A Community Of Immigrants Prevails

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Coogan’s faced a rent increase so extreme that it could not be misconstrued as a negotiating ploy. The response from the neighborhood was swift and overwhelming. Animation by Christopher Hopkins-Ward

Jim Dwyer, a New York Times reporter who we have only had reason to feature once in these pages, should have remained on our radar once we saw his attention to one of our heroes, Chuck Feeney. In particular, if we had snooped around one year ago after reading that article, we would have found this. Interesting fellow, beyond his journalistic talents. But he dropped off our radar, and for the last year we have probably missed many stories that would fit in these pages. Case in point, he wrote a story a couple weeks ago that failed to capture our attention.

And what a failure, though we might be forgiven the mistake. In the early paragraphs he mentions that the bar at the center of the story is closing because its landlord, a hospital, has plans for the building where the bar is located. That sounds not only ho-hum, but perhaps like progress; hospitals are the most communitarian of institutions, right? We correct that now:

Coogan’s, an Uptown Stalwart, Makes Its Last Stand

The link back to this overlooked Dwyer article came to our attention thanks to Jon Michaud, writing this on the New Yorker’s website:

My mother-in-law, Grecia Solano, immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, in the late nineteen-sixties. For the past forty years, she has lived in an apartment in Washington Heights, where she enjoys a view of the Hudson River and the western tower of the George Washington Bridge from her living-room window. Grecia was a cleaning lady at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (now part of New York-Presbyterian Hospital) for a quarter century, retiring just a couple of years ago. She worked nights, so she had few opportunities to go out, but sometimes she found her way to Coogan’s, an Irish bar and restaurant that opened in 1985, on Broadway at 169th Street. “There was never a problem in that bar,” she told me—a reference to the shady activities that were common in many of the other drinking establishments in the Heights during the difficult years of the late nineteen-eighties and nineties.

If you read on, three paragraphs past that opening, you will be rewarded heartily. At least if you are attracted to the three keywords that got our platform going: community, collaboration and conservation. But even more so if you have reason to be interested in immigrant stories.

And for the record, now that we see the need to keep our radar focused in the right places, Jon Michaud was also only mentioned once in our pages in the past, and that goes all the way back to our first year putting this platform together. Anyone connected to a library is automatically a hero in our book, so we will be watching for this next find.

Read Mr. Michaud’s whole post here.

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