The Luna Park Gazette

I ran into Anthony, my mother’s former hairdresser, on Thanksgiving Eve and greeted him with the old standby “how’s business?” And he told me. “I sold the building,” he said. “I’m retiring.” I couldn’t believe it. Another familiar place disappearing? Anthony has been running the beauty salon on Fifth Avenue for as long as I can remember. He can’t just close up shop. Anthony said he’s not leaving Brooklyn. I thought he might head off to someplace like Florida, but he dismissed that idea. “Maybe I’ll go to Key West for a couple of weeks,” he said, “but I don’t want to boil down there—especially in the summer.” Anthony was one of the few people who actually loved his job. “I couldn’t wait to get to work,” he said. “It was never really work for me.” Not too many people in this world can make that claim. One of my earliest memories of Anthony was coming home with my brother from grocery shopping when we were kids. We had gotten caught in a terrible downpour that soaked...

We pulled into the funeral home parking lot just after 8 pm, found a spot, and waited for the cops to show up. It was June 1988. I had just started working as a reporter for the Pocono Record , moving to Pennsylvania from Brooklyn a month earlier, and on this night I was handling the police beat. Frances Cox, one of our photographers, was sitting next to me in the passenger seat and we were waiting to get a picture of a man named Jerry Burgos, a New York transplant like myself, who was inside the attending his wife’s viewing. Nilsa Burgos had been discovered in the couple’s burning home a few days earlier. Her death had been ruled a homicide after an autopsy found no trace of smoke in lungs, meaning she was dead before the fire started. She was seven months pregnant. The paper had been running stories about the killing for days and then one of the reporters had gotten a tip that the state police would pick up Burgos at the funeral home and charge him with his wife’s murder. Fr...

A decade ago, while working as a reporter in Connecticut, I was driving through some small town on my way to some forgettable assignment and listening to the news on the radio. The Yankees had won the World Series and New York was going to give them a ticker tape parade that very afternoon. I’m not much of a sports fan, and I usually root for the Mets when it comes to baseball, but it just killed me to be sputtering around the back roads of East Deer Tick when my hometown was throwing such a huge bash. "What am I doing here?" I whined within my old Toyota. "I should be back there ." Well, today, I got a second chance to see the Yankees parade down the Canyon of Heroes. And it was certainly worth the wait. My office is on Broadway, overlooking the parade route and, after a little hustling, I got to see a good portion of the show without facing the cold or the crowd. And the crowd was unbelievable. I know it’s New York, the Big Apple, and, yes, Toto, I know I’m not in...