New Yorkers in Exile

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Lives Lived: He was the son of a public school custodian and an emergency room nurse who grew up to become one of the great chroniclers of New York life. He crusaded against injustice and covered 9/11, the police, the subway, the coronavirus and more for six daily newspapers. Our colleague Jim Dwyer has died at 63.

I went to high school with Jim's older brother. I loved reading his columns. Sad day when the news broke yesterday.

Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies at 63
Working for New York Newsday, The Daily News and The Times, he covered the human stories of New York in dramatic prose and crusaded against injustice.

By Robert D. McFadden
Published Oct. 8, 2020
Updated Oct. 9, 2020, 8:56 a.m. ET

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, columnist and author whose stylish journalism captured the human dramas of New York City for readers of New York Newsday, The Daily News and The New York Times for nearly four decades, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 63.

His death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was announced by Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, and Clifford Levy, the paper’s metropolitan editor, in an email to the Times staff. The cause was complications of lung cancer.

READ MORELooking back on the journalism of Jim Dwyer in the New York Times.
In prose that might have leapt from best-selling novels, Mr. Dwyer portrayed the last minutes of thousands who perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001; detailed the terrors of innocent Black youths pulled over and shot by racial-profiling state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike; and told of the coronavirus besieging a New York City hospital.

Mr. Dwyer won the 1995 Pulitzer for commentary for columns in New York Newsday, and was part of a New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer for spot news reporting for coverage of a subway derailment in Manhattan. Colleagues called Mr. Dwyer — who worked for six metropolitan dailies and wrote or co-wrote six books — a fast, accurate and prolific writer who crusaded against injustice.

In a kaleidoscopic career, Mr. Dwyer was drawn to tales of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, wrongly convicted prisoners and society’s mistreated outcasts. He wrote about subway straphangers and families struggling to make ends meet.

As a student at Fordham University, he had hoped to become a doctor until he joined the student newspaper, The Fordham Ram, and one day wrote about a rough-looking man having an epileptic seizure on a Bronx sidewalk. Mr. Dwyer stopped to help.

“People passing by were muttering disapproval, ‘junkie,’ ‘scumbag,’ that sort of thing,” he wrote. “The seizure subsided, and those of us who had stayed with him learned he was a veteran and had been having seizures since coming back from Vietnam. A few minutes later, off he went. But that moment stayed with me.”

A 19-year-old cub reporter, he wrote a lead paragraph that set the tone for a career: “Charlie Martinez, whoever he was, lay on the cold sidewalk in front of Dick Gidron’s used Cadillac place on Fordham Road. He had picked a fine afternoon to go into convulsions: the sky was sharp and cool, a fall day that made even Fordham Road look good.”

Mr. Dwyer was hooked. In a 2020 interview for this obituary, he said: “I intended to be pre-med, but The Fordham Ram got in the way of that. It was a crusading student newspaper. I couldn’t resist it. It was a joy for me to discover how much I loved reporting and writing.”

He was an established columnist, having been one for six years at The Daily News and for nine of his 11 years at New York Newsday when The Times hired him to be a general-assignment reporter in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

Jim Dwyer, About New York
A selection of writing by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who died on Thursday, as chosen by his New York Times colleagues.
Oct. 8, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/nyregion/jim-dwyer-stories.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

He soon gravitated to tales of injustice: Anthony Faison and Charles Shepherd, innocent men, released after serving 14 years for murder; the city’s $8.75 million settlement with Abner Louima, four years after a police officer sodomized him with a broomstick in a Brooklyn station house; and freedom for Jose Morales after 13 years in prison for a killing he did not commit.

And the day two hijacked jetliners hit the twin towers of the trade center, Mr. Dwyer caught New York’s mood in the subdued phrases of a veteran columnist: “The city changed yesterday. No one, no matter how far from Lower Manhattan, could step on a New York sidewalk untouched by concussions.”

Later, he wrote about artifacts that figured in the 9/11 attack, including a window washer’s squeegee, which had been used to cut a hole in sheetrock to free six men trapped in an elevator on the 50th floor of the North Tower. They fled down stairways, emerging just as the South Tower fell in the distance.

In 2005, Mr. Dwyer and a Times colleague, Kevin Flynn, published “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.” The book, based in part on a long investigative report published in The Times in 2002, and on survivors’ accounts and tapes of police and fire operations, chronicled the final minutes of many among the thousands who died in the collapsing towers.

Our high school lost 2 that day.

In their book about the 9/11 attack, Mr. Dwyer and Kevin Flynn recounted the final minutes of many among the thousands who died in the collapsing towers.

Since 2007, Mr. Dwyer had written The Times’s “About New York” column, succeeding a distinguished line of writers including Meyer Berger, David Gonzalez and Dan Barry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/nyregion/jim-dwyer-dead.html