Opinions & observations: Focusing on those who ‘built’ Bay Ridge: attorney, civic leader Bob Howe
In this ongoing series focusing on pre-pandemic builders of Bay Ridge, we again direct your attention to the true leaders whose volunteerism ‘built’ Bay Ridge into a juggernaut of civic activity that reached its peak prior to the internet invasion. If you go back through the pages of this newspaper to the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and early into this millennium, you will learn that Bay Ridge was built at a time when scores or even hundreds of residents would flock to meetings of the Bay Ridge Community Council, the Fifth Avenue Board of Trade and the Dyker Heights Civics Association. In fact, it was on a sunny Saturday morning back in the ’90s when leaders like Bob Howe (this week’s Bay Ridge builder), Fran Vella-Marrone, the late Mike Behlen, Larry Morrish, Marty Golden and the late Peter Killen staged the largest community clean-up on municipal record: more than 1,500 volunteers, working in conjunction with city agencies, manned shovels, brooms and paintbrushes throughout Greater Bay Ridge to spruce up their hometown.
These clean-ups continued for years, dwindling somehow only when the internet — Facebook, Google, et al — morphed into our stay-at-home community centers. This week, our Bay Ridge builder of choice is Howe, who led the Merchants of Third Avenue for 30 years, sparking clean-ups, graffiti hunts, festivals and the city’s best Summer Stroll program, along with waging war against a mosquito invasion with Golden, Jim Khoury, the late Larry Morrish and others. As noted last week, this series will hone in on those who actually left the comfort of their home to go out and take part in a community clean-up or attend a Bay Ridge Community Council meeting, long before the dreaded pandemic made almost all of us shut-ins more than two years ago.
Battling mosquitoes, graffiti, street debris, Bob Howe was there