Authorpreneur Dashboard – Michael Heslin
Meatpacking
Literature & Fiction
Before The High Line Park there was a train that ran through their lives. Salome and her mother Max live in a Manhattan loft surrounded by Abstract Expressionist murals and views of the West Side Highway. It is a neighborhood of meatpacking plants and nightclubs and the echoes of ocean liners. Salome never learned to roller skate on cobblestones, but her playground is Mr. Zwerling’s hardware store and her best friend is a man who cannot speak. MEATPACKING is a downtown world where few children grow, where the streetlights are broken and the pay phones don’t work, and her mother struggles to provide for her. Over the years Salome creates a garden of her own on the railroad viaduct, a private world that few others will understand. From World War II and the decades after, MEATPACKING chronicles an unusual family in a once abandoned but now thriving neighborhood of New York.
Book Bubbles from Meatpacking
The High Line
Lower Manhattan has always been my favorite part of New York with its mix of industry and railroad flats. I remember the stinging smell of printer's ink from around the Puck Building and the scramble of shops and junk stores along Canal Street. The Meatpacking District had its own allure, its own grubby and sometimes frightening atmosphere. There is high fashion there now but like many others I miss the grime. Walking above on The High Line brought some of it back and made me think of this story.
Flatiron
Literature & Fiction
In February 1964, two teenagers collide outside Carnegie Hall. The Beatles are playing. The background is Manhattan, the streets, the skyscrapers, an intersection of shadows and light. She is a photographer; he becomes her muse. Across 25 years, she achieves fame and controversy while he reckons with the limits of being there for her. The part of love that is devotion has its own sadness and fulfillment, and it's own price. Their world is Andy Warhol and fashion magazines, the Chelsea Hotel and Greenwich Village. Their hour is a great city in decline and the passing of youth.
Book Bubbles from Flatiron
Why Flatiron?
Like the narrator of this story I was a foot messenger many years ago in Manhattan when I was sixteen. One of the first offices I delivered to was in the Flatiron Building at Broadway and Fifth Avenue. I've never forgotten the shock of seeing it like a ship's prow about to sail uptown. Later on when I saw the Stieglitz photographs of the Flatiron I think my infatuation was complete. Ever since the Flatiron and photography have conjoined for me though it was fifty years before this book came to life.
