Pete Hamill, legendary New York columnist, has died
Source: Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Pete Hamill, the self-taught, street-wise 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 was truly one of the good guys,” Denis Hamill said.
Pete Hamill was one of the city’s last great crusading columnists and links to journalism’s days of chattering typewriters and smoked-filled banter, an Irish-American both tough and sentimental who related to the underdog and mingled with the elite. Well-read, well-rounded and very well connected, 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.
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 pre-digital age best remembered through the dreamscape of black and white photography — a New York of egg creams and five-cent subway rides, stickball games and wide-brimmed hats, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and there were more daily papers than you could count on one hand.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/4387e919e5a4f4dfa8e024402bd2f9ea
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Cross gently, Mr Hamill 
I'd heard he wasn't that well but still
Younger NYC'rs might not know that The NY Post was once a liberal newspaper back in the '60's (early '70's).
There was a whole group of reporter opinion columnists: Jimmy Breslin, Mary McGrory, Murry Kempton, Art Buchwald, and Pete Hamill. I read them all. He wrote for other papers, too. Became an editor. Wrote non-fiction and fiction
Something I either didn't know because I missed those columns in that crazy time, or was so horrified that I "forgot" it - but read him in an interview in 2018 he recalled being at the Ambassador Hotel for Bobby Kennedy's California Primary.
He was one of several people who wrestled the gun out of Sirhan's grip. 
He wrote one of my favorite novels - Forever.
The protagonist goes from Ireland to Mahattan in the mid to late 1600's seeking retribution for terrible deed done against his father. He helps some people, and is bestowed Immortality as long as he remains in Manhattan as a reward. So the story spans centuries of NYC history as he meets up with all manner of people, and groups. Serious, funny, moving, *magical*. 
Pete had finished it before 9-11. But because he was mostly a life long NYC'r and lived in Lower Manhattan at that time - he added 9-11 as well. I highly recommend it.
RIP Pete Hamill.
