Celebrating Community
One of the great misfortunes of my life is that I don’t live in Red Hook. The distance between my apartment in Bushwick (near the border of Bed-Stuy) and the Star-Revue office at the foot of Van Brunt Street is six miles. Google Maps says the journey takes 37 minutes by bike, but I can do it in 30 […]
Gowanus’s upcoming rezoning will likely make much of the neighborhood’s old industrial infrastructure eligible for redevelopment as residential high-rises. According to the Gowanus Landmarking Coalition, a local advocacy group formed in 2017, if the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) doesn’t step in to protect key sites from demolition, Gowanus’s built environment will cease to embody the rich history […]
The Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice (GNCJ), an advocacy group that formed in response to the city’s proposed rezoning of Gowanus, has joined forces with 350Brooklyn, the local affiliate of the international climate change organization 350.org. On May 9, GNCJ members shared their list of demands for Gowanus at 350Brooklyn’s monthly meeting at the Commons, a cafe and event space […]
Since 1996, the Swift Folder – the internationally renowned folding bicycle – has assisted New Yorkers whose complicated commutes typically feature some combination of walk-up apartments, crowded trains, office elevators, and city streets. How many of them know that its inventor lives and works in Gowanus? At the time, industrial designer Peter Reich wasn’t much of a cyclist. “I grew […]
On April 29th, Victoria Alexander of Realty Collective convened a meeting of local business owners at the event space RE:GEN:CY on Commerce Street. The goal was to create – or to consider creating – a formalized neighborhood business association for Red Hook. Alexander brought Perch Advisors, a consulting firm, into the process to “offer outside perspective and guidance.” Led by […]
What do 19th-century dandies, first-wave feminists, commuters, messengers, deliverymen, recreationalists, environmentalists, and competitive athletes have in common? Many of them are (or were) cyclists. As the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition “Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History” shows, New York’s erratic relationship with the bicycle owes to the disparities in social status of these groups, each […]
Born and raised in Red Hook, Luquana McGriff makes some of New York City’s most beautiful cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. In 2016, McGriff started her own one-woman dessert-catering company, A Cake Baked in Brooklyn. At the time, she was a 911 dispatcher for the New York City Police Department. She’d held the job since 2001, but a childhood passion for […]
The idea of participatory budgeting (PB), which in April concluded its eighth annual cycle in New York City, is admirable and perhaps even inspiring. In practice, however, it feels a lot like New York progressive politics on the whole: somewhat dysfunctional and ultimately empty. An exercise in direct democracy embraced by forward-thinking cities around the world, PB empowers ordinary people […]
In 2005, the HarperCollins imprint William Morrow published the memoir No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop by Robert Cea, a former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer. The book chronicled Cea’s days in uniform in the stygian “Badlands” patrolled by the 76th Precinct in the 1980s and ‘90s. According to Cea, “the […]
Gravesend-based Yi Xin Tong identifies as an artist first and as a fisherman second. But it’s a close second. Tong, who makes sculptural and video-based installations, has found that his hobby brings him to the outskirts of Brooklyn. In his opinion, Floyd Bennett Field, a former airport that juts into Jamaica Bay near Marine Park, has the best fishing in […]