Amy Zimmer is a reporter who oversees real estate and education coverage for DNAinfo.com New York. Previously, she covered the Upper East Side and Murray Hill/Gramercy neighborhoods for the site. 

Amy joins DNAinfo after six years reporting on everything from economic development and the environment to culture and crime for Metro. She broke news on the demise of CBGB, Coney Island redevelopment, and on the alarming trend of young women fainting on subways for lack of a good breakfast.

Amy is a born and bred New Yorker with deep roots on the Lower East Side. Her essay about her family’s former store on Orchard Street, H. Eckstein’s & Sons, appeared in The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town (Princeton Architectural, 2007). Amy herself was featured in a 2004 New York Times story about the ever-evolving neighborhood, entitled “Trendiness Among the Tenements,” in which she represented “trendiness.”

Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, City Limits and on Public Radio International’s “Pacific Time.” A piece she wrote for the Brooklyn Rail won a 2004 Independent Press Association award and was anthologized in Pieces of a Decade: Brooklyn Rail Nonfiction 2000 – 2010 (Black Square Editions/Brooklyn Rail, 2010).

Amy received her Bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Yale University, where she won the Sapir Prize for her senior essay on New York graffiti writers. She has a Master’s degree in journalism from New York University.

Fun Fact:Remember Miss Subways? Amy has been working with artist Fiona Gardner on tracking down former winners of the beauty contest that ran from 1941 – 1976. Her oral histories and Gardner’s photographs will be featured in an exhibition at the New York Transit Museum in 2012.