Celebrating Community
At the end of March, the EPA filed an Administrative Order making specific demands of the City of New York regarding their unkept promises at the Gowanus Canal cleanup. Christos Tsiamis, Chief Engineer of the project, has said many times in the past that the Federal government, of which the EPA is part of, has sovereignty over city government, which […]
Linda Mariano, a lifelong advocate for the Gowanus community, shown above as Miss Gowanus on the 100th anniversary of the Gowanus Flushing Tunnel in 2011, passed away last month. Brad Vogel, who we know from the Gowanus Dredgers, wrote these words in memory of her full life: “Linda and I served on the Community Advisory Group together (she helped get […]
Red Hookers got their first view of Cesar Zuniga back in 2014, when, with the support of our council member Carlos Menchaca, he ran against Assemblymember Felix Ortiz. He didn’t do that badly, but it was not yet Ortiz’s time to lose. Here is what he told the Star-Revue then, as part of our ask-the-candidates story: “As the son of […]
Alexandros Washburn, a professor, architect, city planner and lately a real estate developer who owns a house on Van Brunt Street, made a name for himself after Hurricane Sandy by attaching himself to the many resiliency groups that sprung up after that disaster. His latest project is what he is calling a “Model Block.” He and a group of partners […]
It’s finally time for me to figure out what exactly to write in this column I have given myself. I say that because in case you weren’t aware, George is me, George Fiala, who has been running this paper since I thought of it back in 2010. I very much enjoy the groove we’ve gotten into this year, with an […]
A couple weeks ago I was surprised to see the name “Carlos Menchaca” pop up on my phone’s Caller ID. Menchaca has been representing Red Hook in the City Council for the past seven years. During all of that time I have been writing about Red Hook in this newspaper. We’ve never socialized, despite my invitations for dinner to talk […]
The world knew Buddy Scotto for almost 92 years, I was his friend for the past seven. I first heard about him when I worked for the Brooklyn Phoenix newspaper in the early 1980’s. He was known in the office for getting rid of the ‘stench’ that permeated Carroll Gardens when the wind blew in from the Gowanus Canal. […]
(photo above: Brett Yates, winner of the Thomas Butson Award for In-Depth Journalism) I started the Red Hook Star-Revue ten years ago this summer. The main reason was that I like the newspaper business, a second reason was that I found Red Hook a challenging and interesting community, which I suspected had lots of stories to tell. A third […]
Red Hook is currently awash in the building of new warehouses. No doubt the biggest is the massive new UPS distribution facility that starts across Valentino Park, extending on the water all the way to the Cruise Terminal. The package delivery company paid $303 million for the property, which most recently was to be the hub of a new tech […]
In case you’ve been sleeping for the past six weeks, the United States has undergone yet another transformation. No, I’m not talking about the pandemic, although it could be that it is the disaster of COVID, combined with a really sick example of police brutality towards a black person, that has pushed the civil rights/social justice movement to what seems […]