CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: Where I’m from, the more things change, the more they stay the same.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I don’t remember being here, yet nothing ever changes here. I’ve spent almost four weeks staying with friends in New York City; it’s almost as if I’ve already moved and settled in (even without a job offer and apartment lease yet). So much has changed in the four-and-a-half years that I’ve been away. Residential and commercial development is sweeping the Big Apple the likes of which I’ve never in my life seen. Housing costs have become even more astronomical than ever. Funky neighborhoods have become sadly Eastablishment (good-bye, Park Slope), while former slums have become exclusive enclaves (hello, DUMBO). It’s hard to realize that this is my home.

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(Photo: An honest look of shock as I sit amidst one-third of my surprise 37th birthday party.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I turned 37 this month in my hometown. And while August continues to merge into seemingly one exceptionally and unexpectedly long trip to Gotham to interview and apartment hunt, it was turning 37 that I found most informative. Purely for narcissistic reasons. Essentially I was smoked.

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(Photo credit: Jupiter Images.)

The new community-based environmental-justice group, Neighbors Project, asked if they could tell you about the Car-Free Block Party they’re throwing in Lakeview this Saturday. You know they had me at “car-free” so here’s their press release:

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(Photo: No-Entry sign at Love Canal, NY. This was a NYSDEC fiasco, too.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

What was I thinking? The first day of the first of my interview trips to New York City this summer, I wore my interview clothes from before my crack-of-dawn airplane ride, to my arrival at 20-year-best-friend Peter’s house an hour after I literally walked out on my planned interview at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Before I left NYC in 2003, I knew NYSDEC to be somewhat less than a class act. I’m surprised at how short my memory has become during my tenure on the shores of Lake Michigan.

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(Photo: As a matter of fact, we have been posing on this corner for 21 years.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

So I’m GLYNYing again. This past spring, I chronicled the sudden and miraculous Internet reunion of my 1980s cohort of Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY, pronounced “GLIH-nee”). The nation’s first-ever gay youth peer support group, GLYNY was founded in New York City in 1969 as a splinter cell of the historic Gay Liberation Front.

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