I was in California on September 11, 2001. I was there for work in a hotel room getting ready to go to a conference the company I worked for was putting on. I heard someone pass by my hotel room door talking on a cell phone saying someone had flown a plane into the World… Read more »
New York City is such an intense and captivating force that New Yorkers must all leave their beloved Gotham from time to time for areas more peaceful and serene, places where the air is cooler and the pace of things slower. City life is an immense trade-off. We have the greatest art and culture in… Read more »
This past weekend, my wife upheld an 18-year tradition she has of working at the Super Saturday charity event to benefit ovarian cancer research. That left me to look after our three small children by myself. The weather forecast called for rain, so I took my three girls to the New York Hall of Science,… Read more »
This past weekend I went to a wedding that was held on a vegan farm animal sanctuary. The farm sanctuary is near Woodstock in upstate New York (“upstate” is technically anywhere in New York that is north of the five boroughs though people who live in Rochester or Niagara Falls might beg to differ—Albany might… Read more »
I moved back to New York City nearly 20 years ago. I packed all of my belongings into a small rented moving truck and drove north from the sprawl of suburban Atlanta to the sprawl of New York City. It was early November when I arrived at my mother’s house in suburban Briarcliff. The trees… Read more »
New York is a very walkable city. We have horrible traffic that makes driving regularly in the more densely populated parts of the city nearly impossible and a grossly imperfect but extensive mass transit system that makes owning a car in the city unnecessary. Walking the streets of Gotham is mostly a joy. But there… Read more »
Last week we had two days of spring weather in New York. This was less than two weeks after a snowstorm that had many office workers working from home. Over Presidents Day weekend, I was upstate at the Mohonk Mountain House on a family vacation. My father-in-law and I decided to try our hand at… Read more »
In 1895 anti-Semitic German politician Hermann Ahlwardt came to speak in New York City. Local Jews were very upset and there was political pressure on the police department not to provide Ahlwardt any protection. The police commissioner at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, made sure to provide the visiting speaker with an adequate police escort; he… Read more »
When I moved back to New York City as an adult in the late 1990s, the job that got me here was as an inspector for the Immigration and Naturalization Services. I worked at J.F.K. airport stamping passports and processing immigrants, refugees, tourists, celebrities, and anyone else that came through my line. In some cases… Read more »
Last year I was waiting for a bus on Main Street in Flushing when the guy on line next to me began complaining. “You see that snowflake, right there,” he said to the woman he was with, referencing a large snowflake make of lights suspended over the heavily-trafficked street. “That represents everything wrong with society… Read more »
