Share Your New York City Tale at Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood

In the spring of 2000, an online community sprang up to provide a place for writers to share their tales of the life, love, restaurants, parks, events, and everyday happenings in New York City, along with the associated emotions, reminiscences, and angst that the Big Apple evokes in people. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood (http://www.mrbellersneighborhood) is a website devoted to exploring the different versions of consciousness that exist in the various boroughs of the city.

Since its inception, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood has published over 1,000 original pieces, and has been nominated for a Webby Award in the category of Print and E-Zines. A collection of selected articles from the website has appeared in the form of a book, Before and After Stories from New York, which was released in 2002. Another anthology is current under development.

The site publishes personal essays, factual reports, and sketches of urban existence that illuminate the life in various corners of the city. Most of the stories on the site are true, and the site owners are open to any sort of topic. The days following the terrorist attacks on 9/11 saw many pieces posted about the attacks and the aftermath, but now the submissions have settled back into a regular routine of daily vignettes.

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood uses a map of New York City as a companion to the articles, using the external landscape to organize the internal, sometimes unfamiliar landscapes of the emotions of city dwellers. The Google maps can be zoomed in and out, and the red dots on the maps are links to articles about those locations. If you’re looking for an article about a single building, a favorite restaurant, a memorable park, or any particular spot in New York City, you can find it on the map and see if there are articles posted about it.

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is the pseudonymous name of a group of writers and editors that were rounded up by Thomas Beller, the author of The Sleep-Over Artist and Seduction Theory, a short story collection. Beller’s most recent work is How to Be a Man, a collection of personal essays. In addition to his writing, Beller is a contributing editor at The Cambodia Daily and Travel and Leisure Magazine, and he helped to found Open City Magazine.