Happy New Year and welcome to 2026 my lovelies. What year 2025 was and I was so grateful to share my musings and adventures with you. The year ended with a fantastic month of music here in Brooklyn, from swing to power pop and everything in between. But like Janus, I look both to how the year ended and with […]

In the front yard of a house on Clinton Street on the Gowanus side of Carroll Gardens is a modest pond with enormous koi—each one easily more than two feet long. A mesh cover protects them, allowing the fish to grow long and fat, free from the prying talons of would-be feasters. The fish—white and orange and so unexpectedly thriving […]

In 2017, three Swedish transplants living in New York started BonBon—a company that imports Swedish candies. The brand became popular fast, thanks to their fun branding (light pink packaging with “BonBon” in blue cursive), a wide selection of craveable candies (Swedish candy typically uses higher-quality ingredients than those found in their American counterparts, often with fewer dyes and artificial flavors), […]

Braving a rainy and cold lower Manhattan, 40-or-so people, primarily members of the maritime industry, gathered on Nov. 19 in a conference hall in the back offices of Manhattan’s Staten Island Ferry Terminal. The occasion: the Blue Highways Freight Ferry Field Day, organized by the NYC Department of Transportation. The reason I was there was that the Brooklyn Marine Terminal […]

We got both Lander and Goldman in this one… from last month’s issue

There may not have ever been a Red Hook Star-Revue were it not for the Buttermilk Channel. Not the body of water next to what has become known as the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, but a restaurant that opened up on Court and Huntington streets, not that far from Red Hook. I had two offices on that block, where I ran […]

The day after the televised debate with New York City mayoral hopefuls Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo Curtis Sliwa, (this of course was before Mamdani’s victory), it seemed logical to ask people for their thoughts about the candidates. Strangely, it was like pulling teeth, getting people to talk about these guys. “This is a very contentious race and I don’t want […]

Cream cheese prices increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, as did the prices of many other common grocery items. However, while the prices of most foods have come back down, the price of Philadelphia cream cheese remains high, even though the prices of other cream cheese brands have decreased. Cream cheese prices initially went up in part because of higher demand […]

Greg O’Connell died in his home on Saturday, Aug. 2, leaving behind a long legacy as a real estate and community developer in Red Hook. When O’Connell first began investing in Red Hook in the 1970s, it was a largely desolate neighborhood—especially the waterfront—but he had a vision, said Greg T. O’Connell, who in September spoke to the Red Hook […]

“Sophie’s Choice” — a term from William Styron’s 1979 novel of the same name — describes an impossible decision between two equally terrible outcomes. That’s exactly the false “choice” New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and Mayor Eric Adams have presented us with in their Brooklyn Marine Terminal Vision Plan: either let them seize half of our public port […]