The Manhattan Times

What do you get when you fill a room with perfect strangers of myriad backgrounds, ethnicities, and experiences, and ask everyone to delve into an issue as poignant as immigration?

What is the average visitor to the Morris-Jumel Mansion looking for when they come to the historic house where George Washington once slept? Revolutionary War stories, maybe? Artifacts of the past? An aura and lingering rumors of the eccentric Madame Jumel?

by Michael Herson

He ordered his eggs: “Not gushing, but oozing gently.” Then Henry went back to his conversation with Milo. They were two aging men talking politics and books over some bacon. They met often and tacitly rejoiced in their surroundings. They liked the wooden siding on the booths and the wooden counter and the green floor printed in small tiles and the hanging lights over each booth. “It’s the anti-Starbucks” he would often say, and the place made them both feel warm. It was old fashioned, like they were. Today outside the air was thick and it wasn’t sunny, just very hot and gray and still.

Commuters racing through the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal may now have reason to pause and reflect – on something with as much depth and breadth as human nature.

by Lin-Manuel Miranda

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”

It began with the idea of mothers. It grew into a tree. Inside the tree, and within mothers, a whole world.

Pianist Eli Yamin of Jazz at Lincoln Center had been looking for a place to play in his neighborhood of 14 years. When the storefront on the corner of W. 218th Street and Indian Road began undergoing renovations several years ago, Yamin and many others in the neighborhood started dreaming of what it might be.

The story is written in the layers of oil on the canvas: the effervescent colors sometimes meld together, sometimes hold their individuality.

Deep blue and circular motion suggests the sea. Above, vibrant red and orange bleed into the sea, suggesting sky. The painting is a triptych – three canvases aligned and portraying one unified picture.

“It made you want to be a color,” said Debralee Santos, program director of Casa Duarte Cultural and Performing Arts Center. “The texture and smell of it – it felt like it leapt out at you.”

by Jeff Stolzer

LIGHTS UP on SOFTBALL MAN, 45, center stage, waiting for an elevator. He wears a custom baseball uniform embroidered with the large letters GS on the chest. He carries a big gym bag, out of which sticks an aluminum bat; there's also a water bottle in a mesh side pocket. He is very well coiffed, wears an expensive looking watch and has a definite swagger. He impatiently punches an imaginary elevator button.