New York (State) Archives

New York (State)

Manhattan Magic

The incongruity is the fascination of it all. In New York, the most modern of all large cities, the very embodiment of twentieth-century youth, thrives superstition, gray with countless centuries…

Artless Response

From letters exchanged in 1982 between the Whitney Museum of American Art and an author and critic referred to here as E.R. Harper’s Magazine obtained the letters in November. …

Soul Proprietor

by Daniel Genis,

From Sentence, a memoir, which will be published next month by Viking. The entire time I was in prison, I owned a typewriter, and it was on this typewriter that…

Life Is a Box of Chocolates

by Cornelia Stratton Parker,

Wise heads tell us we act first, or decide to act first, and reason afterward. What could be put down in black and white as to why we took up…

World of Night

by Hale Gurland,

Blood Ties

by Sarah Schulman,

From Let the Record Show, a history of ACT UP New York, which was published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It’s March 2018. I have been struggling with…

Rumination

by Lucienne S. Bloch,

From “Inside Stories,” an essay published in the Winter 2021 issue of Five Points. I used to visit an elderly woman who lived in a single room in an apartment…

The Grove

by Ben Lerner,

Then she suggested I make a list of all the things I’m grateful for. No entry is too small or mundane: access to clean water, fast internet, the weeping habit…

On Defense

by Sergio De La Pava,

Twenty-five years of fighting mass incarceration in court

Carrying On

by Lynn Freed,

My first years in America

Sorry to Bother You

From purposes of phone calls made by New York City residents to 3-1-1, a help line for information and non-emergency government services. To discuss a neighbor who hangs underwear out…