Memoir — History — Dinaburg Writes

St. Marks is Dead

When I worked around the corner, I spent a lot of time on St. Marks. Not really doing anything cool, though. I was purely a daytime tourist: through the bulk of my time working in the area, I lived in the unarguably least cool part of NYC, the Upper East Side. I merely lingered on the fringes of cool places during cool-people hours, eventually coming and going from the apartment on 2nd, which, no matter that the book calls it “around the corner from St. Marks,” is functionally St. Marks. Perhaps this scumbag-grifter-NYC-dating-scene-vibe of always being in your GF’s apartment because it is way closer to work was St. Marks culture.

David DinaburgApril 19, 2026NYC, Memoir, East Village, History

Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip

Structurally, it swings between light personal anecdote and researched didacticism. Tonally, it is like talking to my dad. The author is a total square, and speaks with the casual paternalism born of white, Midwestern, upper middle-class comfort. Take, for example, the position of language regarding airline deregulation:

With some basic parameters and policies for the aviation industry set, the job seemed done.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. In fact, the government was just getting started. As bureaucracies tend to view such matters, if a few good rules are sufficient, then many more are even better. The aviation industry also became swept up in a wave of sentiment opposing free market competition in the 1930s.

I’m not sure whether the anecdotes or the history lessons taught me more, but Pull Over! was at its best when it blended the two.

David DinaburgJune 1, 2021Non-Fiction, Travel, Sociology, Driving, Memoir