The Reich family
Rebecca Reich died this week after a lifetime of advocacy for working-class New York.
‘Rebecca Reich had planted herself in front of me at a City Limits event to ask why we weren’t writing about the fierce battle being waged in her neighborhood.’
The names of the city’s real builders, who labor for decades in the toughest neighborhoods, are nowhere. Their accomplishments, everywhere. One of the greatest of these, Luis Garden Acosta, died last week at the age of 73.
Thirty-one years ago today, demonstrators furious over generous subsidies to luxury developers descended on a gleaming poster-child for corporate welfare—the flagship property of the man now poised to be the Republican nominee for president.
From student protests to the People’s Firehouse to the picket lines and strategy sessions of tenant activism, Jay Small was a garrulous and upbeat presence in the movement to make New York more just.
The investigative journalist and advocate, a City Limits alum, devoted his career to holding the powerful accountable and keeping the powerless accounted for.
Behind the new and shiny plan for the Domino factory site is a saga of labor strife, lawsuits, and waterfront politics—one City Limits started telling back in 1983.