Celebrating Community
Last spring I wrote in these pages about my discovery of Bay Ridge’s Regina Opera Company. While I did grow up in a house where the Metropolitan Opera was on the radio every Saturday, that was not my cup of tea. The idea of dressing up and paying lots of money to hear a musical show was not my scene. […]
I have this theory which I first thought of about ten years ago that there is a special school for people who run public meetings. I’m not sure if that would be the field of public relations, or government relations, or facilitating, but what they are teaching is how to make people think they are taking part in a Democracy […]
There was a time when the NYC waterfront was a blighted mess. When I first started working in New York, first in the Village where encounter the Hudson River, and then here in Brooklyn, and the East River, I took for granted that the burned out piers I saw were an indication that the city just didn’t care about the […]
UPDATE: The introductory webinar was held on August 12. As predicted below, it was an undemocratic neighborhood meeting. We were told that over 400 people were online, but there was no further information as to who they were, what they looked like, or whether they had anything to say. It was the kind of ZOOM meant for a one-way conversation, […]
Since our first issue, exactly 14 years ago this month, the Star-Revue has been actively reporting on the waterfront. A special report in our September 2010 edition described the Columbia Street piers. “Piers 8, 9a, 9b and 10 is home to perhaps the most traditional style of work as it is the site of the Brooklyn Container Port. Technically speaking, […]
Many people might not realize it, but in 2006 a British utility bought the Brooklyn company that had been providing gas heating and lighting for the borough since 1825. Yes folks, if you pay a National Grid bill, you are adding to the profits of a London based company. Way back in 1776, the British defeated us in Brooklyn when […]
Usually I spend a month trying to figure out what momentous topic I will be making pronouncement about in this column. But for this month at least, I’m going to tackle a bunch of possibly less momentous issues that have been on my mind. Law and Order My office is inside the warehouses on Van Brunt Street across from Food […]
One of the great TV shows was Public TV’s Cosmos. Originally broadcast in the 1980’s, produced by scientist, astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, younger people know the successor shows, Cosmos—A Personal Voyage and Cosmos—A Spacetime Odyssey, both created by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Sagan devotee and astrophysicist, author and science communicator in his own right. Sagan is described in […]
Back when I started the paper, in 2010, Red Hook resident Adam Armstrong began his mission to bring shore power here. This is a way to power berthed cruise ships with electricity rather than the fossil fuel they burn at sea. Twenty million dollars later, a rarely used shore power apparatus was built on the pier. Armstrong was able to […]
I haven’t really expressed any sort of political view in this paper yet, so you probably should know that I feel much more comfortable with a president that has demonstrable skills in governing, combined with experience at the ways of our particular style of government, rather than a showman. I was born during the Eisenhower administration. Ike was a beloved […]