Darryl McGrath

Email: darryl.lee@yahoo.com

Darryl McGrath

The Secret Lives of Birds

by Darryl McGrath May 24, 2012

Nature typically grants a species a couple million years on earth, but when you consider all that humans have done to birds in just the last couple of centuries, you wish you could push a ...

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Whew!

by Darryl McGrath May 16, 2012

In an era when even affluent school districts in New York no longer consider it a given that their budgets will pass, the Albany School Board had good reason this week to give a heartfelt ...

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The selection of a superintendent is the most arduous task any school board faces, and so it is with optimism and also some trepidation that the Albany School Board gets ready to meet the candidates. Twenty-six ...

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Spaces Available, Soon

by Darryl McGrath April 18, 2012

Although no one would have said it at the time, getting Albany’s residential permit-parking bill through the state Legislature two years ago is looking like the easy part. With unanimous Common Council approval Monday of an ...

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Curb Your Enthusiasm

by Darryl McGrath April 11, 2012

If experience has taught that you can often double-park your car on a downtown Albany street, run a quick errand and get back before you get a ticket, you might want to continue circling the ...

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School’s Out . . . Of Money

by Darryl McGrath March 29, 2012

When the Albany School Board members gather for tonight’s meeting (Thursday, March 29), they will face a task that board President Dan Egan calls painful and even sickening: deciding how many people will lose their ...

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Pay To Play?

by Darryl McGrath February 23, 2012

For years in Albany, restaurant and tavern owners have known that securing the city's permission to play live music in their establishments was a Byzantine process that resembled the legal code of a medieval Italian ...

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Rehabbing the Neighborhood

by Darryl McGrath January 26, 2012

The first thing you notice inside 95 Trinity Place is the light. An abundance of natural light flooding into a late-18th-century factory building is a suprise, considering that the first people who worked here had been ...

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Food-Scrap Revolution

by Darryl McGrath November 10, 2011

“I have to warn you, it’s going to be smelly.” Scott Kellogg offers this caveat as he prepares to set out on his weekly pickup of food scraps from a couple dozen homes in downtown Albany, ...

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School’s In

by Darryl McGrath October 27, 2011

Education funding has been shredded in the past two fiscal years, thousands of teachers in New York have lost their jobs in the last 18 months, and school budgets are barely squeezing in under the ...

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Planning for a Resurrection

by Darryl McGrath August 4, 2011

Look around any of downtown Albany’s neighborhoods, and you will find the stories of the city’s immigrants, told by the churches left behind as second and third generations grew up and departed. And so it is ...

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Rack ’em Up

by Darryl McGrath July 14, 2011

Finally, in a city where the best option for locking your bicycle has long been the nearest wrought-iron fence, bike racks are popping up everywhere. The selection alone is noteworthy, as racks can be seen on ...

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The Architecture of Health Care

by Darryl McGrath June 16, 2011

Urban community-based health-care clinics are often crammed into ill-suited, makeshift quarters in old buildings, with the clinic barely fitting into the space instead of the space fitting the clinic’s needs. So imagine a clinic facing the ...

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The Hole Story

by Darryl McGrath June 8, 2011

Yes, we know it’s almost strawberry season, and temperatures are in the 90s, but that really was a pothole you just drove over—and a big one at that. Wheel-jarring reminders of last winter abound throughout the ...

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My Best Summer Ever

by Darryl McGrath June 2, 2011

My Best Summer Ever Metroland writers reach back into the grab-bag of memories and recount their seasons of a lifetime Letters From a Soldier In the spring of 1968, my older sister met a young man at ...

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The Missing Link

by Darryl McGrath April 13, 2011

The Land of Painted Caves By Jean Auel Crown, 768 pages, $30 Before there was Harry Potter, long before there was Twilight, there was the story of an orphaned little girl who lived in a fantastic, ...

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