Here's what we're thinking about. Have an opinion you'd like to post here? Contact the editor: davestone13@gmail.com. We'll consider it.
03/28/2018 - 09:18
Updated 46 weeks ago
Has pressure turned Andrew Cuomo into a political klutz, or has the real man suddenly been exposed? Challenged by Cynthia Nixon in the race for New York Governor, the man who's already in the office fumbled his way through a week in which he snarked Jews and his surrogate, Christine Quinn, opted for gay bashing. Is this New York or what?
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03/26/2018 - 16:57
Updated 20 weeks ago
When I wrote this in March, emotions were swollen in the aftermath of RIOC's brutal hammering of the Roosevelt Island Youth Program. Since, from a ridiculous attempt to evict the cat sanctuary from Southpoint and its aftermath, through the exposing the State's history of filling playground drinking fountains with water unfit for human consumption to destroying iconic trees without forewarning or consent, things worsened. It's time for another look.
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03/21/2018 - 08:45
On Saturday afternoon, I stopped by the Howe Theatre in the Cultural Center to see how rehearsals were going for director Jacqueline Lucid's 1776, the classic Broadway musical about the founding of America as a new kind of nation. The show opens Friday at Main Street Theatre & Dance Alliance. Impressed many times already by the grace and professionalism of productions here, I was still stuck in my tracks, nearly unable to stop watching and go home.
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03/16/2018 - 20:11
Updated 48 weeks ago
If RIOC wanted to stir suspicion and mistrust, they couldn't have done a better job than they did last week with a bizarre response to a simple information request.
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03/13/2018 - 16:46
Updated 42 weeks ago
A friend with a close up view of RIOC, the state agency controlled by Governor Andrew Cuomo in the style of an absentee feudal lord, scanned RIOC's proposed 2018 budget and wondered aloud, "Have you heard the expression, 'spending like a drunken sailor?'” In the immediate shadow of President Trump's grandiose military parade proposal, he mused over doing one that might give everyone a good, long - very long, actually - look at what RIOC's been doing with the figurative buckets of cash sitting around 591 Main Street.
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03/02/2018 - 10:15
Updated 51 weeks ago
Harsher language was called for to describe what happened last evening, the night when RIOC's executives and State handlers showed their disdain for Roosevelt Island residents with a raw contempt not seen since the hellish reign of Jerome Blue. An obscenity laced headline stuck in my head all night, but this morning, I did what RIOC was unable to do when they crushed the Roosevelt Island Youth Program, led for 22 years by Charlie DeFino - I put the kids first. I knew they'd be reading, trying to understand what outsiders did to hurt them.
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02/28/2018 - 09:13
With an existential crisis facing the Roosevelt Island Youth Program, a group of concerned parents makes an appeal as a vote that will mean life or death for the program is set for Thursday's RIOC Board Meeting. We are publishing the full text of their outreach without editing, except for graphic features we cannot duplicate.
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02/23/2018 - 15:08
Stung by public protests over the Public Safety Department's handling of crime reports, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation released a open letter in response. We are publishing it in full, without editing.
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02/17/2018 - 17:59
Updated 1 year ago
It's taken RIOC over a year and a half to figure out who should run the Roosevelt Island Youth Center, but the State agency needed less than a day to find a law firm, Bond Shoeneck & King, headquartered, not in New York, but in Syracuse, to act as a venomous conduit for personal attacks on Youth Program Executive Director Charlie DeFino.
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02/10/2018 - 10:02
Updated 1 year ago
Two events this week show, in no uncertain terms, how far we’ve drifted from Roosevelt Island’s original vision — the City of Tomorrow, now a Land of the Lost with memories stitching it together.
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