The Best of Mr NYC Years End

As the clock ticks down to 2022, something occurred to moi: some of my best, or at least my favorite, posts are ones that I wrote at the end of various years. They were, as you might imagine, posts full of ruminations of the year gone by and the one right over the horizon but not always -- sometimes they were interviews or reports of odd things.

So here are my favorite end of the year blog posts that you might enjoy going back and reading again:

On the last day of 2013, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg was leaving office and Mayor-Elect Bill De Blasio was preparing to assume it, I wrote a blog post about how the Bloomberg years had marked a "farewell to funky town", how the wild city of the 20th century had became the much tamer one of the 21st. I also wrote about the recent deaths of some prominent New Yorkers who, in their way, defined "funky town". Now Mayor De Blasio is leaving and Mayor-Elect Eric Adams will be taking over and, it's fair to say, funky town, especially in a COVID world, is well and truly gone forever. 

Then, in 2018, a strange event happened in NYC -- a huge blue burst of light exploded over the sky of NYC, literally electrifying it. It was a strange yet amazing thing to happen in those quiet days between Christmas and New Year's, a reminder that this city is always full of surprises. 

In 2019, in my last post of the year, I did an extensive interview with Hyapatia Lee, the former adult actress and current Native-American activist. She was, and remains, a fascinating person with an amazing life story. It was a real honor to interview her.

Finally, last year, after a year-from-hell and another year-from-hell coming up, I wrote about my distinct memories of December 31, 1986 which remains my favorite New Year's Eve ever.

And now 2021 is in the history books and 2022 beckons. Fingers crossed that things get better but, even if they do, we have a long way to go.