Celebrating Community
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 […]
I’ve been wanting to write a column about Eric Adams for quite a while. I met him a few times when he was our Borough President, and frankly, I thought he was perfect at that job, which is basically a figurehead position. BP’s used to have real governing powers back when there was a Board of Estimate running the city, […]
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, […]
Back in my youth, which is not ALL that many decades ago, people starting talking about the environment. In those days, we were told that without doing things to limit fossil fuel use, the world would eventually get hotter, jeopardizing our normal way of life. Well, it was quite surprising, and depressing, to see in the news that we have […]
