40 Years of Chronicling the Unnoticed
My article this week on Brooklyn Housing Court stands as the final story I wrote as a staff reporter for The Times. It’s been 40 years since the first one. The decades zoomed by, a blink in time.
Working for The Times gets you places. I once spent nearly a month at a toxic Superfund site in Seymour, Ind. It was suggested I go to Columbus, Ohio, for a week to eat an outlandish amount of fast food, some of which was O.K. I filled agreeable days in Omaha scribbling down insights from telephone repairmen.
Best of all, though, were trips drifting through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. While The Times has bureaus sprinkled around the globe, I spent 40 years in the New York office. Openings sprouted elsewhere. Did I want to go? No, but thanks. Mostly, I was assigned to the Metro staff, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The Times explains the world, but I always felt that Metro qualified as its pulse. Covering the billowing activity across the miscellaneity of the five boroughs was never tiresome, never trite. Some reporters relish traveling to Novosibirsk or Malacca. I liked Canarsie. I liked Bayside. They were local. I liked being local.
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