April 30, 1789. Our first President is sworn in and announces: “I exchanged more letters again with King George, a very fine monarch, one of the best in my opinion and I agreed with him that we were very unfair to the British in how we fought, like guerillas in a jungle. To be honest, we should have fought more […]
Author: Joe Enright
This is not Cupid’s arrow, by Joe Enright
On a beautiful late summer evening in Windsor Terrace some two hundred people jammed into the Holy Name auditorium just off Prospect Avenue to air their grievances. The sounding board on this occasion was Community Board 7, mandated by the New York City Charter to solicit comments from residents about the proposed upzoning of a large oddly-shaped section of land […]
Walt Kuhn: A Red Hook A-Lister , by Joe Enright
Internet pages curated by that new cyber sensation sweeping the nation, Artificial (“Arty”) Intel & His Zombies, now list about three dozen carbon units as famous “Persons/Red Hook.” Many of them never spent much time here (Notorious B.I.G., e.g.), while others lived in Gowanus and South Brooklyn (Joey Gallo, Jimmy Iovine, e.g.) – close enough when zombies call the shots […]
Watching the cement being poured on the road to hell, by Joe Enright
There’s a proverb about good intensions often leading to doom. Take the Adams Administration’s “City of Yes Housing Opportunity.” I’ll bet the branding consultants got well paid on this one. To support City of Yes is to be for “Housing” and “Opportunity.” To be against it is to be for homelessness and despair. And as for “City”? Why, join the […]
Looking for The Remote: Roaming Mass Media, by Joe Enright
For the first in an ongoing series, let’s start at the beginning…Before color screens, before video cassettes, before DVDs, before cable, before Wi-Fi, before Smart TVs – and the thousands of viewing options very few older Brooklynites know how to locate – television programming was sparse. Especially in 1948, when WNET (today’s Channel 13) made its debut with only one […]
Tales of New York –an interview with cartoonist Stan Mack, by Joe Enright
Stan Mack is one of the most prolific story tellers of the 20th century. He’s told over 1,500 tales using thick white paper, a pen and black ink to create comic strips about ordinary people, sometimes in extraordinary locations. A thousand were published in the Village Voice every week for two decades. Now 275 of the best of those will […]
2023: The Year In Review, by Joe Enright
It was a year of downs with slight upturns that suddenly veered into downs that seemed to bottom out, only to tumble violently downward again. – Happily, the murder rate was also trending downward, yet most citizens reported feeling unsafe as mental illness, addiction and homelessness were visible everywhere, especially on the F, D, 2, 5, B, 1 and A […]
Canarsie’s Jerry Building: Who the Heck was Jerry? by Joe Enright
I was working the Red Hook-Amagansett-What-Have-You news desk on a slow day, trying to recover from the year-end Star-Revue party the night before. Things had been kind of slow at Sam’s on Court Street until George threw down a wad of bills with presidential mugs I wasn’t familiar with, whereupon Louie kept those drinks coming. Being free and all, how […]
Defonte’s finally gets their Way, by Joe Enright
On a beautiful Saturday morning in June, a long-delayed street renaming ceremony took place at 379 Columbia Street to honor the late Dan Defonte, the former proprietor of Defonte’s Sandwich Shop. The large Defonte clan and their friends and fans gathered from near and far to celebrate, donning tee shirts honoring the new Daniel Defonte Way. The usual speeches were […]
A Challenge You Don’t Want to Take, by Joe Enright
On April 2nd Barbara, a retired New York City school teacher, parked her silver 2021 Hyundai Tucson SE in a spot that had miraculously opened up, right across from her Park Slope home. Sadly, that night her car joined the ranks of the Hyundai TikTok Challenge. For numbskull young-ins, that Challenge is pretty easy to conquer. You see, Hyundai models […]