Celebrating Community
It was my toughest assignment yet, but George had faith I could pull it off. “Sure, it’ll be dangerous,” he said dismissively. “But you run fast. For an old guy, anyway. Plus, I’ve noticed you’re pretty quick at pressing that ESCape key.” And so off I dove into the Internet to unearth the identity of a man named Q. Since […]
I’ve been going to Vincent’s Barber Shop on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn since I moved to the Ditmas Park area in 2003. Until recently, there has always been a packed crowd waiting for haircuts and shaves. And now, since COVID, when I walk into the shop, I wear a mask. Everyone who enters the shop has to wear a mask, […]
Many New York City residents, especially those of us who are from New York City, think we know everything about our beloved hometown. But the fact is, we do not. I joined the Victorian Flatbush Tour, which includes parts of Ditmas Park, Prospect Park South, and the historic Albemarle-Kenmore Terraces, on a Sunday afternoon. The tour wound around a small […]
Hurricane Sandy was a storm of the century. Which these days means a storm that seems to hit two or three times a year. But that’s another story. Our story is about Sandy and Red Hook. Sandy put us under two feet of water, plunged us into darkness for three weeks and thrust us into the national spotlight. Two young […]
A Historic Election The historic election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris marks another hard-fought milestone in American history. President-Elect Joe Biden, is now the oldest elected president in US history, and more noteworthy, Kamala Harris, the first Black (Jamaican), South Asian (Indian), and female vice president of the United States of America. As the nation transitions from one presidential […]
It may be a tad overoptimistic to say that, by the time most of you see this piece, the election will be over, but at least, in most cases, the voting itself will have been concluded (except for some of the folks still waiting on line in areas of Georgia with heavy minority populations). This presents quite a dilemma for […]
The Election gambits had all failed. 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls were already offering background briefings to reporters on their courageous objections to the President’s insistence on his squatter’s rights to the Oval Office. But the coup-de-grace was finally delivered by a Washington Post exclusive: the Joint Chiefs and a joyous Secret Service detail had developed a discrete extraction method, although […]
I’ve been going to Vincent’s Barber Shop on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn since I moved to the Ditmas Park area in 2003. Until recently, there has always been a packed crowd waiting for haircuts and shaves. And now, since COVID, when I walk into the shop, I wear a mask. Everyone who enters the shop has to wear a mask, […]
All right, let’s start at the beginning. According to the latest realty news about hip, happening Gowanus, those old red brick Roulston buildings under the F train at 9th Street that once housed a huge bakery, coffee grinders, and tons of groceries – followed by cobwebs and then artist lofts – will now be home to lots of office workers. […]
The world knew Buddy Scotto for almost 92 years, I was his friend for the past seven. I first heard about him when I worked for the Brooklyn Phoenix newspaper in the early 1980’s. He was known in the office for getting rid of the ‘stench’ that permeated Carroll Gardens when the wind blew in from the Gowanus Canal. […]