy—has moved from being a pest to being a pestilence. In …
Word has it that Machito, the father of Latin jazz who died in early 1984 at 75, was learning how to breakdance. The great Cuban bandleader, who since the 1940s had performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie …
Human nature didn’t change once Ed Koch became mayor of New York, but it soon began to display its shabbier sides. The mood of the city seemed to grow sullen, as if in contempt of earlier feelings and visions…. Quick …
Cities, like dreams,” Calvino tells us, “are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else” (Invisible Cities). Calvino is right, of course. …
Last March Dissent organized, under the leadership of editor Fred Siegel, a round-table discussion on the problems of New York, with emphasis on the possibilities of solutions. We print below a transcript, sharply reduced for reasons of space. The round …
