We gather to bestow final rites on the Village Voice, once a giant of New York City print journalism, a global beacon for social and political and artistic movements chronicled in its pages, reduced, as of last week, to a legacy.

But what a legacy – not least, of herculean reporting that exposed the corruption of New York City’s powerful. That incubated and sustained giants like Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Jennifer Gonnerman, Tom Robbins, Colson Whitehead, J.A. Lobbia, Pete Hamill, Stanley Crouch.

That introduced the world to a hustler named Donald Trump shaking down the city for aid. That blew the whistle on corruption in the city’s powerful Board of Estimate and in dank corners of the administration of three-term Mayor Ed Koch. And championed workers, and the heroes and heroines of Stonewall, and women’s quest for power and justice, and black and Latino and Asian and immigrant New Yorkers for theirs.

That pilloried the worst among us – slum landlords, slack judges – and celebrated the best you’d never heard of in music, film, dance, art, life.

Whose song will never be heard except in replay, and must never be left to fade from memory.

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