Jim Dwyer loved New York, especially the everyday people whose stories he told for 36 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist for New York Newsday, the Daily News and the New York Times. And judging from the sadness and admiration that comes through in the commemorations written since his death last week at the age of 63, New York loved him back.

I was lucky enough to know Jim both as a neighbor and through his writing, and in the last few days I’ve gone back and read or re-read a sample of his work. What I found was a remarkable chronicle of New York’s evolution, starting from when he was the transit columnist for Newsday in the 1980s and the refurbished subways and buses were the city’s most visible sign of its comeback from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

From then on, he wrote some of the most memorable and influential stories about signature events, including the 1991 Union Square subway derailment, the last phone and email messages of those who didn’t make it out of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and hospital kitchen workers in the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. He had a particular passion for exposing injustice, from racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike to the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of those such as Jose Morales. Last Thursday’s About New York has a fine sampling of some his best columns.

Jim Dwyer didn’t just write about New York. He made it better. A series of moving pieces about Rory Stanton, a 12-year-old who died of septic shock, led to a change in New York State policy that has likely saved thousands of lives. He inspired others to take up the cause of the wrongly convicted and helped raise funds for the Innocence Project, where his family has asked donations to be sent.

One quality that I admired is that he was careful to not cross the line from journalist to crusader, keeping facts and the complexity of human behavior central to his reporting. His reflections on the behavior and motivations of everyone from the police to himself in the case of the five Black and Latino teenagers who were imprisoned and later exonerated for the brutal 1989 assault of a white jogger in Central Park is a prime example:

“Fallibility runs in the human bloodline, and people from many quarters of public life had not done their jobs well, including journalists like me. I covered parts of the trials in 1990 for New York Newsday, and wish that I had been more skeptical and that I had shouted, rather than mumbled, the doubts I did express.

Chaos does not get its due. Ms. Meili was not identified for nearly a day, and her movements not established until much later. The tunnel vision that took over the investigators is rendered (in the Netflix series ​“When They See Us”) solely as amoral ambition, but the reality of error in the Central Park case, as in most everything, is more interesting and nuanced than cartoon villainy.”

Even in his private life, he found time to use the same qualities to make a difference. Here in Washington Heights, where he lived with his wife Cathy and raised two daughters, he was known for championing local treasures from Ft. Tryon Park to neighborhood institutions like Coogan’s restaurant.

And in a little known episode, he even struck a blow for clean energy. As president of the board in the cooperative where we both lived, he was determined to make our building one of the most energy efficient in New York. When we were stymied by a poorly written state law that only permitted solar subsidies for single-family owners, he worked to get the law amended. We became the first coop building in the city to go solar, and opened the doors for others to follow.

In his last column, he told the story of an old woman in Ireland who fed and saved his ancestors in the 1918 flu pandemic, and used it as a parable that we should take to heart in this moment of crisis and loss:

“In times to come, when we are all gone, people not yet born will walk in the sunshine of their own days because of what women and men did at this hour to feed the sick, to heal and to comfort.”

I can’t think of a better way to describe the legacy of Jim’s words and actions.