This Friday 27th of April I will be taking The Daily Gotham offline at 10:30pm to work on the site's system upgrade.

After much discussion and deliberation I am upgrading the site from a now almost defunct CivicSpace distribution of Drupal to a custom culturekitchen distribution based on Drupal 4.7, along with a cleaner and easier to use interface based on Michael Bouldin's DailyGotham design.

How can you help?

Please consider sponsoring our effort.

Your sponsorship not only help towards paying for our time and effort, but all sponsors will be acknowledged on a special sponsors post, email annoucement and blogroll.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass Points to Shoddy Research

MARCH 25, 2007, BROOKLYN — There is no dispute that Downtown Brooklyn was once a hotbed of Abolitionist activity. During the Civil War era, most of New York was pro-slavery, so these brave souls would bring firearms with them when going to church because they faced the real risk of being lynched.

The issue has become urgent again because developers, with their friends in City government, want to destroy a few homes to build an underground parking lot and an access road for a hotel.

Residents claim that their homes should not be taken by the City through eminent domain because there is historical proof that their homes were part of the Underground Railroad. In 2004, in order to undermine the residents, the New York Economic Development Corporation (EDC), with their private contractor AKRF, claimed that they consulted prominent historians. Unfortunately they were caught lying: Christopher Moore of the Schomburg Center came before the City Council and testified that he had not been consulted, as claimed by AKRF.

So AKRF went back to the drawing board, and on March 13, 2007, they released a 500+ page document trying to prove that there is insufficient evidence to save these houses from destruction.

Wal-Mart No Way's ad is now on the air. The ad, "The Real Costs of Wal-Mart," is airing on NY1, but you can view it here.

And be sure to call Mayor Mike at 311 to say Wal-Mart No Way!

www.shaunrichman.org

Ben at The Observer found out he will be having competition soon from Newsday.

[via The Politicker: Competition?]:

Well, I hate to blow Newsday's cover, but I hear preparations are underway for a new city politics blog and Politicker rival to be run out of the Kew Gardens Death Star.

The more the merrier, I think.

Heh.

I guess races are all the rage these days. For one, did y'all notice there's another "open-source" NYC blog called, onNY turf. I noticed the other day --and yes, they seem to have opened after us.

It gets better. Guess who is diversifying his political portfolio and starting a ... ahem ... [ cough, cough ] ... and I quote :

[via how open is the source | CivicSpace]:

By the way, you're the target competition of my coming site, and I'll be sure to steal ideas from your site regularly

Mr. Scott Sala of SlantPoint, which seems to be the only NYC Republican blog worth reading, is starting a CivicSpace run community site for NYC Republicans. And given I am active in the CivicSpaceLabs community, trying to find ways to simplify the use of the technology for grassroots organizing, yours truly here will be actually giving some open-source love to Mr. Sala.