Columnist one of last crusaders in New York City
NEW YORK — Pete Hamill, the selftaught, streetwise newspaper columnist whose love affair with New York inspired a colorful and uniquely influential journalistic career and produced several books of fiction and nonfiction, died Wednesday morning. He was 85.
Hamill died at a Brooklyn hospital from heart and kidney failure, his brother Denis confirmed in an email.
Pete Hamill was one of the city’s last great crusading columnists and links to journalism’s days of chattering typewriters and smokefilled banter, an IrishAmerican both tough and sentimental who related to the underdog and mingled with the elite. Wellread, wellrounded and very wellconnected, Hamill was at ease quoting poetry and Ernest Hemingway, dating Jacqueline Onassis or enjoying a drink and a cigarette at the old Lion’s Head tavern in Greenwich Village.
Hamill lived with Shirley MacLaine, dated Onassis and was linked to Linda Ronstadt, Susan Sontag and Barbra Streisand among others.
His topics ranged from baseball, politics, murders, boxing and riots to wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Ireland. But he would always look back to the New York he grew up in, a predigital age best remembered through the dreamscape of blackandwhite photography — a New York of egg creams and fivecent subway rides, stickball games and widebrimmed hats, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and there were more daily papers than you could count on one hand.
“I have the native son’s irrational love of the place,” Hamill wrote in his 2004 book, “Downtown: My Manhattan.” “New York is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty.”
A Brooklynborn high school dropout, Hamill was a columnist for the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine and Esquire. He wrote screenplays, several novels and a bestselling memoir, “A Drinking Life.”
“Pete was a giant of journalism, a quintessential New Yorker and a personal friend to my father and myself,“Gov.
Andrew Cuomo said in a statement. “I learned much from him and he inspired me. Pete’s death is going to leave a hole in the heart of New Yorkers.”
In 2019, Hamill and one of his greatest contemporaries, Jimmy Breslin, were featured in the HBO documentary “Deadline Artists.”