Real Journalism written by people
Last month in Albany, Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa announced that, in the fall, she would assemble a commission to evaluate the possibility of dropping the Regents Examinations as a graduation requirement for high schoolers in New York State. New York remains one of 12 states that require students in public high schools to pass standardized exit exams […]
For the Star-Revue’s August issue, I wrote a feature about Revel, the moped-sharing app whose Vespa-style scooters have overtaken parts of Brooklyn and Queens. It wasn’t technically an opinion piece, but because most of Revel’s other media coverage had taken the form of first-person essays by intrepid reporters who, having tried out the product, had intercut regurgitated press-release info with […]
The tenants won, and the real estate lobby lost. But the tenants didn’t win everything. Signed into law on June 14 amid widespread celebration, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA) expanded and strengthened New York’s system of rent stabilization and offered a host of new benefits to tenants across the state. It suffered, however, from the […]
From May to September, typically on the second Wednesday of the month, the arts organization Pioneer Works hosts $5 first-come-first-served lunches in its garden at 159 Pioneer Street. The series started in 2017, but I went for the first time this June. For each gathering, Pioneer Works hires a new chef to cater the event. When I attended, the food […]
If one could go back in time and visit Red Hook in the 1940s, one would, at about 4:30 am, find a scene of desperation on its crowded waterfront. Days began with “longshoremen huddling in doorways in rain and snow on Columbia Street facing the piers, waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up […]
I like hiking, but I’ve never been rock climbing. I’d estimate that Breakneck Ridge, a trail within Hudson Highlands State Park at the border of Putnam and Dutchess counties, occupies a rough halfway spot between the two activities. A weekends-only stop on the Hudson line of the Metro-North Commuter Railroad, with a pair of small yellow platforms on either side […]
Whether we like it or not, it seems clear that the summer of 2019 in New York City will be the summer of Revel. After a discreet 10-month pilot program with 68 bikes in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Greenpoint, the Brooklyn-based startup suddenly unleashed 1,000 shiny new mopeds between Astoria and Sunset Park at the end of May, and now the […]
Since I live in a very small and ugly apartment, one of my favorite activities when I’m a tourist (in my own city or elsewhere) is to visit historic homes that’ve opened themselves to the public. Different houses serve different purposes. Some – like the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park or Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island, famous primarily for […]
In the spring, the Red Hook Container Terminal added a new weekly container service to its roster of clients. Each Monday for the past two months, a vessel from Miami-based carrier Seaboard Marine’s North Atlantic-North Central America loop has docked in Red Hook, the last port of call on a route starting in Guatemala, with stops in Nicaragua, El Salvador, […]
The Sunset Park Landmarks Committee, an activist association of neighborhood preservationists, celebrated a major victory on June 18 when the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) responded to their six years of organized advocacy by voting unanimously to protect four historic residential sections of Sunset Park. The Sunset Park North, Sunset Park South, Central Sunset Park, and Sunset Park 50th Street historic […]
For many beer enthusiasts, the greatest adventures are bucolic escapes to farmhouse breweries in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom or the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, where, with monastic dedication, bearded bohemian hillbillies craft organic small-batch ales of such dignity and freshness that they seem almost healthful. But you need a car to get there. Fortunately, in February, Svendale […]
Every couple weeks, City Councilmember Brad Lander experiences a spasm of guilt over what Gowanus is going to look like in 10 years, and in order to relieve this sensation, he tweets a link to an article about the importance of increasing the housing supply as a means to combat rising rents in America’s cities. It may be Farhad Manjoo’s […]
The last day of school in New York City is June 26. Congratulations, students and teachers! When classes start again in September, the city’s elite specialized high schools, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, will welcome 895 and 803 new freshmen, respectively. As nearly everyone who follows local news must already know, at Stuyvesant High School, only seven members (0.78 percent) of […]
