Author: ruhlwrite

There are a lot of old things in the apartment Scott Jordan and Belle Costes share. Belle and Scott in the workroom of their apartment. Virtually every inch of the tiny two-bedroom, fourth-floor walkup is covered with treasures they literally have unearthed while digging up the city’s past. Actually, it’s really not totally accurate to say that there are two bedrooms, because the objects that live in the apartment have taken up so much room that there’s only one small space with…

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Tina Maria Glavan takes a small, white vessel from the shelf in her art studio and cradles it in her hands. For decades, Tina worked as an interior designer. Exquisitely textured, it looks like a hollowed-out snowball, the kind Hostess, not God, makes. It’s not perfect. It didn’t turn out as she envisioned. One of Tina’s colorful works. It took her a while to see its real beauty; today, she wouldn’t part with it for any amount of money. She could say the same about…

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For pianist Maria Kaushansky, music is about making connections that go far beyond the sounds that emanate from her keyboard. Maria is a pianist. “When I’m playing and I meet people for the first time, we may not speak the same language, but we know the same songs,” she says. “That’s really special.” This is not to say that language usually is a barrier for Maria – she speaks English, Russian, French and Italian – but music always eases the introduction. Maria, who has…

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In a city that never sleeps, I’m a dawner. I get up at 5 in the morning all seven days of the week. It’s a habit I established about a decade ago when I got a puppy who was endowed with an adorably tiny bladder, and I took an administrative job at a university that required me to be at my desk at 8 a.m. The puppy grew up – Zora will be 10 on the 21st of January – and the job dissolved when my boss unexpectedly died. But for no plausible reason that I can come up with,…

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Vanessa Gonzalez is in the front window of her new shop, Anoria Boutique, dressing a couple of mannequins. Vanessa is the owner of Anoria Boutique. She apologizes because her display is not finished; she likes to have everything perfect at all times. She didn’t close the shop until 11:30 last night because some customers came in at the last minute for party dresses. They bought two in the window. She’s replacing them with a long, lacy black gown and a delicate, diaphanous beaded…

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