Brian Hyland is coming home to Woodhaven, the town where he grew up, went to school and where he lived when he sang the #1 smash hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”
Just imagine that for a moment. He was 16 years old, a graduate of St. Thomas the Apostle and student at Franklin K. Lane High School, and a neighborhood kid who lived off 78th Street.
His dad belonged to a club that met around the corner at the Union Course Bar, known today as Neir’s Tavern.
With success came the opportunity to move, which his family took, relocating to Long Island. But in his heart, Hyland remained a kid from Woodhaven.
He went on to have a long career, scoring nearly two-dozen Top 100 hits along the way, including “Sealed With A Kiss” and “Gypsy Woman.” He still tours today. We went to see him at Westbury Music Fair in 2019 before the world upended for a year, and he’s playing in September in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
And one week after he leaves that the stage, Hyland will be back in Woodhaven for a homecoming party like we haven’t seen around here in ages.
The main event will be an unveiling of a sign at the home he grew up in near the corner of 78th Street and 87th Road. It won’t be one of those blue-and-yellow markers you are used to seeing around town; you aren’t allowed to put those up for living people.
Instead, with the consent of the homeowners, we will be placing a beautiful marker on the property of the house for all to see. That ceremony begins at 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 18, and everyone is welcome to attend.
That has to be a bit of a surreal moment for someone, but also a nice one. We’ve all revisited our childhood homes. Brian Hyland has done the same whenever he visited Woodhaven on one of his many trips back to the New York City area for a show.
No matter how many years go by, your childhood home is still your home. That is where you grew up, and if you look hard enough and close your eyes you can see your loved ones coming out the front door.
After the ceremony, we’ll take a short walk, an Itsy Bitsy Parade you might say, over to Neir’s Tavern where we’ll have a great big “welcome home” bash for Hyland.
We’re expecting a lot of former residents of Woodhaven to come for the day, so it will be a homecoming party for a lot of people.
But if you’d like to avoid the crowds and say welcome home to Brian Hyland before the ceremony, the Woodhaven Cultural & Historical Society is hosting a private gathering, a meet-and-greet with Brian.
Everyone who attends the will receive an autographed item and get a nice photograph taken with him. Food and beverages will be provided.
Tickets are $75 and all proceeds will used to pay for the sign and the party. The locale of the meet-and-greet is being kept under wraps, but it will be in the confines of Woodhaven.
One special guest that weekend will be Laurie Ennd. She manages the “Memories Growing Up In Woodhaven” group on Facebook and was instrumental in making this happen.
Again, everyone is invited to the ceremony at 3 p.m. and the party afterwards at Neir’s (Brian will be attending both), but if you would like the full homecoming experience, email us at woodhavenhistory@gmail.com and get a ticket for the meet-and-greet.
There are a limited number of tickets (we are keeping the attendance low), and they are going fast. It’s going to be a great weekend and we are really looking forward to welcoming Brian home.
One last thing, Make Music NYC will be coming to Woodhaven this Monday, June 21. There will be live music at Forest Parkway Plaza at Jamaica Avenue from 3 to 6 p.m. This event is sponsored by the Woodhaven Business Improvement District.
This will also mark the public debut of the Woodhaven Art Circle, a collection of artists from our community. Several artists will be showing off their work and we’re hoping other local artists will attend and introduce themselves to the group.
And we’ll also be looking for volunteers to make a tribute video for Brian Hyland, so come Monday and enjoy some music as we start planning the biggest homecoming party Woodhaven has seen in ages!

James Regan went from being a student at Matin Luther School to executive director.
“Jim is the most action-orientated person,” said James Bunn, director of Marketing at Martin Luther. “His legacy is going to be one of vision, looking at horizons, opportunities, and going for things to get it done.”
For the last four years, Regan has served as executive director of the school. He led the “Reset For Growth” Initiative, which resulted in an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the update the building and the school’s technology.
“We made changes so that you, the customer, want to bring your children into our building and you want to feel good about it,” said Regan.
Regan graduated from Martin Luther in 1976. He returned in 1978, but in 1979 left for two years for a post at Lexington School for the Deaf.
He returned to Martin Luther as a teacher and head wrestling coach, positions he held from 1981 to 2013. He led the team to an Independent Private & Parochial Schools championship in 2011.
He has served as director of Athletics since 1985, and in 2012 was appointed principal.
“I want to leave the school in a place where it will continue to succeed for the next 50 years,” Regan said.
Martin Luther School approved for accreditation by the New York State Association of Independent Schools Board of Trustees at its meeting held on June 1.
“We are very proud of our accreditation by NYSAIS,” Regan said. “It is important for our parents, students, and community to see the NYSAIS symbol we earned so they know that we hold ourselves to the highest possible standards in all we do so our students can thrive and be their very best both academically and socially.
“The rigorous evaluation process we underwent also resulted in our continual refinement of where and how we want to meet the ever-changing demands of education in our world today,” he added.

Millie Tunnell’s new headstone will be memorialized on Juneteenth in Maple Grove Cemetery.
The one-of-a-kind plaque honoring Tunnell, who lived in Jamaica and passed away at the age of 111, is the product of a collaboration between The Kew-Forest School and The Friends of Maple Grove.
A group of high school students led by art teacher Narges Anvar worked closely with cemetery historians, Helen Day and Carl Ballenas, to piece together the life story of Tunnell and design a monument that would honor her legacy.
Through diligent research, Day and Ballenas were able to locate her previously unmarked grave using old maps of the cemetery’s layout. They became determined to memorialize Tunnell when they discovered a set of newspaper clippings printed over 125 years ago that provided insight into her life.
After Tunnell had reached her 100th birthday, reporters would write stories on her annually until her passing in 1896. According to those articles, Tunnell had a sharp memory, liked to smoke a corncob pipe and was able to thread a sewing needle without using glasses.
She explained that she was born into slavery in Accomack County, Virginia, on the Tunnell plantation and often recounted the time she met George Washington.
Tunnell married Merrick Ewell from the nearby Ewell plantation and bore nine children. Ewell was freed, and fearing he would be enslaved again he fled to Queens.
When the owner of the Tunnell plantation died in 1855, his will stated that his 19 slaves, including Tunnell and her children, were to be set free.
However, the will was contested, and the court determined that a sum of $1,269 – around $36,000 today – was to be paid by Tunnell before her and her family were allowed to leave. It took her just over five years to gain that freedom.
Despite a trove of historical information, Day and Ballenas couldn’t find any pictures of Tunnell, so they reached out to Anvar, who passed on their work to her students and asked them to create an illustration that would express Tunnell’s “courage, strength and nobility.”
“It was just perfect,” Anvar said in reference to Annie Vaca’s winning design. “It was a whole collaborative process, and I thought this was a great opportunity for students to get involved with something historically significant while learning about the humanitarian impact of art.”
The illustration on Tunnell’s new plaque features a reinterpretation of an old anti-slavery logo. It shows the image of a Black woman now standing up instead of kneeling down, and triumphantly dropping a set of shackles to the floor. There are also nine birds flying off into the distance that represent each member of the Tunnell family buried at Maple Grove Cemetery.
“There’s a bridge here between the past and the present and my aim is to take history and make it alive,” said Ballenas, who’s organized numerous monuments in Maple Grove Cemetery to people that have been overlooked.
“People engage with history in a different way when you explore it through someone’s personal perspective,” he added. “It gets people curious and students want to learn about history all of a sudden because it’s connected with a part of their life.”

New York City is currently facing an unprecedented number of crises. Small businesses have been brought to heel by the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and public safety have both declined significantly, all while the city continues to get more and more expensive due to the lack of comprehensive planning for development and affordable housing.
These crises have hit the outer boroughs particularly hard, where mainstreet economics and working-class New Yorkers are struggling to hang on. For these reasons, our paper looked for a mayoral candidate who we believe would best protect and serve the interests of communities in Brooklyn and Queens. After much deliberation, we believe that candidate is Andrew Yang.
Although Yang gained notoriety as a presidential candidate, he possesses an intimate knowledge of Queens and Brooklyn (his wife is a Bayside native ) that is reflected in his policies. His vision for the city is bold and comprehensive, yet it doesn’t lose sight of the particular problems and solutions that are applicable to individuals, families, and business owners.
In an interview with our paper earlier this month, Yang spoke at length about his plans for economic recovery and small business investments. More so than any other candidate, Yang demonstrated an understanding that mom-and-pop businesses are the bread and butter of the City’s economy, especially in neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn and Queens.
We are particularly impressed by Yang’s plan for a People’s Bank of New York, which would offer every New Yorker access to basic financial products and services. The bank would also guarantee loans and financial support for small businesses in underserved and immigrant communities.
Such a measure would preserve the culture and livelihood of many neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. A People’s Bank is also particularly important and feasible during our current moment, when federal funding for COVID-19 relief is available to invest into small businesses and local communities.
Similarly, Yang’s comprehensive plan for land use and housing would bring positive change to Brooklyn and Queens. His commitment to move away from the de Blasio era practice of rezoning poorer communities would decrease the effects of gentrification and displacement in the outer boroughs.
Additionally, his support for accessory dwelling units and 100 percent affordable housing on city-owned properties would increase housing stock without enduring the unwieldy ULURP process that often stalls developments or leads to unaffordable housing (consider the Gowanus rezoning fight currently unfolding in Brooklyn).
Such measures would transform the citywide conversation about zoning and development into a more productive and thoughtful conversation about planning.
Although he is a political outsider, Yang has received endorsements from Sunset Park Councilman Carlos Menchaca, Flushing Assemblyman Ron Kim, and other established politicians.
These relationships make us confident that Yang will work effectively with the City Council and other government officials without getting bogged down by his own political debts.
Similarly, Yang’s commitment to curb the rise in hate crimes indicates that he will be willing to work closely with the NYPD and other agencies to secure public safety. Yang was recently endorsed by the firefighters union, another good sign on this front.
In meeting with Yang, we were pleasantly surprised by his grasp on the city and its inner workings. However, his distance from the machinery of New York City politics is surely a welcome change.
We believe that Yang’s plans for the city strike the right balance between a large-scale vision for change and a clear focus on the specific issues affecting communities and businesses. For these reasons, we think Andrew Yang is the best choice for Queens, Brooklyn, and all of New York.
After Yang, we were most impressed by Kathryn Garcia. Many people with close ties to our paper — elected officials and constituents alike — sing the virtues of her work ethic and experience as the head of the Department of Sanitation. Our own interactions with her inspire similar sentiments.
We are confident that Garcia would be a great administrator and manager of city politics. However, her vision for small business relief and the post-COVID recovery is not as bold as Yang’s, and for that reason we rank her second on our ballot.
Much the same could be said for Eric Adams. Our paper has interacted with Adams on the campaign trail and during his time as Brooklyn borough president, and we have consistently been impressed by his integrity and professionalism.
Like Garcia though, Adams’ plans for recovery and small business support are not comprehensive enough for the current moment. Additionally, we are concerned that Adams will shy away from political fights on account of his preexisting relationships with politicians, the police force, and other key players at City Hall.
Other candidates in the race have left much less of an impression. Even though she labels herself as a progressive, Maya Wiley brought about very little change as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
If anything, she made police accountability even worse during her tenure when she agreed with de Blasio’s decision to make police disciplinary records secret.
On the other hand, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales have both watched as their campaigns imploded these past few weeks due to sexual misconduct allegations and labor disputes, respectively.
The victor of the Democratic primary will likely be elected mayor come November. The next person to reside in Gracie Mansion must confront the aftermath of COVID-19 as well as a number of other lingering issues left unresolved by the de Blasio administration.
That person must pursue a bold plan for recovery while listening to and protecting the interests of hardworking New Yorkers.
It’s no easy job, but we believe that Andrew Yang has the best shot of getting it done.

A Lyft driver was killed when his car was struck by an unlicensed driver at a busy intersection in Maspeth early Sunday morning.
Mohammed Hossain, 47, was driving his final passenger of the night when his Toyota RAV4 was T-boned by a Ford Explorer at the intersection of Fresh Pond Road and Eliot Avenue. The accident occurred at 3:50 a.m., just moments after Hossain reportedly texted his wife that he would be home soon.
Hossain was rushed to Wyckoff Height Medical Center where he later died. His 20-year-old passenger suffered only minor injuries.
Devastated family members visited the on Sunday to mourn the loss of the Bangladeshi immigrant. Hossain lived in Borough Park and had three children.
The driver of the Explorer, 22-year-old Erik Chimborazo was arrested at the scene. He has been charged with vehicular manslaughter, drunk driving, and driving without a license. His vehicle had no inspection certificate and the Bushwick resident never got the car insured.
According to NYPD data, 106 people have died in car crashed in 2021, up from 80 during he same time period last year. Many blame the problem in part on emptier streets due to the pandemic for emboldening reckless drivers.

District 39 is expansive — reaching from Gowanus and Park Slope up to Borough Park and Kensington — and therefore requires a council member with an expansive knowledge of city politics and the widespread needs of constituents. For these reasons, we believe that Brandon West is the right person for the job.
Although he is a first-time candidate, West is anything but a newcomer to the world of politics. For years he worked as a budget staffer at City Hall, a role that gave him an intimate knowledge of the city’s finances and how agencies interact with one another.
West fought for a fairer and more balanced budget from within City Hall, particularly as it pertains to public safety, housing, sanitation, and other quality-of-life services. However, he was frustrated by politicians conducting business as usual, and decided it would be best to finally run himself.
Unlike Brad Lander, the district’s current representative and a candidate for comptroller, West will not ignore constituent services in pursuit of greater notoriety at City Hall.
In an interview with our paper, West demonstrated a clear understanding of how the problems plaguing constituents connect to citywide problems.
In his mind, every missed trash pickup is connected to sanitation cuts, every eviction is connected to the larger crisis of affordable housing, and every controversial rezoning (such as the Gowanus rezoning in District 39) is connected to the city’s broken land-use bureaucracy. When West talks about hot-button topics, it isn’t all fluff.
We were particularly impressed by West’s ideas to protect small businesses, which include fighting for a vacancy tax and commercial rent relief that would help struggling businesses survive under the pressure of COVID-19 and unfair landlords.
West also advocates for an expansion of participatory budgeting, which he hopes will give constituents who have long been ignored by their representatives a better chance at having their voices heard.
We are confident that West will be able to navigate these large issues at City Hall without losing sight of their impact on the many neighborhoods of District 39. He is a measured, thoughtful, and experienced leader who can protect the interests of individuals, families, businesses, and communities.
However, we would be remiss without mentioning some of the other impressive candidates running in District 39.
Shahana Hanif — a native daughter of Kensington and director of Organizing and Community Engagement for Brad Lander — has run a fantastic campaign that has drawn widespread support from young people within the district.
Hanif’s community organizing experience is impressive, and her plans for the district, including the creation of a shelter for Muslim women, are extremely thoughtful and focused. We believe that Hanif has a very bright future in politics and public service, and that she would make a fantastic second choice on the ranked choice ballot.
Nonprofit theater founder Justin Krebs has also run an exciting campaign that focuses on education and arts in the district. Krebs is also notable for receiving a rare endorsement from Ben & Jerry’s, the world famous ice cream company.

From June 8 to June 28, a new memorial at Green-Wood Cemetery will honor the more than 52,000 New Yorkers who have already died from the COVID-19 pandemic. The new installation — titled ‘WE REMEMBER: A COMMUNITY COVID MEMORIAL’ — features images, nameplates, and other items along a 200 feet stretch of the iron gate at the Cemetery’s iconic entrance on Fifth Avenue and 25th Street.

Naming the Lost Memorials, a nonprofit that has organized previous COVID-19 memorials in New York City, worked in collaboration with Green-Wood Cemetery to bring WE REMEMBER to life. The cemetery also partnered with over 20 local organizations to help promote and finance the memorial, including Brooklyn Roots, Flushing Town Hall, the Worker Justice Project, Hebrew Tabernacle, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
“All of us at Green-Wood have seen, firsthand, the toll that COVID-19 has taken on family, friends, our community, and even our industry,” said Richard Moylan, President of Green-Wood Cemetery. “This beautiful living memorial gives us a special place to remember what they meant to us and how they each made this world a better place.”
“Even as New Yorkers begin to feel the joys of opening, the pandemic rages on in other parts of the world. It’s not over,” Kay Turner, an artist, folklorist, and team member at Naming the Lost Memorials, added. “Nor is the sense of loss we feel knowing that 600,000 of our loved ones in the United States are gone from us. Mourning and remembrance are still necessary acts. Naming those lost to COVID-19 must continue. Our memorial at Green-Wood provides a place to do just that.”
WE REMEMBER functions as an interactive exhibit. Community members and passerby are encouraged to create their own nameplates to add to the ever-growing memorial wall.

Unfortunately, the opening ceremony that was planned for the memorial was cancelled due to weather, yet Green-Wood still hopes to organize candle lightings, name readings, and other events down the road.

Green-Wood Cemetery experienced a dramatic increase in burials and cremations during the pandemic’s heights last spring and summer. The volume of deaths was so great that the cemetery was forced to institute a partial cap on the number of cremations it would allow within a day. Although case numbers and deaths continue to decrease, the staff at Green-Wood Cemetery has remained extremely busy since the pandemic’s start.

For more information on the memorial, visit https://namingthelost.com/memorials/.