Ralph Gardner Jr.

United States

Writer at Freelance

Commentator and Writer at WAMC, Northeast Public Radio

Lifetime NYC writer and resident. Former WSJ "Urban Gardner" columnist

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Articles

Aris's ashes

5 days ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

My friend Aris, who died in December, made clear what he wanted done with his ashes. It’s on my to-do list for this spring. He wanted them sprinkled around the tree that stands in front of our house. I’m frankly not sure why. He visited rarely, only once in the last forty or so years, when he attended my daughter’s wedding here in 2019.
Assembling Toy Lawnmower Triggers Panic Attack

1 week ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

Nothing sparks questions about my competence and self-worth like facing the challenge of putting something together. If you subscribe to Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s (no relation) theory of multiple intelligences there are at least seven of them; not just the verbal and mathematical skills that I was led to believe were all that mattered back in high school. Poring over them I find I’m deficient in many. For example, musical and artistic intelligence.
Trees make their case at a Catskill art exhibition

2 weeks ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

Were you a tree — and given the significant size of WAMC’s listening audience and public radio’s conservationist tendencies, maples and oaks may well be among them — what would be your favorite season? A couple of recent developments in tandem prompted the question. The first, unsurprisingly, was spring, my favorite and I would argue the Northeast’s most exciting time of year. Life feels resurrected.
Donald Trump and I agree: Good water pressure is an inalienable right

3 weeks ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

Finally, something that Donald Trump and I agree on. An executive order the President signed April 9th — propitiously titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads” — reverses a Biden era regulation that conserved water by restricting the number of gallons per minute that can flow from showerheads and other appliances.
I bought a window seat and got a wall instead

1 month ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

Air travel these days, economy class air travel in particular, is an exercise in ritual humiliation. The seats are so cramped that after being immobilized on a transatlantic flight for seven or more hours you almost need to be assisted to stand upright — the ways those astronauts recently were whose return to Earth had been delayed for months. I realize that I bear some responsibility for my predicament.
Discovering my Romanian past

1 month ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

My mother Nellie often spoke about the Bucharest apartment where she lived until her family immigrated to the United States in 1939. “Actually,” she mused less than a year before she died in 2019, “by any standards including probably today in the United States it was a fabulous place.”She described a duplex art deco apartment with wraparound terraces and a staircase that wouldn’t have provoked surprise were Norma Desmond to swan down its steps in Sunset Boulevard.
Wine and liquor tariffs couldn't come at a worse time

2 months ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

Prior to the pandemic I used to visit WAMC’s studios every week to record my commentary. Then the lockdown hit and I started recording from home on my phone. I’ve done so ever since because nobody objected. I suspect that has less to do with the quality of the sound than because if somebody is going to complain it’s going to be about the substance of the work and the twists and turns of my damaged soul. By the way, I’m recording this column at WAMC.
I take Trump's fake news claims personally

2 months ago | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

I worked for the Wall Street Journal for almost seven years in the 2010’s, producing more than 1,300 columns at a rate of four or five a week. The name of the column was Urban Gardner. It wasn’t a gardening column, even though first-time readers would occasionally ask my advice on growing tomatoes.
Bears are attacking my bird feeders

2 months ago | berkshireeagle.com | Ralph Gardner Jr.

It takes all my self-discipline to adhere to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s admonition to hang my bird feeders only from Dec. 1 through March 31 to reduce conflict with bears. Frankly, I don’t follow their advice. After losing several pricy feeders to bears, I have cheaper feeders that don’t cause heartbreak if they happen to get destroyed before and after the dates that the DEC says is safe to hang them.
A grand European style cafe and chocolatier opens in Hudson, NY

Feb 8, 2025 | wamc.org | Ralph Gardner Jr.

Among the entertaining elements of Hudson’s holiday season Winter Walk were tableaux performed in storefronts. Children ballerinas executing pirouettes in one window, Santa getting his locks shorn in another. But perhaps the best show in town was invisible from the street. And for good reason. It was happening behind the imposing walls of a bank. Or should I say Banque.