Our Town, The West Side Spirit, Our Town Downtown and The Chelsea Newsjoined forces with 32BJ SEIU to host the Building Service Worker Awards October 23, 2018.

The annual ceremony honors those working to keep New York City’s homes and workplaces running: from doormen and security guards, to office cleaners and window washers.

When accepting his award, Window Cleaner of the Year Gaspar Amorim brought his son on stage with him. While Gaspar made a career for himself washing windows at 295 Wall Street, 1 Chase Plaza, and 3 Times Square, his son was able to attend Fordham Law on a union scholarship. Event emcee and renowned NY1 anchor Errol Louis tweeted a photo of Amorim’s acceptance, captioning it: “The American Dream in a nutshell.”

State Senator Brain Benjamin, State Senator Liz Krueger, State Assembly Member Deborah Glick, State Assembly Member Dick Gottfried, State Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Member Ben Kallos, and City Council Member Helen Rosenthal attended the event to congratulate and present awards to the honorees.

Click here to read about last year's honorees.

Nominations for 2018 are now closed.

Errol Louis

Errol Louis is the Political Anchor of Spectrum News NY1, where he hosts "Inside City Hall," a nightly primetime show about New York City politics.
As part of the show, he interviews top political and cultural leaders, including an exclusive weekly one-on-one conversation with Mayor Bill de Blasio. Louis has also conducted interviews with ex-mayors David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg; Gov. Andrew Cuomo and ex-governors George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson; dozens of city, state and federal officials, and presidential candidates including John Kasich, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Louis has moderated more than two dozen debates between candidates for mayor, public advocate, city and state comptroller, state Attorney General and U.S. Senate. In 2016, he was a questioner in the final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

In addition to political leaders, Louis has interviewed iconic cultural figures including filmmaker Ken Burns, activist Gloria Steinem, and authors Robert Caro and Gay Talese.
Louis was recently ranked #40 on the list of the 100 most powerful people in New York City politics. He is an adjunct professor of Urban Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught political and investigative reporting to more than 100 graduate students. He is co-editor of Deadline Artists, a two-volume anthology of America’s greatest newspaper columns published in October 2011.

Prior to joining Spectrum News NY1, Louis was a Daily News opinion journalist from 2004 to 2010, hosted a weekday talk show on AM1600 WWRL, where he was twice named one of the "Heavy 100" top talk show hosts in America by Talkers Magazine.

A graduate of New Rochelle High School, Louis attended Harvard College, where he graduated with a B.A. in Government. He also earned an M.A. in Political Science from Yale University and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School.