My West Side Rag Story

By Carol Tannenhauser

West Side Rag is the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy.

As a young girl in the 1950s, no doubt influenced by “The Adventures of Superman,” which I watched religiously on television every Saturday morning, I played “reporter.”

My imaginary identity was an amalgamation of Perry White, the hard-boiled, cigar-smoking editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet, and Lois Lane, the intrepid woman reporter who was always getting into jams as she covered the breaking news of the city, saved in the end by Superman.

Okay, I overlooked the anti-feminist message back then.

Sitting at a beat-up child’s desk in the basement of my suburban home, I would suddenly grab the receiver of a red metal toy telephone and bark into it:

“Got a story for me?”

Then, I’d write up the latest robbery or fire in Metropolis on my toy typewriter, which had only one key. You set it to the right letter, pushed the key, and a smudged character would appear on your paper. Needless to say, my stories were short, a quality I strive for in my writing to this day.

I owe my involvement in West Side Rag to my daughter. Here’s the backstory.

In the fall of 2015, at the age of 67, I was back volunteering part-time for The Doe Fund, a nonprofit organization where I had worked full-time for 20 years, in a men’s homeless shelter in Harlem, helping the residents get mainstream, permanent, full-time jobs, so they could then find apartments, and put homelessness behind them. I was devoted to the cause and the organization, but looking for something else to do.

One day, I got an email from my daughter, then in her early thirties. Attached was an ad from West Side Rag, headlined, “Writers Wanted. We Pay.”

“You should write for them,” she wrote in that fateful email. “All my friends read it.”

Eleven years later, at the age of 78, I am the co-owner and editor-at-large of West Side Rag, a remarkably popular, hyper-local, digital-only news site on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Some call it an institution. I often call it a paper.

As for my daughter, after the death of her father and my husband, Robert Tannenhauser, on April 25, 2025, she stepped up to fill his many roles at West Side Rag. Bobby had been running the business side of the Rag ever since he had convinced me to buy it in 2019. His words were, “If we don’t buy it, somebody else will.” (I couldn’t bear the thought of a corporate owner.) Bobby also contributed articles, often about the crime rate, helped set editorial policy, and moderated the comments.

I think my daughter is doing it to honor her father, who was her greatest supporter, and he would be proud of the way she is handling her responsibilities. Freelance writers often tell me, “Nobody pays faster than the Rag.”

I answered West Side Rag’s ad in November, 2015, introducing myself as an experienced freelance writer, and pitching a story about what I knew best: a formerly homeless man who had turned his life around with the help of a great program (The Doe Fund) and an Upper West Side landlord (Bobby Tannenhauser) who was willing to give him a chance.

Bobby hired Raymond Melendez as a night porter in the prewar building he had wisely bought, out of bankruptcy and in deplorable condition, and completely restored, on West 72nd Street, steps from Central Park (location, location, location). Ray has now been working at the Ruxton for 25 years.

The Rag accepted and posted my story in a matter of days. (Let’s hear it for instant gratification!) I was ecstatic and savored the byline. One commenter said it was about “the restoration of a building and a life.”

I refused the $40 fee for the story, because I didn’t need it and assumed the Rag was struggling financially. I have remained pro bono ever since. I consider my work for West Side Rag community service.

The publication was started in May, 2011, by a 33-year-old Upper West Side man, who prefers to remain anonymous. “The Rag” found an audience right away and, in December of that year, was named as a finalist for the Village Voice’s Best Neighborhood Blog of the Year award.

When I came in four years later, there were already thousands of West Side Rag readers and a band of neighborhood columnists and freelance writers who regularly wrote for it.

The early “Ragsters” who I got to know and love were serious about writing and journalism, smart and talented, quirky, in a good way. They all wrote varied news stories, profiles, and features, but each had a primary interest.

Lisa Kava took on Openings and Closings, one of our earliest and among our most popular columns, which bears her byline today. Joy Bergmann was interested in crime and courtroom stories, a dogged and meticulous investigative reporter who spent countless hours “downtown,” covering hearings and trials.

Michael McDowell was a nomad, a sensitive and talented writer who was working on a novel, and whose latest stay was on the Upper West Side, of which he was a keen observer. What I remember most about him is an essay he wrote during the pandemic.

“If you stand near Wollman Rink at the southern end of Central Park at 7 p.m.,” it began, “when New Yorkers throw open their windows and applaud the health care and other essential workers who’ve been tending to the sick and keeping the city running, the aural sensation – surround-sound applause – is comparable to what a performer must experience on stage at Carnegie Hall, the Met, or Madison Square Garden.”

The pandemic was an intense time for West Side Rag. With everyone homebound and the city at a virtual standstill, our readership shot up, topping 10 million page views in 2020.

By then I was all in.

We made it our mission to keep readers up-to-date on the local news they cared about – what stores and businesses were open and where to get a COVID test – but, also, to keep their spirits up.

One of the most-viewed West Side Rag stories of all time (to my delight, one of mine) was about an Upper West Side single woman who, during the pandemic, “freaked out” by the lockdown and lack of people on the sidewalks – broke her lease and moved to Vermont.

“So, I gave up my rent-stabilized apartment in the West 80s,” she explained, but I stopped her in her tracks.
“You gave up a rent-stabilized apartment?” I asked, incredulously. “That’s unheard of!”

“Clearly I was losing my mind,” she replied, ruefully. “I had COVID brain. But, anyway, I did.”

And that became the “hook.” In 243 comments and more than a quarter-million views, readers showed their appreciation of the humor and the woman’s explanation for returning to a (fair-market) apartment on the Upper West Side within a year.

“I’m in my place,” she concluded. “Yep, yep, yep. I don’t care about kitchen counter space, just give me a bus that takes me to the Met in five minutes.”

Gradually, I took on more responsibilities.

For one thing, “Monday Bulletin,” which was first called “Morning Bulletin,” frequently did appear on Monday, but at three in the afternoon. I suggested changing the name and started writing it. I also took over moderating the comments, which were piling up in unholy numbers, while continuing to write stories, from the mundane to the whimsical to in-depth, investigative reports from the field.

Lois Lane was back!

I loved doing eyewitness accounts and in-person interviews that took me on adventures and introduced me to unforgettable Upper West Side characters. I aimed to write their stories as vividly and honestly as I could. I wanted to transport readers to places I felt lucky to go.

I wrote about what it’s like to head out at four in the morning, during a “polar vortex,” with a team from a local nonprofit tasked with checking on homeless people living outside, offering help. To don an official MTA vest and helmet and descend into an active construction site where a subway elevator was being installed, on a tour with an MTA president. To interview a man who works for Google who was paralyzed from the waist down in 2009, at the age of 33, after being hit in the head by a 30-pound falling tree branch while walking to work in Central Park. He called himself “the luckiest unlucky person in the world,” describing his recovery and what he has been doing with his life since: ensuring that restaurants and other businesses that Google directs people to include accessibility status, and advocating for the disabled.

Eventually, I was editing other writers’ work and making sure they got paid. Then, I was writing and loading stories on Word Press, our “managing host platform,” inserting photographs to correspond with the text, and writing headlines. Then, I was posting stories on West Side Rag’s website for nearly 20,000 Upper West Siders to read, mistakes and all. I remember the trepidation I felt the first time I pushed “publish.”

On January 1, 2021, Bobby closed the deal with the former owner of the Rag. It was “the longest negotiation for the least amount of money” in his career, he joked.

The first thing we did as owners was to post an ad in the Rag for writers, like the one my daughter had sent me, (though I doubt we said “We Pay”). We got a lot of responses, but the one that stands out and greatly influenced the development of the Rag was from Ann Cooper, a professor emerita at the Columbia School of Journalism, with years of experience as a print and radio journalist, foreign correspondent, and bureau chief, including in Moscow, when the Soviet Union was falling.

Bobby read it first, printed it, and appeared in the doorway of my office.

“You have to read this,” he said.

We both had the same reaction.

“Why would she want to write for West Side Rag?”

Yet, she did. Ann started off by writing two stories: one about a mundane community meeting, and a masterful one about the prevalence of scaffolding in the neighborhood and why it stays up so long. We met for coffee. I found out her real interests were in editing and building a “newsroom” at the Rag. We hired her on a part-time basis, for a certain number of hours a week, which I can’t remember and she quickly exceeded.

Ann insisted that the next thing we had to do was hire a full-time reporter.

After an exhaustive search across the Western Hemisphere, we landed on Gus Saltonstall.

God is good.

Gus had been working for four years at Patch, a national local (oxymoron) news chain that was one of our competitors. His beat was the Upper West Side and three or four other neighborhoods. That meant he was writing four or five stories a day (something I cannot fathom). He was ready for a change.

Gus had interned at the Rag in the summer of 2017, when he was a junior in college. I remember thinking when I read his writing samples, “This kid has got a spark.”

Gus was born and raised on the Upper West Side and returned to it to live after college, with Isabelle, the love of his life, whom he met there. He knows the neighborhood organically, and has an uncanny sense of what residents want to read. He is now the senior reporter and managing editor of West Side Rag.

Essentially, at the age of 30, he runs it.

Bobby died on April 25, 2025, after a long illness. I was gone from the Rag from January of that year until the summer of this one. Ann and Gus took over. I kept watch and made a few small contributions, but I was grieving hard.

The Rag went on without me.

I spent that time learning to live without Bobby, my first and only love, partner, and best friend for 53 years. It wasn’t pretty, but here I am.

I am now editing articles for the Rag, a skill I learned from Ann, who left the Rag in June, 2026, to edit the magazine at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, which covers one of her primary interests: Russia and the region surrounding it.

I am also attending weekly editorial meetings with the core team, which includes, in addition to Gus and my daughter, editors Laura Muha, who also writes Monday Bulletin, and John Daniszewski, and Sam Gross, who helps with fundraising and reader growth.

And I am the self-appointed fact checker and proofreader of the entire West Side Rag, always catching and fixing, perfect for someone who tends to see what’s wrong.

In September 2026, thanks largely to the efforts of Sam, West Side Rag secured what is called a “fiscal sponsorship,” making donations to it tax-deductible. This is not only good for our donors, but allows us to apply for grants supporting local journalism.

This represents a new era for the Rag.

It has gone from a one-man shop, to a family business, to a tax-deductible entity.

It took several years and the entrance of Sam Gross to achieve that final step. In the interim – with the help of our son, who has taken over managing the rest of Bobby’s varied enterprises (or “deals” as he called them), in consultation with his sister – our family covered the costs of running West Side Rag that exceeded ad and donor revenue and we will continue to do so. One reason costs have risen is that, in recognition of the hard work writers do, we immediately raised the fee for an article from $40 to $100-$125, still small but respectable.

The good news is, since our tax-deductible designation, reader donations to West Side Rag have risen greatly, showing support, appreciation, and trust, and moving the Rag closer to our goals of self-sufficiency and sustainability.

I am not playing reporter anymore.

West Side Rag is the real thing, and it’s here to stay.

I love the sense of usefulness and competence working on the Rag gives me, the collegiality of the staff, and knowing we are contributing something important to the Upper West Side:

A fair, well-written, accurate, up-to-date, reliable source of hyper-local news (with a sense of humor). A feeling of common identity and community. A place to express an opinion (though it might not make it past the moderator), argue, explain, complain, reply, and rant to your neighbors.

A source of pride.

I thank my lucky stars for West Side Rag, as I imagine many of you do, too.

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