Weird New York: Your Guide to New York's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets

Chris served as the associate editor of Weird N.J. magazine for more than four years. While there, he helped write and edit Weird N.J. (the book) and co-authored its follow-up, Weird U.S. Chris is also an actor and comedian, has contributed writing to shows on Comedy Central, and has acted on a number of TV programs, including Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He is a performer and teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan.
Chris grew up in west Orange, New Jersey, a few short blocks from the laboratory where Thomas Edison once put on public electrocutions of a variety of animals. Now he lives in Astoria, Queens, just a stone's throw from the Hell Gate section of the East River, where more than one thousand people perished in the General Slocum stemboat fire of 1904.
Mark graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City, where he studied fine art, illustration, and photography. It was a boring and misspent suburban New Jersey childhood that first led him to his lifelong fascination with seeking out and exploring lost history and forgotten landmarks of his surroundings. These days he lives with his wife, Barbara, and their two daughters in a boring suburban New Jersey neighborhood (when he is not out tracking down satanic albino cannibals).
With his love for the state of New Jersey and his affection for the strange, Mark blended the two into a magazine called Weird N.J. It was an adventurous concept that explored every unbelievable tale he would hear while traveling around the state. The response to the publications was overwhelming. Thus, the joumey to uncover little-known weird stories about the other forty-nine states began. Mark has been in the publishing industry most of his life as a graphic designer and writer. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Shirley, and their daughter. He likes rock `n' roll and vacations "down the shore," and was voted "most likely to spontaneously combust" in his high school yearbook. So far it hasn't happened.