I came of age in the prewar apartment canyons of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As we wended our way back from high school, a buddy and I would stop by the 91st Street soda stand and pick up the tabloids. We read as we walked, gorging on Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin and Jóse Torres, a boxing champion who became a pretty damn good columnist.

Then there were the sports pages and all those streetwise voices.

Later I discovered The Village Voice, Ellen Willis, Andrew Sarris, Alexander Cockburn, Wayne Barrett. Theirs were columns written from a gloriously disputatious bleacher.

Three years ago, I was offered the delicious opportunity to join this line of march, to hustle along and try not to trip over myself. My hope was to revisit the city I knew, and to chase the changing city I half-knew. I rediscovered an intoxicating, blink-and-it’s-gone place: Guatemalan immigrants battling to save their Queens park from ruin, Senegalese mothers fighting in housing court for heat, and former patrons rallying to save a beloved postal delivery man’s home from foreclosure’s maw.

Last week, the mail brought a letter containing a beauty of a college graduation speech by Teourialeir Johnson. She is an inmate at Bedford Hills state prison. “Education,” she told her audience, “has a way of awakening us from the paralysis of our fall.”