Celebrating Community
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 […]
After ten years working for a Brooklyn community news-paper publisher I started my own business in 1988. My company, Select Mail, provided, as I dubbed it with my first sign, “Computerized Public Relations and Marketing.” This was somewhat of a new idea back then, as businesses were only just beginning to replace type-writers with desktop computers. My boss at the […]
I was struck by a conversation I had with my friendly UPS driver the other day. I told him that I had just gotten back from a two week vacation overseas, and he told me he just did the same. He had spent a week in Poland and a week in Belarus visiting family. I’ve spent most of my life […]
A very long time ago I tried to keep my marriage going with counseling. The main effect of that was to make me stop talking to her during the week, saving it all up for the weekly session. I’m not saying this was a good thing, what I am saying is that this monthly column reminds me of it in […]
I‘ve often written that Red Hook needs an organization that represents the viewpoints of everyone in our pretty unique community. An institution that presents our views to the rest of the world, including those outside entities looking to change things here, including real estate developers, government agencies and large corporations. Also a place where our local politicos can come and […]
February’s CB6 Land Use committee was host to a couple of presentation by designers of two small park areas that are part of the Gowanus rezoning. The first presentation for a park that will be on part of the Pig Beach property was made by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates who are the designers of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, a much […]
The new beautiful people who love to equate social justice with unconstrained real estate development love to say that everybody could get a great place to live whereever they want if only developers were allowed to build anyplace they wanted to, as tall as they like. If you don’t believe me, go to the website of the supposed non-profit, Open […]
After the revelation last month about a provocative letter sent by some Gowanus Superfund Community Advisory Group (CAG) to EPA heads, some thought that the next monthly meeting would be filled with fireworks (see our last issue). However, Chief Engineer Christos Tsiamis, who has been providing updates to the project almost every month for the past dozen years, diffused all […]