(l-r) Basil Paterson, Carl McCall, Brian Benjamin, Cordell Cleare
Cordell Cleare recently received the Democratic nomination to replace Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin in the State Senate after his appointment by Governor Hochul. Cleare is almost certain to win the special election that will be held with the general election on November 2.
She will succeed the legacy of Constance Baker Motley, Basil Paterson, Carl McCall, and David Paterson, some of the prominent senators who have represented the district. Combining much of Harlem with the Upper West Side and other adjacent neighborhoods, the district has a rich history of noteworthy senators.
It was not until 1953 when Julius Archibald became the first African-American to serve in the New York State Senate. (Edward Johnson, a former slave, was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1917.) Archibald won a narrow victory in the 1952 primary, a margin of just 207 votes against incumbent Harold Panken, who was backed by the Tammany machine including the African-American Carver Democratic Club led by J. Raymond Jones.
Whites constituted 48% of the district’s voters at that time, but Archibald, who was a leader in the NAACP running on a civil rights platform, squeaked to victory with a coalition assembled by the West Side reform leader Robert Blaikie with support from anti-Tammany Congressmen Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Archibald’s slim victory in the primary sent a clear message to the party leadership: an African-American should represent Harlem in the Senate district it shared with the West Side. That has been the case in every election since that historic breakthrough in 1953.
The Tammany leaders promptly regrouped and easily won the nomination for one of their own, James Lopez Watson, who swamped Archibald in the 1954 primary. Watson served in the State Senate until 1963, when he decided on a judicial career and was elected to the Civil Court — a judicial seat first held by his father, James S. Watson, who in 1930 was the first African-American elected judge in New York. President Lyndon Johnson subsequently appointed the younger Watson as the first African-American on the United States Customs Court, now called the United States Court of International Trade. The courthouse at One Federal Plaza is named in Watson’s honor.
Watson’s election to the bench created a vacancy to be filled by a special election in February 1964. Like Cordell Cleare’s nomination, the district committee of the Democratic County Committee was sharply divided along club lines. The Carver Club of District Leader J. Raymond Jones supported Constance Baker Motley, who was Thurgood Marshall’s deputy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To the surprise of many, however, the committee voted to nominate Noel Ellison, the African-American president of the Riverside Democratic Club.
Controversy ensued when it was disclosed that Ellison, whose main support came from the white members of the committee, had been convicted of running numbers from his dry cleaning store. Democratic County Leader Edward Costikyan intervened when he learned that there were irregularities at the nomination meeting and persuaded Ellison to decline so the committee to fill vacancies could nominate Motley.
Constance Baker Motley already had a distinguished career bringing desegregation cases in the federal courts, including ten arguments before the United States Supreme Court. She became the first African-American woman in the State Senate, but her Senate service was cut short by her election as Manhattan Borough President in 1965, the first woman elected to that post.
Her term as borough president was also short-lived because President Lyndon Johnson appointed her as judge of the United States District Court, the first African-American woman to serve in the federal judiciary. She served in that court, eventually becoming Chief Judge, until her death in 2005.
Basil Paterson was elected to succeed Constance Baker Motley in 1965. As a young lawyer, he became active in the Carver Democratic Club and became a favorite of J. Raymond Jones. Paterson worked hard to protect the interests of Harlem and played a key role in stopping Columbia University from building its gym in Morningside Park.
In 1970, he gave up his Senate seat to run for lieutenant governor on Arthur Goldberg’s ticket; Rockefeller won handily. Ed Koch appointed Paterson as deputy mayor in 1978 and Governor Hugh Carey appointed Paterson as the first African-American secretary of state of New York in 1979.
Sidney von Luther, a Harlem union and civil rights leader won the seat with the support of the Riverside Democratic Club in a three-way primary in 1970 and was reelected in 1972. Senator von Luther proudly identified himself as “a gadfly” and once challenged Senator Martin Knorr of Queens to a duel.
The New York Times quoted von Luther, “there are certain sacred principles that have to be defended and somebody has to appoint themselves as the conscience of that goddam bargaining place.” His Senate colleagues retaliated in the 1974 redistricting by moving a big chunk of Morningside Heights from the district and replacing it with a larger piece of Harlem.
Carl McCall, a business partner of Percy Sutton, was also a familiar figure in reform circles. McCall received support both from the Harlem leadership as well as West Side reformers and cruised to victory in the 1974 primary. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the United States delegation to the United Nations with the rank of ambassador. In 1993 McCall became the first African-American to serve as state comptroller and was re-elected twice. In 2002, McCall received the Democratic nomination for governor, but lost to George Pataki.
Leon Bogues won the special election to replace Carl McCall in February 1980. Bogues had been the chairman of Community Board 7, which covered the West Side, but he was also successful in gathering support from the Harlem leadership. Bogues was re-elected three times and served until his death in 1985.
David Paterson was elected to the seat held by his father following the death of Leon Bogues in 1985 and served until 2006, when Eliot Spitzer tapped Paterson to run for lieutenant governor. David Paterson became governor on March 17, 2008 following Spitzer’s resignation.
Bill Perkins, well known in both the West Side and Harlem parts of the district, was elected in 2006. He had served seven years in the City Council and was a champion of the lead paint laws that addressed that serious housing problem. Perkins was one of the few elected officials to endorse Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primary and was chairman of Obama’s campaign in New York. Perkins returned to the City Council in 2017.
Brian Benjamin was elected in 2017 to succeed Bill Perkins and was reelected twice. Governor Kathy Hochul appointed him lieutenant governor when she became governor following Andrew Cuomo’s resignation.
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Douglas A. Kellner is a partner in the law firm Kellner Herlihy Getty & Friedman LLP. He also serves as Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections. Kellner chaired the Manhattan Democratic Senate District Committee nominating meetings in 1981 and 1985.
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Mayor de Blasio surveys damage from Ida (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
When the long tail of Hurricane Ida brought record rainfall to our region earlier this month, public officials claimed they were blindsided by the damage that resulted. While it’s notoriously difficult to accurately predict rainfall, the devastating societal impacts of the storm were not a surprise to those who follow these issues closely.
An inundated transit system, flooded homes in lower-income neighborhoods, residents trapped in basement apartments. These tragedies were foreseeable, in part, because the city has consistently failed to effectively link its climate adaptation strategy to a social equity and environmental justice strategy.
These recent events are a stark reminder that disasters are not “natural.” They are a function of a system that fails to protect everyone equally, and those in the most economically precarious positions are also the most vulnerable to climate-related hazards. We simply must do more to address the intertwined challenges of climate change and social justice before subsequent stronger storms wreak even more havoc.
Unfortunately, New York City is woefully under-prepared for the climate crisis. Eleven city residents perished as a result of Ida’s floodwaters. It is our civic duty to heed this wake-up call and assure that those lives were not lost in vain.
Complacence, fiscal limitations, and politics are some of the root causes that stymie efforts to adapt in real time to a changing climate. But more than any other factor, we have continually failed to heed nature’s most important lesson, as ecologist Barry Commoner succinctly summarized in his 1971 book Closing the Circle: “Everything,” Commoner explained, “is connected to everything else.”
This single rule, had we ever stopped to consider it, might have helped us avoid the climate quagmire we find ourselves in today. But it can still help us now.
There has been much talk since Ida about how the city needs to more effectively deal with stormwater, refine its emergency alert systems, and protect residents of basement apartments. Yes! Yes! And yes! But we are destined to fail if we view these as standalone problems with unitary solutions. Instead, we need to embrace and harness complexity instead of ignoring what we know to be true: your zip code and your income, more than any other factors, also determine how vulnerable you are to disaster.
As an urban planner, I was trained to think of cities as complex systems, but for a long time those just seemed like hollow academic concepts. Three years ago, I was in the Netherlands trying to better understand how the Dutch have so famously built a thriving, vibrant, livable nation on a marsh that sits mostly below sea level. One afternoon a Dutch engineer grew exasperated by my pestering questions about technical remedies and dressed me down.
“You’re asking the wrong questions,” he told me. “You can always solve a water-related problem with engineering. That’s the easy part, just spend enough money and you can fix anything. But if you don’t use that opportunity to solve a social or economic or environmental sustainability problem at the same time, then you’ve squandered the money the public entrusted to you.”
My friend the engineer, it turns out, perfectly encapsulated everything New York has failed to do in addressing our climate-related challenges. Sure, rain gardens and bioswales have been installed around the city, trees are being planted, and agencies are implementing the City Council’s Unified Stormwater Rule requiring developers to address stormwater risks when they build.
But these piecemeal solutions must also be part of a holistic and comprehensive plan to rethink how we do almost everything in the city, from economic development, housing, and transportation to how we build our parks and schools, what we do with our waste, and where we get our power. A veritable alphabet soup of city agencies will need to rethink what they do and how they do it and collaborate in ways that they have never done before. Most importantly, every decision, no matter how small, will need to be considered through the dual lens of risk mitigation and social justice. This, indeed, is the stated purpose of Mayor de Balsio’s signature OneNYC plan. But despite its pretty pictures, OneNYC, like many of the mayor’s other signature initiatives (looking at you, Vision Zero), has led to few meaningful changes in how the city actually operates.
And those old ways of doing business are anachronisms. In 2019 the city’s Charter Revision Commission failed to advance a proposal to require the city to adopt a comprehensive planning mandate, so the city will continue to pretend that land use and development decisions are wholly separate from decisions about school siting, infrastructure, and transportation. Instead, the city’s antiquated Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) will continue to minimize community input into impactful new real estate developments and fail to connect these projects to any kind of long-term strategic vision for the kind of city we want to see.
Thousands of other U.S. communities have long understood that these issues must be addressed holistically, and this mindset is critical if we want to be more strategic about confronting future climate risks. Council Member Justin Brannan, in fact, introduced legislation back in 2019 to require a citywide waterfront resilience plan. Along with colleagues like Costa Constantinides, Brannan has also been a real leader in pushing the city to recognize and address its vulnerability to climate change. But these are just the first steps, and what we need is not only new and better plans, but a wholesale reimagining of how the city operates, including a true commitment to social and environmental justice.
New York’s climate change adaptation efforts need to heed the lessons that other communities, and even the federal government, have already begun to internalize. A week after taking office, President Biden put forth the Justice40 initiative creating a direct link between the nation’s investments in climate change mitigation and the effort to empower disadvantaged communities.
These efforts are not silver bullets, but they are a start. In New York City, we hear a lot of lofty rhetoric, but the pace of true change feels glacial, while the societal toll from climate change continues to accelerate. The city’s myopic and siloed approach to climate change adaptation results in contentious battles like the one currently playing out over the city’s East Side Coastal Resiliency project, and is why even seemingly simple climate justice solutions like equitably distributing safe bicycling routes seem unattainable.
Massive public investments and politically difficult regulatory decisions will need to be part of New York City’s efforts to address the perils of climate change. Just as importantly we will also need to remake our entire governance apparatus, acknowledging once and for all that risk mitigation and social justice are inextricably linked and foregrounding these intertwined goals in every single decision we make. This evolution won’t be easy, but anything less squanders the painful lessons of Ida and every disaster before it, warnings we ignore at our own peril.
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Donovan Finn is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Design, Policy and Planning in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. He is also a proud resident of Jackson Heights, Queens.
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Older New Yorkers (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
As we grow older, few things are more essential than feeling safe in our neighborhoods.
For older adults, public safety is more than fighting crime; it’s about maintaining independence and a quality of life and dignity. But currently many New York neighborhoods fall short of creating an age friendly environment where older adults can thrive. There’s work to do, but fortunately our city is experiencing a moment of unprecedented change that represents our best opportunity to make New York a safer, more equitable place to age.
From adopting age-friendly design principles to supporting neighborhood services as we all age, the incoming mayoral administration and City Council will have the opportunity to reimagine a New York City for all ages. That’s why we are proud to support the comprehensive policy agenda released by LiveOn NY and Hunter College’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging, which provides fresh and innovative ideas for how the next city government can go beyond policing to make all neighborhoods safe and secure places to age.
For older New Yorkers, public safety includes the community-based services that provide a lifeline to core services such as nutrition and health management support. These human services provided by local non-profits like ours have kept older New Yorkers safe throughout the pandemic, making thousands of vaccination appointments, delivering nutritious meals, and fostering socialization. Unfortunately, for too long, the city has fallen short in making meaningful investments in aging services as well as the human services sector at large. It’s time the city truly supports and fully funds the organizations and workers who continue to show up everyday to support older New Yorkers.
Beyond increasing support for direct services, a safer city also requires significant work to ensure all New Yorkers have a safe place to call home. Today’s tight rental market, old housing stock, and lack of affordable housing conspire to make it difficult for older New Yorkers, particularly those on fixed incomes, to remain housed while making ends meet. We’ll need the next city administration to double down on increasing the production of affordable senior housing with services, as well as support housing programs that can accommodate the changing needs of older residents.
Public safety also means remaining safe from falls, which are the fifth highest cause of death among people age 65 and older. Walkable streets with equitably located resources and accessible transit options, all give older adults the freedom to engage and contribute to the surrounding communities. Fall prevention starts with investing in street lighting and sidewalk maintenance to eliminate tripping hazards like cracks, litter, and snow, and making crossing areas safe for pedestrians. Tragically, older New Yorkers are struck and killed by vehicles at nearly three times the rate of younger people. Let’s commit to create safer areas for New Yorkers by prioritizing walkability and expanding the city’s Vision Zero program.
To build a city for all New Yorkers, our transportation modes must adapt to the needs of people with different levels of physical ability. Currently, only one in four subway stations have key accessibility features. Whether you’re an individual with a mobility limitation or a parent with a stroller, accessibility features such as elevators and ramps are critical to not only preventing falls, but to unlocking all that New York has to offer. It’s time for the state and the city to work together to make our subway system more accessible.
For those that rely on Access-a-Ride, there are also ready-made improvements to be made. Namely, it’s critical for the city to expand its successful e-hail paratransit pilot program across the five boroughs.
Of course, while housing, nutrition, services, and an age-friendly community are key to ensuring New Yorkers can age safely, preventing crime directed towards the older population will remain critical. With the recent attacks on Asian Americans, we see clearly that too often violent crime is perpetrated against older adults and those in marginalized populations in particular. We, as a city, must come together to fight hate and discrimination in all of its forms. From funding local non-profits to build community, to bolstering mental health programs that have proven success, we believe a holistically safe city is possible.
New Yorkers are counting on the next mayoral administration and City Council to make our neighborhoods better and safer places to age. Growing older should build momentum in our lives, rather than slow us down. It’s time to invest in the future of aging in our city. Community-based social services organizations like ours with decades of experience working with older adults stand ready to help the incoming city government make the right investments for our communities.
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Donna Atmore-Dolly is Executive Director of Allen Community Non-Profit Programs. Anderson Torres, PhD, LCSW-R, is President and CEO of R.A.I.N. TOTAL CARE.
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