Downeast Coastal Maine is a far piece from New York City, where I spent most of my adult life. Here is some of my work, and what others have said about it.
Early Years
The Bridge-Leader was a local newspaper I published in Northern Manhattan in the 1990’s when my neighborhood had one of the highest murder rates in New York City.
Drug dealers east of the Mississippi, from Maine to Florida, were rolling through our streets purchasing astonishing quantities of heroin, cocaine, crack, pot. Dominican gangs were challenging the entrenched Colombian gangs. People were dying on street corners.
With a team of over 30 volunteers, I brought my neighbors current, and critical, information.
What others said:
The New York Times ran a feature about the danger and chaos in our neighborhood after a police officer shot a local teen in the back. It talks about my paper and our coverage.
We broke a story about real estate developers spending money in local political campaigns. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Jim Dwyer, picked up the story for the Daily News.
In Joe Klein’s 1997 New Yorker Magazine profile of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was hoping for reelection, I show up as the Washington Heights Reporter who challenged Giuliani about his dishonesty and poor community relations in a press conference.
Fun fact: The day of that press conference, the Daily News ran a front-page article by Jim Dwyer listing all of the instances in which Giuliani had lied to the people of New York City. The list jumped to a second page. And it cut straight into what many felt was Giuliani’s critical failure as Mayor. I’m gonna guess that Dwyer is one of the big newspaper guys Giuliani complains about to Joe Klein after the press conference. I’m the community journalist.
As Klein recounts the story, Giuliani was still talking about that press conference a day or two later when he got the news that a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, had been beaten and raped by police inside a police precinct bathroom. Giuliani broke with his long-standing habit of lying to New Yorkers. He decided to tell the truth, and New Yorkers reelected him.
Love Letters
Notes on a spiritual path that unspooled after September 11, divorce, sexual harassment.
I had one loyal reader and commenter, “GD.” The letters weren’t written to him, but I recall an evening in the early 1990’s, a dinner party in his apartment on Astor Place. He had just returned from six months in Southeast Asia.
Sitting together at a round wooden table carved in Bali, he began to tell me stories of India and Lord Ganesha. As he spoke, conversations in the room around us blurred into a warm, quiet mist. He would later tell me that is what a direct transmission from a teacher feels like. Maybe he was my teacher.
Gerald Philip MacKenzie, Ganesh Das
April 11, 1954, Havana - January 16, 2023, New York City
The Upper West Side
2015-onward
In 2015, I returned to NYC, and to community journalism.
I’d done other things for a while: There was a deep dive into yoga and my spiritual health after 9/11. I baked bread professionally for Daniel Boulud, Gerard Rubaud, and others. Raised money for the New York Philharmonic, and also for a sculptor making wind turbines, Robert Perless. I was even an elected member of the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting.
But back in the City, I became fascinated with my new neighborhood, the Upper West Side. And I began writing for the West Side Rag, a hyperlocal news organization that served my community.
I covered school boards, police precincts, and neighborhood stories.
What others said:
During the 2020 COVID shutdown, New York Magazine ran a piece called, “The West Side Rag Is the Hyperlocal Site We All Wish We Had.”
I got a great mention for some investigative work I did finding the mother of a homeless man found dead in Riverside Park.
More about that investigation below.
Neil Harris, Jr., aka Stephen
Neil Harris, Jr., known in Riverside Park as “Stephen,” in a 2010 family photo.
Neil Harris, Jr. sat on a bench in the Riverside Park of New York City for well over a year. Pretty much the same bench, all day. Almost every day. He rarely spoke to anyone, but everyone seemed to know who he was, sitting there alone, quiet, pleasant enough, watching. A tightly packed rucksack by his side.
When his dead body was found in the park, with no ID or correspondence, it felt like a strange kind of loss: an unknown story that just bizarrely ended, no details, no redemption. Really, no story. Just a man who called himself “Stephen,” who sat on a bench for what felt like always.
Not long after he died, I happened to see his photo in a database of missing persons with a name, Neil Harris, Jr.
Someone had been looking for this man. I googled and found a Facebook page with his name on it. Strangely, he didn’t seem to have anything to do with the FB page. I read post after post, comment after comment until I found a woman who wrote that she was hoping he’d come home. That was Susan Hurlburt, his mother.
So began a 6 week adventure trying to connect Susan Hurlburt with her deceased son. Joy Bergmann, writing for the West Side Rag, followed her original story about “Stephen's” death in the park with a piece about Susan and my effort.
More recently Radio Diaries has picked up and explored the story of Neil Harris, Jr. as part of their series on the people buried on Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field. I contributed and I’m in the first episode.
The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island premiered as an Official Selection of the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2023. The series will begin release on the Radio Diaries podcast on September 28. It will start airing on NPR’s All Things Considered on October 9th, 2023. You can hear the trailer here.