Michael McKee: 1939-2025: Celebrating a life devoted to tenants’ rights. Updated on December 3, 2025. The fight started over a broken window, as fights sometimes do. The year was 1969. The window was in Michael McKee’s apartment on West 17th Street. And the fight? That was with predatory landlordism, and it lasted for the rest…… Continue reading Requiem for Michael
Author: Timothy Ledwith
Tim's essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in City Limits, The Morning News, Open Letters Monthly, Pop Matters and other online and print outlets. Since the 1980s, he has also worked in communications at local, national and global organizations advocating for human rights, labor rights and social justice. Tim is an alumnus of The Writers Institute at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and has a Master's degree in biography and memoir from the Graduate Center.
The Truth About Harold
“When I was growing up, the only photo of my Uncle Harold that I ever saw showed a handsome man in a tuxedo.” A graphic novella about family secrets…
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Over & Back
When the City of New York and the union representing workers on the Staten Island Ferry finally reached a long-term labor agreement in September, I felt intensely – even unreasonably – proud. The pact provided about 150 crew members with their first wage hikes in thirteen years, an astounding period for any workforce to keep…… Continue reading Over & Back
“Fix This House”
Roger and Maria Markovics on the winding road to tenants’ rights. Ten Bucks I owe you? Ten Bucks you say is due? Well that’s Ten Bucks more’n I’ll pay you Till you fix this house up new. – “Ballad of the Landlord,” Langston Hughes, 1940. The ground-floor office of United Tenants of Albany was tucked…… Continue reading “Fix This House”
Art of Memory
Thirty-four years ago today, on July 26, 1989, Louis Fulgoni, an accomplished visual artist and a great friend and comrade, died of complications from AIDS at the age of fifty-three. Raised on Staten Island, he had spent most of his adult life in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. In the 1980s, he was the art director and…… Continue reading Art of Memory
Carded
For some reason – in my experience, at least – coincidence and simultaneity tend to arise in the context of travel. There’s something about being unmoored from everyday routine that charges the particles of your personal universe with extra voltage. Perhaps because they are vibrating at a slightly higher frequency than usual, unlikely intersections of…… Continue reading Carded
How to Survive in the Wild, in Five Easy Steps
Embrace the wanderlust but make a plan. It’s the fall of 1979 and I am twenty-one and feeling flush. After working all summer off the books in downtown Albany, I have a housepainter’s sunburn and no particular plans. Suddenly I am struck by a fierce case of wanderlust. White-line fever. Itchy feet. I don’t know…… Continue reading How to Survive in the Wild, in Five Easy Steps
Shot List
When you live in the old house on Staten Island that has been in your family for seventy-five years, you inevitably inherit some ghosts. Sometimes they’re shadows, sometimes sounds. And sometimes they turn up in the form of brittle Super 8 celluloid. When the pandemic hit and I, like most people, had time on my…… Continue reading Shot List
License to Be Thrilled
When in Rome I did not do as the Romans do. I tried but they had millennia to work it out. I was there for not quite four years. When in Rome I had a job at an agency of the United Nations. They (we) worked on food and agriculture in the global south. It…… Continue reading License to Be Thrilled
Escape to Fresh Kills
Sometimes, on less humid days when the smog didn’t hang too thick above the lower bay, the view from the boardwalk was downright effulgent. I was a teenager at the time and so, by definition, not a morning person. Still, I would pause for a moment to take in the ocean view before entering the…… Continue reading Escape to Fresh Kills
Family Stuff
One night in the kitchen too stubborn for a walker mom hit the linoleum hard. Femur smashed but flush with adrenaline piss & vinegar she went under the knife and jesus christ survived. Dying to get back home she died instead in bed at the post-op rehab place. Sad but not so bad if you…… Continue reading Family Stuff
A Dog Year
Did you ever have a dog that was prancing on a hike in serpentine hills one day and gone, forever, the next? Did you adopt a dog from a room full of dogs, a cacophony of howling a few years before, when you saw her sitting quietly on her own? Did you mask up grudgingly?…… Continue reading A Dog Year
The House on the Hill
The house is a talisman – all of it – built circa 1915 in the Rosebank section of Staten Island, bought by my parents in 1948 for ten grand (a stretch for them, then), wood-framed and cedar-shingled (shingled, that is, until they cocooned it in tawny aluminum circa 1970). The two-floor, three-and-a-half bedroom, one-bathroom house…… Continue reading The House on the Hill
Secret Sharing: A Family Story
Why do we tell the stories we tell? In an essay on the ethics of creative non-fiction, Lynn Z. Bloom answers for most storytellers. “I write for the usual reasons writers write about anything important: to get at the truth; to make sense of things that don’t make sense; to set the record straight; to…… Continue reading Secret Sharing: A Family Story
Judy West: A Radical Life
Judy West, public relations and political action director at American Federation of Musicians Local 802 from January 1983 to November 2000, died at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on January 27, 2023. She was ninety-nine. Following is a remembrance of a 2011 conversation I had with Judy, who was my supervisor…… Continue reading Judy West: A Radical Life
“Perception at the Pitch of Passion”
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, by James Baldwin, edited by Randall Kenan. Pantheon Books, 2010. On a chilly night in 1985, about two years before he died, James Baldwin appeared at the Ethical Culture Society in New York. He was reading from The Evidence of Things Not Seen, his book on the Atlanta child…… Continue reading “Perception at the Pitch of Passion”
Published work
Oldies but goodies. Selected non-fiction: essays, reporting and reviews.
Cross the Narrows 