Celebrating Community
Many people might not realize it, but in 2006 a British utility bought the Brooklyn company that had been providing gas heating and lighting for the borough since 1825. Yes folks, if you pay a National Grid bill, you are adding to the profits of a London based company. Way back in 1776, the British defeated us in Brooklyn when […]
Usually I spend a month trying to figure out what momentous topic I will be making pronouncement about in this column. But for this month at least, I’m going to tackle a bunch of possibly less momentous issues that have been on my mind. Law and Order My office is inside the warehouses on Van Brunt Street across from Food […]
One of the great TV shows was Public TV’s Cosmos. Originally broadcast in the 1980’s, produced by scientist, astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, younger people know the successor shows, Cosmos—A Personal Voyage and Cosmos—A Spacetime Odyssey, both created by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Sagan devotee and astrophysicist, author and science communicator in his own right. Sagan is described in […]
Back when I started the paper, in 2010, Red Hook resident Adam Armstrong began his mission to bring shore power here. This is a way to power berthed cruise ships with electricity rather than the fossil fuel they burn at sea. Twenty million dollars later, a rarely used shore power apparatus was built on the pier. Armstrong was able to […]
I haven’t really expressed any sort of political view in this paper yet, so you probably should know that I feel much more comfortable with a president that has demonstrable skills in governing, combined with experience at the ways of our particular style of government, rather than a showman. I was born during the Eisenhower administration. Ike was a beloved […]
Whenever I consciously try to predict something, I’m generally wrong. I think a lot of people end up being wrong, while a lot of people end up being right. That’s because I’m guessing we all are doing wishful thinking. If I were to make 2024 predictions, I’d probably say that Trump will be soundly defeated, so much so that all […]
Last month I thanked our advertisers who are an important part in keeping this paper going. Not simply financially, but in the fact that there are people in the community who still believe that a local publication, a printed one no less, is important enough to put their money behind it. As a society, we are spending more and more […]
The Red Hook Civic Association, which restarted with new leadership earlier this year, made a notable impression in the NYC media world with a major story about its push for a new express bus taking Red Hookers to lower Manhattan. This is a long term project of the Civic Association, and almost came to pass in 2008 until the financial […]
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 […]
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 […]