38-38 Ninth Street, Long Island City, New York Review of Finance

“It’s getting fucking impossible to make physical things,” said Niccolo Porcello as we walked up Ninth Street in Long Island City, carrying about five hundred copies of the New York Review of Finance (NYRF) to the magazine’s Wednesday evening launch party in a subterranean bar in the Financial District.

NYRF is a brand-new review. Its first issue appeared on November 19, 2025. In our arms was the second. NYRF might not have happened without us—that is, without New York Review of Architecture. Its cofounders—Porcello, Michael Nicholas and Paige Oamek—started talking about making a magazine last summer while playing for the NYRA softball team. Possibly the ultimate meet-cute.

It also might not have happened without the building we had just exited—that is, Stellar Printing. None of NYRF’s founders have a background in finance or even strong connections to the Financial District. Porcello says he goes to Manhattan only once every three months. But they do share a commitment to publishing something tangible. “If something is on the computer or on the phone, personally my eyes are often glazing over,” Oamek told me. Porcello, as we lugged our issues onto the subway toward Manhattan, said, “People engage more with pieces that are not entangled with the soup that is the phone.” Porcello is no stranger to bygone mediums: Years ago, he started a record label, Sad Cactus Records, that releases albums on vinyl and cassette. He had mailed its ninetieth release just that morning.

It was NYRA that introduced NYRF to Stellar, too—since fall 2022 this magazine has printed most of our issues there. We were recommended Stellar by a friend at New York Review Comics (a publishing imprint under the umbrella of The New York Review of Books). Stellar has no working website and they replied to none of my emails, so one day when my daughter was out sick from daycare I simply showed up—stroller in tow. Their director of operations, Kevin Ednie, took me in and gave me a tour, a bundle of print samples, his cell phone number, and a very reasonable quote.

Stellar stands two blocks east of the East River, between the gigantic Ravenswood generating station—responsible for a fifth of New York City’s electricity—and the sprawling Queensbridge Houses—the largest public housing campus in the United States. Stellar’s current home, built in 1920, is a simple set of industrial brick boxes with girder roofs, three loading docks, and a motor court. The company moved there in 1989; two years later Ednie became director of operations, a role he still holds today.

Stellar offers web offset printing, a technology invented by a Texas newspaper publisher in 1954. Web means they feed paper into the machines in gigantic rolls, rather than one sheet at a time. Offset means they make unique plates for each job. The same machines can make newspapers, tabloids, or magazines—they simply keep folding and cutting the printed sheets until they reach the desired size and format. The time and expense to make plates and set them up in the machine means web offset only makes sense for large print runs: “I’ll print any amount you want, but it’s not worth it to go under a thousand,” said Ednie. On the other hand, large print runs are exceedingly affordable—less than a dollar a copy. NYRF got away with printing a run of just three hundred for their first issue, which cost them $675. Web offset printing is also fast. Once everything is set up, the presses can make thirty thousand copies per hour. For NYRF, Ednie told me, “the run is five minutes, tops.”

Stellar has about seventy-five employees and operates 24-7. The machines involved are very large, each at least the size of a school bus—an improbable array of cylinders and rollers tied together by taut, airborne lines of paper, all of it reminiscent of Citizen Kane. The ink, which arrives in barrels large enough to hold a person, has its own dedicated ink-plumbing: valves and pipes to move it into the machines and onto the plates. A vast room simply holds the paper rolls, each one forty-two inches in diameter and twenty-two to thirty-four inches wide—Stellar keeps about five hundred on hand at any given time, enough to last about a month. Forklifts carry the rolls to the machines and then the finished publications to the loading dock.

In the 1990s, the neighborhood was notoriously dangerous. Ednie advised workers to pack their own lunch—so they wouldn’t have to walk down the street to the corner store. There were crack houses across the street and sex workers would walk up and down in front of the building. Stellar offered a shuttle service to collect employees from the subway stop and had an informal agreement with the police that employees could drive the wrong way down Ninth Street, away from Queensbridge Houses.

The neighborhood has changed. Said Ednie, “I won’t pretend it’s paradise, but on a scale of one to ten, twenty-five years ago it was a one. Today, it’s a seven.” A $100-per-night DoubleTree by Hilton and a $200-per-night Springhill Suites by Marriott are now across the street, each about twenty stories tall. Porcello and I walked straight through the Queensbridge Houses on our way to the subway station. It was bustling with kids and playgrounds and old ladies carrying their groceries.

All that neighborhood improvement unfortunately bodes poorly for Stellar’s survival. Newsprint plants are under a lot of pressure. There are of course fewer newspapers, and the survivors are printing fewer issues. Nevertheless, Stellar still has plenty of clients. In a typical twenty-four-hour cycle they print six to seven dailies, fifteen to twenty weeklies, and a smattering of monthlies and periodicals. They print about one hundred different titles. These include The Bronx Free Press, the Manhattan Times, The New York Sun, The Korea Daily, the Queens Daily Eagle, The Island Current, and the Columbia Daily Spectator—which just published a loving photo-essay about Stellar, the paper’s printer since 1991. My favorite Stellar client fun fact is that they also print for the other NYRA, producing betting pamphlets for the New York Racing Association. At one point Ednie counted how many different languages pass through their machines: twenty-three. All of Stellar’s clients are within the tristate area.

No, the real threat is the real estate developers. I asked Nina Rappaport, who wrote a book on urban manufacturing—Hybrid Factory, Hybrid City (2023)—about the future of manufacturing in Long Island City: “What we are seeing is residential pressure always wins out. Although there are tons of vacant residential units in Long Island City right now, it does not stop the developers from building them.” Rappaport would like to see policy that uses residential development to cross-subsidize the creation of manufacturing spaces. Outside of a few pilot projects, such policies remain, unfortunately, theoretical. Ednie described the demise of a rival printing press: “They discovered: ‘All we need to do is have designers and admin work from home, then outsource our printing, because our building is worth $12 million.’” I asked him if Stellar’s landlord was looking to sell their own building, and he demurred, “I won’t get you mixed up in that.”

The possible replacement of a printer responsible for one hundred low-margin local newspapers with semi-vacant towers of investment vehicles seems par for the course in a world where we are increasingly alienated from the means to make physical things, encouraged instead to sit at home pouring ourselves into digital realms mediated, structured, and controlled by corporate giants, where the house is always watching and always wins. Why are there billions available for speculative condos but nothing for small manufacturers? Why are capital markets open for all manner of nonsense but locked up for small publications that serve a societal benefit? Sounds like some questions for a New York Review of Finance.

Until then, a new generation might just be discovering the printed newspaper. At the end of my interview with Oamek, I asked if there was anything else she wanted to mention. “Let them know how cheap newsprint is!” she told me. “I am shouting it from the rooftops: I would love to have more of my friends’ things to love and hold.”