Maura Magazine | New York

Tag - New York

The Temple

A tribute to the Brooklyn all-ages haunt the Punk Temple, and a look at DIY in New York today.

C.R.E.A.M.

Before Mikey Likes was making music-inspired ice cream from scratch, the New York native was just like pretty much every other kid growing up on the Lower East Side of Money-Makin’ Manhattan.

I Guess This Is Growing Up

Recently I was seated with four moms about my age at a baby shower. Some worked, some didn’t, but they had children in common. When the conversation moved on from sitting in a car for two hours to let a child sleep and dealing with other moms at daycare to ripping vaginas and cord-cutting, I reminded the ladies we were eating. They looked at me like I was an alien. Then one of the women asked me what I’d normally be doing on a Saturday—they had already reeled off lists of classes and activities—and I said, deadpan, “Yoga, then… whatever.” They laughed, all in on the big joke that I had nothing important to do. I wanted to say, “I might spend three hours on the phone with my mother trying to convince her to move to a single-story house, because I worry every night she’ll fall and kill herself.”

Home Cooking

Hood Chef was born Hector Vasquez on February 29—which means that the rail-thin, tattoo-covered Brooklyn resident has been bucking the norm pretty much since birth. Like many growing up in the Borough of Kings in the 1980s and 1990s, Hood Chef was constantly inundated with the idea that slinging rock or having a wicked jump shot were the only viable options to get off the grimy corners of Crooklyn. He escaped the street life without doing either, but he stayed in the hood—because that’s where he felt most needed.