For the purposes of cable news soundbites and superficial political campaigns, the world is often neatly divided between heroes and villains. And though we know that the real world is populated by flesh and blood human beings, complicated, conflicted, just trying to figure what to do next, that doesn't stop us from wanting heroes and reviling villains. We just can't help it... Here, then, is our NYC pantheon for 2010.

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Heroes: New Yorkers We Love

Daisy Khan
Reformer
"We will cater to the lunch crowd—a religion becomes accepted in any country once its food is accepted." So said Khan, Park51 co-founder and director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, referring to one of many devious strategies at the proposed Islamic Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan (not a mosque, not at Ground Zero). As religious intolerance and bigotry sweep across America (thanks to a villainous few, see below), it's vital that thoughtful, bridge-building leaders like Khan—who has worked tirelessly for women's rights in the Muslim world—continue working toward the kind of free and open society that has always been at the heart of the American Dream. (And c'mon people, Sufis are basically the Unitarians of the Muslim world, so calm down.) Don't give up, Ms. Khan.

Baruch Herzfeld
Bike Saint
A few issues ago, we brought your attention to Herzfeld's near-saintly dedication to reconciling the Williamsburg Chasidic community and the Williamsburg fixed-gear community—for that effort alone, he's a hero. But that's not all: Herzfeld has also created a fund to help cover injured cyclists without health insurance, an all-too necessary safety net in this city, despite all the new bike lanes... Thanks, Baruch.

Automotive High Pistons
Football Team
We're all about bringing Friday Night Lights to Williamsburg, as the highly talented Automotive High School football team (go Pistons!) finally gets to play some home games at McCarren Park (rather than being forced to play an entire season on the road). The first game is September 25th (with game two scheduled for November 7th), and we'll be there to cheer on the hometown boys—and so should you...

Brooklyn Grange
Urban Farmers
From Ben Flanner, the former e-trader who brought you Greenpoint's Eagle Street Farm (the city's first rooftop soil farm), and the crew from Bushwick hippie-hipster pizzeria Roberta's, came—after brief setbacks owing to pestering permit problems—the city's biggest commercial rooftop farm. Since soil arrived by crane to the acre atop 37-18 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City last May, the team and a small army of eager volunteer farmers have grown and harvested veggies for local restaurants and their farm stands. Heroic cooks can get Brooklyn Grange crops at Brooklyn Flea, Roberta's, or by joining their good old-fashioned CSA.

John Lurie
Reclusive Genius
Did you read that crazy profile about John Lurie in the New YorkerM last month? It was crazy. Literally the coolest man in the world for a four-year stretch in the mid-80s, Lurie—leader of the legendary Lounge Lizards and muse to a young Jim Jarmusch—was never able to figure out what his second act was all about, winding up his moment in the public eye with the sublimely bizarre early 90s TV show, Fishing with John. From that point on, it would seem, Lurie drifted into a reclusive, low-grade paranoia, escaping to California, where he's only lately taken up music again... So why is this heroic? Well, most of the iconic downtown New Yorkers from the 80s either died (see Basquiat) or drifted into senescent mediocrity (see Jarmusch, or David Byrne). So, we salute you, John Lurie, for never compromising, even if it made you a little crazy.

Heroes: New Yorkers We Love

Yoko Ono
Artist
A strange choice, you could say, but hear us out: The often (and unfairly) maligned Yoko Ono has long been a hero of New York City's creative class, by virtue of the fact that she's continued to be a part of it long after earning the freedom (financial and otherwise) to abandon it altogether. Whether it's avant garde music, experimental film, conceptual artwork (her latest exhibition just opened in Berlin), or any number of the other formats she's worked in over the years, she's as committed as anyone to a life spent trying to affect change through the creation of art. And for that, she's our hero.

Donna Marsh O'Connor
Peacemaker
O'Connor is the spokeswoman for September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of—well, the name is pretty self-explanatory. Speaking from a position of not insignificant moral authority, O'Connor—whose pregnant daughter died on 9/11—has been tireless in championing American ideals of tolerance, open-mindedness and freedom, seeking to ensure that 9/11 not be used as justification for violence, revenge or bigotry. Though she's not always succeeded (two long wars!), O'Connor's recent defense of Park51 has been a true testament to her faith in the Constitution, and in American values. As she said herself: "We recognize that we are all in pain. And we go forward. We do what is right." Amen.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Courageous Insider
And a nod as well to Graham Rayman, the Village Voice reporter who authored the paper's seasons-spanning five-part series about the secret recordings made by Schoolcraft—a cop in Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct, who documented the NYPD's cynical institutional culture, callous enforcement of stop-and-frisk quotas, and whitewashing downgrades of serious complaints. Schoolcraft blew the whistle after being forced into a psych ward by his panicked superiors. His cause—seriously: the salvation of the NYPD—is a noble one, and his tapes are essential listening.

Ronald Bronstein
Renaissance Man
Bronstein's Frownland is one of the key independent films made in New York City in recent years—a sympathetic, painful study of personal relationships among characters with some of the most awkward social skills ever filmed—and he starred as the epically irresponsible "cool dad" in the Safdie brothers' terrific Daddy Longlegs. At least as impressive as the essential D.I.Y. cinema, though, is Bronstein's day job, as a projectionist for repertory film screenings at MoMA and elsewhere (presumably this is how he learned about both movies and antisocial people).

Peter Pizza
Bike Fixer
A word-of-mouth-known savior to many and bike-refurbishing messiah to all, Peter Pizza, a sturdily true-blue Brooklyner who repairs, rebuilds and resells mixed multitudes of mostly vintage frames and parts out of his Lorimer Street garage, is a veritable civic hero for our resource-strapped, occasionally MTA-downtrodden times. He is dexterous, industrious and fair—and since he despises bike thieves like he loves old Schwinns, Antonio Ricci himself would have to go elsewhere in search of stolen wares. It might seem cliché to call Mr. Pizza the real-bike-deal, but such a greased glove befits him all the same. And yes, Peter Pizza is indeed his real name.

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Villains: New Yorkers We Hate

Malcolm Gladwell
Chatter Provider
One might be considered a villain for being extremely argumentative. Not so with Malcolm Gladwell, whose consistent act of villainy is to never make a real argument or take a critical stance. As such, he renews his villainous status every time he writes a book or article or has what he'd call an "idea." Worse yet, Gladwell's article-length "review" of Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat in The New Yorker reads a bit too much (coincidentally?) like Gladwell's own research. Yet since the primary weak question he poses therein—"Is spying good or bad?"—goes unanswered, the otherwise informative piece certainly has the force of a Gladwellianly fistless punch.

Villains: New Yorkers We Hate

Douglaston Development
Condouchebags
Though it might be an exaggeration (emphasis on "might") to call collectively villainous an entire building complex and everything "cool" it purports to represent, it is hardly a stretch to call out Douglaston Development (creators of the architectural douchebaggery of The Edge, one of the most recent blights on the Williamsburg waterfront) for their unabashedly fallacious use of absolute and relative superlatives in their bankhole-directed advertising: "Most amenities"? "Best neighborhood"? "Superior apartments"? Or "ingenious," "incomparable," "incredible"? Worst of all, "HARDCORE"? Really, the semantics of condouchery sound a lot like the lite-beer, dance-floor-fist-pumping flatulence of brobaggery.

The Vendetta Breakdancer
Busking Jerk
Many subway passengers who wait for the L train in Union Square have likely encountered the V-mask-wearing (as in V for Vendetta) breakdancer who performs his spatially sullying, unentertaining spin-spiel just west of the center of the platform. The same passengers have thus been silently assaulted by the vacuity of his head-nodding gaze, and aurally assaulted by the so-called music he plays. What really makes him a villain, though, is that we once witnessed him get into a brutal yelling match with the wonderful elderly Polish man who plays the concertina, among other one-man-act instruments. And guess what? The V-masked man was totally in the wrong. V for Villain, perhaps?

Vincent Forras
Litigious Jerk
We praise businessman and Republican senatorial candidate Vincent Forras for his service as a volunteer firefighter at the WTC site in 2001, just as we loathe the lawsuit he recently filed against the proposed downtown Islamic Cultural Center that claims, insanely, that the organizers of Park51 (Sufis!) "are believers in radical Islam and its jihad against America and American interests," and that the center will be "a monument to the jihadist's victory over American ideals of freedom and democracy." Those very ideals, it would now seem, are in far more danger from within, than without.

Bill Keller
Christian Jihadist
A proper Christian response to the proposed Islamic Cultural Center in Tribeca might be something like... love? Or, sympathy? But televangelist Bill Keller's "Christian response" is a competing 9/11 Christian Center in downtown New York that would spread Jesus' message of hysterical xenophobia through misinformation. Such gems on the proposed center's website include "Islam is a wonderful religion... for PEDOPHILES!" Yeah! Who ever heard of a Christian touching kids?

The Bike-Lock Gluer
Misguided Vigilante
We appreciate the issue irritating this unidentified Williamsburg resident who (self-)righteously goes around the neighborhood putting glue in bike locks under cover of anonymity courtesy The Brooklyn Paper—that there are too many abandoned bikes locked up to too few bike racks and available street furniture along Bedford and adjacent blocks. But this is exclusively the business of the city's Department of Sanitation, and vandalizing others' private property is nobody's business at all. His broader anti-bike agenda, outlined in an op-ed smackdown against our hero Baruch Herzfeld, further confirmed his villainy.

Tao Lin
Writer Performance Artist
Marketing Strategist
Tao Lin isn't a writer. At best he's a performance artist, at worst he's a nihilistic marketing strategist with a willfully tedious prose style and a fetish for ankle-deep dorm-room philosophical relativism. It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't such a good nihilistic marketing strategist and could be ignored, along with his tedious Internet army of imitative defenders. (Thankfully, the writing, a mere afterthought in The Project That Is Tao Lin, is easy to ignore: there really is no there, there.)

Villains: New Yorkers We Hate

Wrong-Way Bicyclists/Cars in Bike Lanes
We understand that for a very long time this city was a lawless, uncivilized rat race of do-anything/go-anywhere transit, and that the suicidally vulnerable cyclist had to do whatever it took to survive. But you know what? There are bike lanes now, and a D.O.T. that seems to care, so if we want to be treated as legitimate transportation, we have to act like it—and that means not going the wrong way down a bike lane on a one-way street. Ok? (And to all you cars who use the bike lane as a passing lane, you're villainous assholes who should be set on fire.)

The Williamsburg Hotel
Boutique Idiocy
As we wrote last month, online: "There's just something about a fancy boutique hotel (and a fancy boutique hotel bar) that represents the last frontier of mindless douchebaggery, the kind of superficial, stage-managed exclusivity that appeals to the worst kind of vanity in the worst kinds of people." Alright, we know Williamsburg has been evolving into a condo playland over the last decade, but a boutique hotel/condo with a restaurant called "Streets" that serves high-priced Third World street food has really put things over the edge. Say it with us, "the Meatburg District."

David Koch
Libertarian Puppet Master
Ever wondered who those people are, those people buying eight-digit uptown apartments, sitting on the board of Sloan-Kettering, and wearing black ties at events where they're honored for dropping millions on Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History and the Met? Well, as the great (heroic!) Jane Mayer recently revealed in the New Yorker, one of them is the shady Obama archnemesis Koch, co-owner of the massive Wichita-based energy conglomerate Koch Industries, who also spends his money, covertly, to fund influential market-fellating libertarian think-tanks and astroturf anti-Obama populist movements, along with fun and educational crypto-denialist climate-change exhibitions at the Smithsonian. Mayer's article is a great illustration of Who Runs Things at the upper levels of the cultural, political and intellectual life of this city and country.

Illustrations by Anat Even-Or