Imre Kovacs, in memoriam, PortSide volunteer, maker of good trouble

Yesterday Tuesday, July 7, 2026, heaven gained another maker of good trouble. That would be Imre Kovacs, Red Hook resident, member of the River of God Church - Red Hook, Brooklyn, PortSide friend and volunteer, effective agitator on behalf of good causes.

He passed at 83, peacefully, after giving cancer a tough fight.

I saw him the morning before he died and was glad to find him ready to go and talking about death in a classic impish Imre way - though in short breathy phrases interrupted by long pauses – about how he should be shaved and cleaned up after he passed. He told his daughter Kati Kovacs before I got there that he was dying that day and wanted ice cream and root beer before that. He ate those and survived another day.

Jessie Wayburn, a Red Hook resident, helped Imre daily the past two some years which enabled him to live at home and in community until his very last days. She wrote yesterday “He wanted everyone to know that he loved them, and it feels important to share that, in his prayers with his daughter Kati on Sunday, he kept saying, "Wow! Wow! What an amazing life." He was in awe of and fiercely protective of Red Hook, and will continue his advocacy for a better world from a different plane.”

I met Imre at the 2/21/23 meeting about the Red Hook Library where we all learned that our library would be closed for renovation without any real plans for interim service. He described himself humbly at the meeting as the gardener of the River of God Church. He went on, with Dave Lutz, to do the heavy lifting that got Red Hook our interim Library on Van Brunt Street.

Soon after meeting him, I found him crying in Van Brunt Street, and he told me “I had a partner battling cancer for 15 years, that takes a big commitment. Tomorrow is her Jahrezeit.” To get him out of the house so that bereavement about Oona did not take him down, I invited him to all PortSide programs and encouraged him to hang out on our ship for TankerTime. He rebounded and became a passionate volunteer painting, cleaning, setting up chairs for events.

His force of will was epic. He would get chemo in the morning and come volunteer in the afternoon. He often radiated a boyish joy as in the photo of the first time he used a powerwasher. He was continually grinning, if he was not fuming about what needed to be improved in the world.

He was continually trying to better himself (struggling with the ADHD that was diagnosed late in life), Red Hook which he loved and wanted to help, and the wider world.

He graduated from Yale college in 1965 and finished Yale Divinity School in 1968 at a time when the idea of an “urban ministry” was a goal and Yale was a hotbed of civil rights protests. He was briefly a reverend in church but mostly executed his calling in the world.

He became an urban planner and worked for the Staten Island Office of City Planning, where Imre provided technical assistance to the newly created Community Planning Board. When a charter revision commission was formed, Imre was hired for grassroots work. He interviewed the Board Chair of every Community Board in Brooklyn. He then worked on Wall Street, but looking for ways to help people, rollerblading over the Brooklyn bridge to work for two decades.

He and his beloved Oona moved to Wolcott Street and Reverend Imre became the only white member of the River of God church next door. In recent years, his work led to making the church’s backyard the Sullivan Street Community Garden. He wanted the church more connected outside its congregration. He helped PortSide get visiting SeaScouts bunked at the church.

He helped create a new youth baseball program once he learned that local kids have limited access to the Red Hook ball fields since those fields are often reserved by schools and teams outside the neighborhood. He worked with Jonathan Landreth to bring the Red Hook Champions to the fields and organize annual free training sessions.

On April 6, a bunch of us sprang a surprise 83rd birthday party on him where our Councilmember Alex Aviles gave him a City Council proclamation citing his decades of civic work. We wanted to give him his flowers while he was still around, as one of the organizers, John Leyva said. The proclamation and the event stunned him with surprise and meant the world to him.

For the birthday party, I made him a silly hat “Dirt 1” festooned with flowers, memorializing the day that he, Peter and I tried to move a mound of donated dirt to the community garden: a situation where three people considered themselves in charge until Imre gave us all titles. He was Dirt 1, I was Dirt 2, and Peter was Dirt 3. The joke resolved the managerial impasse. He sure could be insistent in a style I call relentless codgering. That did get stuff done! He texted me on 10/29/25 to say he liked “the name they gave me today at the library: scoundrel.”

Two photos here show his commitment to civic work. There’s a photo of him lying on the ground, likely hoping to be arrested, in front of the September 2025 final BMT Task Force meeting that voted to approve the plan. The protest was because the public was locked out of meetings that should have been open due to NYS Open Meetings Law and we didn’t like the way the plans were going.

The other photo, the last one, shows Imre leaping in the air and is how I will remember him. He was souped up because he and I had just come from the March 2025 City Council charter revision commission, the Commission to Strengthen Local Democracy. He showed up to offer me moral support, as he put it. I had testified calling for a new NYC agency for maritime. The testimony was well received, and we were excited. That was a great night out for Imre, a hearing.

My deepest condolences to all who knew him. We should all remember him every time we use or pass the Sullivan Street Garden or the Red Hook interim library, two of his favorite projects. And eat strawberry ice cream in his memory!

7/8/26 by Carolina Salguero