December 2021 / It was 1959 and Nat King, Roland Wallace and I had just won Boys’ Club of New York Blue Jackets, satin symbols of years-long battles in the trenches of the Lower East Side against other, equally ambitious 15-year-olds, especially the very tough Jewish kids from the Boy’s Brotherhood Republic. Along with the jackets came an evening with one-time welterweight boxing champion, Barney...
March 2020 / Recently, Greg Russ, the chairman of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) indicated that the agency could do the unthinkable and partially privatize the city’s public housing stock as a way to bridge that agency’s ever-widening repair bill. This was brought about by Russ’ revelation that the cost of the repairs over the next five years could be a staggering $40 billion, up...
March 2018 / Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They posses and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful. In a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I found myself in Penn Station recently one evening, and with...
February 2018 / I found myself in Penn Station recently one evening, and with every step I took was accosted by a panhandler. I mention this because the experience was eerily familiar to my undergraduate days at Rutgers University when walking through the Station was akin to leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to satisfy a school of piranhas. In my University days, New York City was told to...
August 2017 / In Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan, he described the energy landscape in New York City at that time as follows (and which I have paraphrased) : Frank Algernon Cowperwood does not believe in the people; he does not trust them. To him they constitute no more than a … coal seam which is to be exploited …They present but a mass of bent backs, their knees and faces in the mire...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.
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