Meet the Native New Yorker Bringing Authentic Brooklyn Flair to Local Radio

This struggling community station was about to go under when Roxanne Wignal took it back from the gentrifiers.

Photos by Vincent Tullo

Thirty-nine-year-old Farrah Wignal, who goes by Roxanne, proudly calls herself a “Brooklyn baby.” It doesn’t matter that when she was growing up in Crown Heights, men fought in the streets and other girls threatened to beat her up. She’s obsessed with the borough. When she steps off the Franklin Avenue subway stop, which intersects the neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, and Crown Heights, she smells weed and Newport tobacco and it feels like home.

“The American flag waving over the Brooklyn Bridge,” she says shaking her head and smiling, as if recalling a fond memory. “Every time I see it, it makes my nipples hard.”