Columnist, The City Charrette, Tribeca Trib

Jim Stratton — raised in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, graduated Oberlin College, spent the next half-century living in New York City. Wife: actor/writer/photographer Cass Collins, with four children: Jeff (structural engineer), Jeremy (jazz bassist), Conor (filmmaker), and Callison (singer-songwriter).

An on-camera news reporter (United Press Newsfilm, UPITN) for a dozen years, spent two Army years in New Orleans where he joined in opening the still-wonderful Maple Leaf bar while writing, in New York City, the column “Keeping Aloft” in the now-iconic SoHo Weekly News. Former co-owner of Puffy’s Tavern and continuing co-owner and General Manager of Grassroots Tavern, he also writes a column, “The City Charrette,” for the Tribeca Trib. A founder of the Downtown Independent Democrats, Lower Manhattan’s political reform club,  he was for 18 years a Democratic District Leader and member of the Democratic New York County Executive Committee. A former chair of Community Board #1 in Lower Manhattan and past president of the SoHo Alliance and P.S. 234 Parents Association. Author of the 1977 book “Pioneering in the Urban Wilderness,” a historical, personal, and informational tour de force on the artist-loft movement of which he was a part.

And he did all this without much intending to.

Meanwhile, he has written a lot of unpublished science fiction. That’s a part of what this blog is about.