Celebrating Community
Paul Giffone is bringing Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) basketball back to Red Hook for the first time since he last was in charge of it 12 years ago. There were sign up practice sessions during three Saturdays in September at the Miccio Center. “The way I choose the players is whoever wants to play and whoever is going to be […]
The city is infested with rats, was recently thrown into a state of emergency by rainfall, and Mayor Adams has ordered that the city’s budget be cut by 15% in the coming months: understandably, participatory budgeting may not be top of mind for many. Nevertheless, on a rainy Thursday evening in September, ten volunteers and a couple of attendees met […]
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 […]
There is a petition on change.org regarding a park which was supposed to be located on Columbia St. from Kane St. to Degraw St. in the Columbia Waterfront District. According to the petition, which was created in November of 2021, there have been many meetings developing the park, and $1.7 million was set aside for it but the park has […]
The new Red Hook Civic Association is making progress as 17 people attended the general meeting despite the 95 degree weather on September 6. The Communications Committee has decided that one-pagers (one-page documents with information on issues that members think are important) are an effective way to pass along information on key issues. Kristen Rouse, deputy district director for Congress […]
Council Member Alexa Aviles gave her State of District 38 speech at PS 1 in Sunset Park on September 14. The night’s events included remarks from Assembly Member Marcela Mitaynes, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and Tiffiney Davis of the Red Hook Art Project (RHAP.) There was also artwork from RHAP as well as featured performances by the P.S. 1 Chorus […]
All major European tourist destination are filled with German tourists. Not young ones, but mostly the elderly, in groups, walking the streets slowly, driven by their guide talking to them through headphones. This situation gets worse in the mountains, where every European camping spot and hiking route is invaded by German tourists of any age, fully equipped, moreso than any […]
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind In today’s sharply divided political world, Hannah Arendt’s words, (in reference to the Holocaust) ring true. Arendt’s assertion that people are not inherently evil is an optimistic worldview – the real […]
Searching for a topic for this month’s column, I realized I had forgotten what most New Yorkers never knew, which is that we had an election coming up. The menu Brownstone voters are being presented with consists of barely contested City Council and Supreme Court races, and an uncontested Countywide Civil Court race. Much of the area also has an […]
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 […]