aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

The Mayor of Brooklyn

Shortly before leaving New York I worked with Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s Cultural Transition Committee. I met Marty only a few times but became close to some on his staff and had
I stayed, might well have ended up working even more closely with them. So it was that reading last week’s dead-on New Yorker profile of Marty brought pangs of homesickness:

Markowitz’s office, like that of New York’s other borough presidents, combines a grand governmental title with a slight portfolio and a very modest budget. (This year, Markowitz has an operating budget of five million dollars; the city’s over-all budget was fifty-one billion dollars)...The Times, in endorsing Markowitz against his two primary contestants in August, 2001, acknowledged the comparative impotence of the office that he was seeking. Indeed, that was what made Markowitz, whom the paper described as “an ebullient public servant who could provide a refreshing boosterism for the sometimes beleaguered borough,” the right man for the job.

Markowitz’s ebullience is such that, among other city officials, he tends to be treated less as a political peer than as a cheery mascot for his borough. In mid-December, Markowitz shared a platform with Mayor Bloomberg at an event announcing an investment in the neglected Restoration Plaza, on Fulton Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, and the Mayor introduced him with an air of amused condescension.

Marty is a showman. A Brooklyn booster. With a Fiorello LaGuardia-like flair. He loves Brooklyn and it shows. His office “looks less like a sober place of government than like Santa’s workshop. On every surface-shelves, tables, window ledges, and cluttering the desk-there are Teddy bears and toy trucks, balls and bats, dolls dressed in the regalia of the Caribbean parade that takes place on Eastern Parkway every Labor Day.”

Markowitz has made an art of trading in a familiar nostalgia for better times as a means of promoting the future of what he usually refers to as “the city of Brooklyn.” Ken Fisher, a former City Council member who was another of Markowitz’s opponents, says, “Marty can make people nostalgic for the Dodgers who weren’t even born when they left Brooklyn.” Since his election, Markowitz has attained a degree of omnipresence in the seventy-two-and-a-half-square-mile borough: if there’s a parade, he’ll be marching in it; if there’s a street fair, he’ll be eating at it. If there are Brooklynites to be honored-such as Cake Man Raven, a Fort Greene confectioner who replicated Borough Hall in sponge cake and frosting for Markowitz’s inauguration-Markowitz will be there, issuing a proclamation or a citation printed with gilded, archaic lettering.

I love Brooklyn too. After living in Manhattan for 25 years, most of it on the Upper West Side, I moved to Brooklyn. (Doug kids that the BIG move was to Brooklyn, and says compared to that Georgia was a cakewalk.)

Brooklyn is today what Manhattan was when I moved there in 1975. It has the old neighborhoods, an artistic edge and energy, and great architecture and diversity.

While the borough is still beleaguered in many ways-more than twenty per cent of its two and a half million residents live below the poverty line-Brooklyn has also begun to serve as an overspill for Manhattan wealth, with development proposed for many formerly neglected stretches of territory, from the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, which now houses movie studios, to the industrial waterfront between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where the city would like to see luxury apartment towers rise, to the piers below the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, where new parkland has been proposed...his self-appointment as Brooklyn’s chief nostalgist deflects attention from the surprising fact that, if the Atlantic Yards development gets built, he will have wielded far more influence over the shaping of Brooklyn’s future than anyone expected of him.

The proposed Atlantic Yards development is right in my old backyard. I lived in Prospect Heights, and my guess is my old neighbors have differing views of the project. It will increase property values for everyone who owns, but also congestion, traffic and everything else that comes with urban development, including pushing some of those who live there out.

Neighborhood opposition to the project has ranged from anger at the suggestion that the state may invoke powers of eminent domain to the argument that a privately owned real-estate development is not the best use of the land, a large chunk of which is owned by the M.T.A., and will alter the character of the neighborhood. But the right of the gentrifying class to preserve its property values in blocks close to the arena is not one around which much mass support can be rallied in Brooklyn; and, meanwhile, Forest City Ratner has demonstrated a keen understanding of community politics in lining up support among representatives of the neighborhood’s less affluent populations. While fifty per cent of the housing will be for the luxury market, Ratner says, the rest will be set aside for residents whose incomes are between eighteen thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a year. (There have been similar promises that minority-owned and women-owned businesses will get priority when it comes to applying for construction contracts.) “I never want to see a time in Brooklyn when there are multimillionaires and there are those who live in public housing, and nothing in between,” Markowitz says. He does not mention that the wealthiest new property owner in the neighborhood will be Bruce Ratner.

Marty’s what I imagine an old-time New York pol to be, and looking back as I do through rose colored glasses, I like that.

Markowitz has always used his office in unusual ways: as a state senator, he organized free summer concerts featuring mostly crowd-pleasing, B-list bands and performers, at which he would appear as the m.c., dressed in a white tuxedo. (When in 1991 riots broke out in Crown Heights, part of Markowitz’s district, Markowitz was hosting B. B. King at a concert a few blocks away.) In Albany, he was better known for bringing bagels, dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day, to the Senate chamber than for any legislative innovations. In some respects, though, Markowitz’s actions as Borough President have revealed the reflexes of a parochial politician. To the New York City Panel for Education Policy, formerly the Board of Education, Markowitz named Donald Weber, a longtime schools superintendent, a decision that drew controversy on two counts: the position on the board, which had been newly restructured, was intended for a representative of Brooklyn parents, rather than for an education bureaucrat; and Weber’s school district had been investigated in the late eighties and mid-nineties by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office for cronyism. (Weber later resigned anyway, citing the panel’s impotence.) Another embarrassment occurred when it emerged that Dolly Williams, a co-founder of a construction company in Brooklyn, and Markowitz’s appointee to the New York City Planning Commission, had also invested a million dollars in Bruce Ratner’s Nets.

The story of the Atlantic Yards development is pure Marty:

When he was campaigning for the borough presidency, Markowitz said that he wanted to bring an N.B.A. team to Brooklyn, and the idea was taken about as seriously as his appeals for Brooklyn’s secession. But in the fall of 2002, when it became clear that the New Jersey Nets were likely to come on the market, Markowitz picked up the phone… “I thought to myself, Who can I call who has a dedication to Brooklyn, and that has got the economic ability, because, let’s face it, someone who builds two-family homes is not going to be in a position to buy a team and to build an arena.” He considered Donald Trump, but feared that Trump might move the team closer to Atlantic City and his casino investments. Markowitz did, however, call Bruce Ratner, whose company, over the past two decades, has built the massive Metro Tech development-more than two million square feet of office space-not far from the proposed site of the arena. “Bruce had no interest, absolutely no interest,” Markowitz said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at this fella and know that he’s not a jock.” (Ratner, who is sixty, looks more like the Consumer Affairs Commissioner he was during the Koch administration.) “But I was very persistent with him, and didn’t take no for an answer.”

“He called every two to three weeks,” Ratner says. “I would make up little white lies, and I would wait a day or two to call him back. I am sure I said to my assistant, ‘Oh, my God, it’s Marty.’ “ Eventually, Ratner was convinced of the wisdom of the notion, but not before augmenting the Borough President’s ambitions with his own calculations-"the recognition that there is an opportunity to do what my business is, which is real estate and large-scale economic development.”

Thus the arena imagined by Markowitz became only part of a much larger development, which will stretch six blocks along the border of Prospect Heights. Ratner says that he had looked at the site years ago, but dismissed the idea as unworkable. In the past five to seven years, however, the neighborhood’s profile changed, as the handsome brownstones attracted new residents. “A lot of it stems from the safety, and security, and resurgence of Brooklyn,” Ratner said.

I was one of those new residents. On balance, I think I’d want the new development. We were eagerly awaiting the opening of Target before we left; my old neighbors tell me they love it.

I loved New York City politics. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved to read about it, watch it, debate it and I loved that I got real close to it. Politics in New York, for all it is criticized (hey that’s part of it), is a process that is inclusive and has legitimacy and works. There is energy and vitality and they make things happen and stop other things from happening.

Here I find that politics and government are de-legitimized. Of no interest except in so far as it can be blamed and criticized for all that is wrong with our world. And as a consequence, politics here is genuinely dysfunctional and ineffective. At least that’s been my experience so far.

Today I hired the Treasurer of our College Republicans. I told him, “I’ll make a liberal of you one day.” Maybe not. But at least he seems like maybe he believes in the legitimacy of politics and government. Around here, that’s something.