Welcome! To The New York Groove

Hello and welcome to the New York Groove. We couldn’t be more excited to have you here. We’re a group of longtime New York City journalists and we’re building an independent, journalist-owned newsroom from the ground up.

For more than a decade, we’ve watched countless local outlets fold altogether or wither away into shadows of their former selves, even when New Yorkers needed information and community the most. (We’ve also worked at a lot of them while all this was going down.) Our city deserves better; New Yorkers deserve more.

We are creating a site, and a community, that people can turn to when they need help navigating this big beautiful mess of a city. Somewhere they can trust for service journalism that will show them how to get and give help, and a place they’ll turn to when they want reminders that fun is a core New York City value.

New York Groove will have an overall mission of making our readers better New Yorkers in every way that phrase implies. We’ll highlight service journalism, mutual aid, explainers, labor movement news, can’t-miss events, and more features pushing back on the idea that only an elite few have the power to shape the future of this city. In short, we’re building a newsroom designed to help New Yorkers become more engaged with the city around them, not merely enraged with it.

Of course, there’s plenty of room for both. As New York City patriots, we love our city and are therefore fueled to point out its flaws and the bullshit that floods its decision making, and to refute the cynics who think better things aren’t possible. On the flip side, we also reject the constant refrain that the city is dead, or dying, or "used to be better and cooler, right before you got here."

We’re also figuring this out as we go along. (None of us is coming into this as a media mogul – we think this is a good thing!) We want to be transparent with our readers and our community at every step of the process of building a new local media outlet from scratch in 2023. We’re starting small, yes, but we want to grow this into something big, something sustainable. And we want you with us while we do it. In order to truly support our readers, we need to be reader-supported.

If your main follow-up here is, “How can I give you piles of money right now?!” Great question, love that energy. You can do it right here. But also, we've got a lot more to say and don't want to take up too much real estate in your inbox on day one – click through for the full spiel about what we're doing here and why.

In short: local journalism is a tough racket, but so is just existing in New York City, and we can't think of anything more worth it. Baby, you'd better believe.

Now, with introductions out of the way, how about some of that reporting we promised you?

Everything you can do today to help asylum seekers in NYC

By Dave Colon

Some 90,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since last April — more than the total capacity of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field combined. They started as asylum seekers who crossed the American border only to be bussed up to the city from Texas, and were often lied to about where they were being sent. The influx has sent the city's homeless shelter population skyrocketing past 100,000. The city and state have struggled to find housing for the new arrivals, and Mayor Eric Adams announced this week the city would attempt to get around its long-standing right-to-housing mandate by setting a 60-day limit for adult migrants staying in emergency relief shelters. That makes things even harder for the migrants to adjust to life here as they’re struggling to find work and permanent homes.

If New York is really a city of immigrants, part of making that more than just empty aphorism is lending a helping hand when new ones arrive. And while the larger issues of how to best recalibrate America's immigration policy are largely outside of the purview of most New Yorkers, that doesn’t mean we’re not eager to help.

If you're looking to help the thousands of asylum seekers who've made the trip to New York City, you can do so with stuff you have lying around the apartment, or by pitching in your time and people skills to help them access basic services.

We’ve rounded up a few of the best options after the jump.

How to visit all 5 NYC boroughs by boat in a single day

By Tim Donnelly

At the New York Groove, we believe in seeing the whole city, and that means getting yourself to all five boroughs any way you can. The best way to do that in the summer time is obviously by water. It’s faster than biking and the exact opposite of being trapped in the still, thick air of an underground subway station.

For just $16 (maybe even less if you hustle for transfers), you can visit all five boroughs by boat in a single day, ripping around New York City’s waterways like a yacht-owning sicko. But you don’t need to invest in risky undersea tourism ventures or even hire your own crew: the NYC Ferry system makes for a perfect way to take all five boroughs by sea.

The following is a guide on how to do this using a weekend ferry schedule. You can do it other days of the week too but this is the math we’ve done for you.

BROOKLYN: Start at Brooklyn Bridge Park (Pier 1) at noon to make sure all your crew and passengers are accounted for.

Boat 1: Take the 12:42 pm East River Line ferry (toward Wall Street) from Pier 1 to Wall Street.

Spend a few minutes here and wait for the Soundview Line ferry. This does not count as the Manhattan stop! You’ll get to that later. This is a layover.  Don’t even leave the dock.

For the rest of your custom NYC By Sea itinerary, smash that link, matey.