Celebrating Community
Whenever I consciously try to predict something, I’m generally wrong. I think a lot of people end up being wrong, while a lot of people end up being right. That’s because I’m guessing we all are doing wishful thinking. If I were to make 2024 predictions, I’d probably say that Trump will be soundly defeated, so much so that all […]
Last month I thanked our advertisers who are an important part in keeping this paper going. Not simply financially, but in the fact that there are people in the community who still believe that a local publication, a printed one no less, is important enough to put their money behind it. As a society, we are spending more and more […]
The Red Hook Civic Association, which restarted with new leadership earlier this year, made a notable impression in the NYC media world with a major story about its push for a new express bus taking Red Hookers to lower Manhattan. This is a long term project of the Civic Association, and almost came to pass in 2008 until the financial […]
An idea when I started this paper in 2010 was that the people who lived here and who made it such a unique community should be aware of threatening exogenous forces. Exogenous and endogenous are terms used in different fields, but they’re basically fancy words for outside and inside. The point here is that changes in Red Hook should be […]
I was working at the Phoenix, a community newspaper headquartered in Boerum Hill that was known as the newspaper for Brownstone Brooklyn, when a funny term started floating around the office. This was in the late 1970’s, when formerly industrial neighborhoods in lower Manhattan began changing their names to SoHo, Noho, TriBeca, even LoLita. These terms were understood to be […]
I’ve been wanting to write a column about Eric Adams for quite a while. I met him a few times when he was our Borough President, and frankly, I thought he was perfect at that job, which is basically a figurehead position. BP’s used to have real governing powers back when there was a Board of Estimate running the city, […]
This is a Red Hook-based paper, but since its founding in 2010 I’ve written about the goings-on in Gowanus. It’s an area I have a long history with. But it’s also showing Red Hook a vision of its possible future. Back in the 1980s, a friend bought a building on Fifth Avenue near the Old Stone House. At the time, […]
Back in my youth, which is not ALL that many decades ago, people starting talking about the environment. In those days, we were told that without doing things to limit fossil fuel use, the world would eventually get hotter, jeopardizing our normal way of life. Well, it was quite surprising, and depressing, to see in the news that we have […]
After ten years working for a Brooklyn community news-paper publisher I started my own business in 1988. My company, Select Mail, provided, as I dubbed it with my first sign, “Computerized Public Relations and Marketing.” This was somewhat of a new idea back then, as businesses were only just beginning to replace type-writers with desktop computers. My boss at the […]
I was struck by a conversation I had with my friendly UPS driver the other day. I told him that I had just gotten back from a two week vacation overseas, and he told me he just did the same. He had spent a week in Poland and a week in Belarus visiting family. I’ve spent most of my life […]