Real Journalism written by people
The Red Hook Locals Softball League is back for the second season in a row after a long hiatus while waiting for the ballfields in the neighborhood to re-open. The Wobblies, Bait & Tackle, the Record Shop, and B61 have all returned this season, and Hometown has joined as an expansion team. Greg “Greggles” Fischer, who plays for Bait & […]
A year ago, Yumedys Gonzalez was one of the more than 22,000 New Yorkers living in a shelter. And like so many, she clung to the dream of one day having her own home. Nevins Street Apartments, which reopened in May 2022 at 50 Nevis Street in a new 10-story, $72 million downtown Brooklyn development, seemed just right. “I would […]
There was a Red Hook community town hall event at the Miccio Community Center with lots of neighborhood organizations represented on July 28. The Red Hook Community Justice Center’s MAP department and NSTAT team hosted the town hall. The idea behind the town hall was giving residents an opportunity to discuss their experience with community police relations in Red Hook […]
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, […]
Despite the dog days of summer, an engaged crowd of 23 showed up for the Civic Association Meeting on July 17 at the Red Hook Recreation Center. A vote was held on whether or not to have an August meeting, and the majority voted against it. Another vote was held regarding when the next meeting should take place and it […]
On a quiet July afternoon on Verona Street, near the corner of Van Brunt, Ken Marcelle sweeps hair from the floor before his next appointment. The incoming client is Keaton Tips, formally a resident of Red Hook. A 34-year-old animator and motion designer, Tips moved from Dikeman Street to an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, in 2020. That year, many of […]
New York City’s experiment in rank choice voting applies to all municipal offices, but only in Party primaries, and in special elections, which are non-partisan. It does not apply to the main event; general election are still “first past the post.” Yes, you can argue that, in NYC, Democratic primary elections are, in fact, the main event. But, they are […]
The terms “summer reading” “beach reads” or even “guilty pleasures” are frequently tossed around in July and August. These terms conjure different images and ideas – the dreaded mandatory summer reading for reluctant students, the splashy / trashy cover of a romance with sand stuck in the pages or maybe the various media platforms where you can find lists such […]
Sunset Park has a history of things happening to it, rather than for it. In Thomas J. Campanella’s thorough history of the borough, “Brooklyn: The Once and Future City”, Campanella describes how the borough’s neighborhoods were transformed by Robert Moses-era construction projects. Working class neighborhoods were re-branded with names like Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. In Sunset Park, Third Avenue […]
A classic American drink, the egg cream is a true culinary invention of New York City, up there with chicken and waffles, the Waldorf salad, and baked Alaska to name a few. It was also deemed “Brooklyn’s official elixir since the 1920s” by former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz 21 years ago. Following the end of World War II before […]
Sonic revival. Concert performances by Sonic Youth were glorious things—transcendent, intoxicating, very nearly overwhelming. Sound systems and synapses couldn’t always handle them but the energy transference was reliably powerful. The band played what is commonly referred to as its last show on the WIlliamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn on August 12, 2011. They actually went on to play already scheduled festivals […]
Archival recordings are tricky to think about critically, in no small part because the contents of any artists archives are always interesting and desirable to fans, and that fan enthusiasm makes criticism irrelevant for most of the people who would even consider buying them. And reader, I am one of those fans—as one example, Miles Davis’ album In a Silent […]
Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a lot of things: a landmark oral history, a monument to conversation, a snapshot of labor across classes and collars at a particular unsettled moment in American history. It’s also a testament to how little things change. Working […]
