Many things happened in 2022, but for me, it will always be the year that my friend Gary Taustine died.
Gary died suddenly at home at 50, of natural causes, in June, attracting a standing-room-only crowd at his Greenwich Village memorial. Many of his survivors had never met each other before, but they all shared the same feeling: We didn’t know how much we needed Gary until he was gone.
Gary spent nearly all his life in the lower third of Manhattan, growing up with his older sister and brother, Rhonda and Mark, on the Lower East Side and gravitating north to 19th Street.
Gary was my first Manhattan friend. I met him in the orbit of 9/11 survivors sometime in late 2001 or early 2002 and was soon one of the lucky few who got to enjoy the best secret meal in town.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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