Amy “The Zim” Zimmer knows New York. If her witty, wry writing about the city weren’t enthralling enough, we’d insist she turn tour guide. She comes from Old World, Lower East Side New York where her grandparents ran the dry-goods store H. Eckstein’s & Sons on Orchard Street. Now she’s prowling the Upper East Side to cover neighborhood news for DNAinfo. She earned street cred during a four-year stint at the free daily Metro New York where she broke the story on the demise of CBGB and discovered the alarming trend of young women fainting on subways due to a lack of a good breakfast. No big whoop, you say? The subway has to make an emergency stop when someone faints on-board. Imagine a fire drill, underground, in a hot and stuffy overcrowded car, during rush hour. Oy vey.
As a co-ed at Yale, her essay on NYC graffiti writers won the Sapir Prize–then she earned a master’s degree in journalism from NYU. (No Stanford for her; she had to come back.) We discovered The Zim while reading excerpts of interviews she held with former Miss Subway winners (at the New York Transit Museum exhibition). But you can read her regularly as she reports with aplomb on everything from private schools to public pools.