The BroadsheetDAILY – 6/30/22 – Fall In: Gerrymandered District Lines Result in Staten Island Assembly Member Representing Lower Manhattan in Albany

The Broadsheet – Lower Manhattan’s Local Newspaper

Fall In

Gerrymandered District Lines Result in Staten Island Assembly Member Representing Lower Manhattan in Albany

Above: Lower Manhattan community leader Justine Cuccia campaigning for the State Assembly District 61 seat representing Lower Manhattan and Staten Island. Below: Staten Island resident Charles Fall has been re-elected to represent District 61 in the New York State Assembly.

Preliminary, unofficial results from Tuesday’s primary point toward a likely winner in the race to represent Lower Manhattan in the State Assembly. Charles Fall, an incumbent Assembly member from Staten Island, has outpolled Lower Manhattan activist Justine Cuccia.

This race was largely defined by a surprise redistricting announced by the State legislature in January, which grafted Battery Park City and a sliver of the western side of the Financial District onto the North Shore of Staten Island. This gerrymandered map meant that roughly 80 percent of the newly created 61st Assembly District’s population resided within Staten Island.

Both candidates carried their home territories by lopsided margins. Ms. Cuccia won 72 percent of the vote in Lower Manhattan, while Mr. Fall enjoyed a similarly asymmetrical advantage in Staten Island. But, because the preponderance of voters live in the Staten Island portion of the district, more than 3,700 total votes were cast there, while slightly fewer than 1,300 were tallied in Lower Manhattan.

The second factor that appears to have influenced the outcome of the race was low voter turnout. A total of fewer than 6,000 votes were cast in the entirety of the 61st Assembly District. This is less than half of the 12,058 votes tallied in the primary election for the 61st Assembly District in 2018, the last time Mr. Fall faced a challenger for the Democratic nomination. Participation may have been driven down by a number of factors, including voter confusion related to redistricting, as well as apathy inspired by the multiple court challenges to various redistricting plans, along with this year’s primary elections being split between dates in June and August.

Mr. Fall said, “I want to thank the residents of the 61st Assembly District for giving me another opportunity to serve. I look forward to working with the community to improve matters related to public safety, transportation, education and ensuring we hold City and State agencies accountable.”

Ms. Cuccia said, “Lower Manhattan still faces all the urgent challenges that inspired me to run in the first place—affordability for renters and homeowners, unchecked development with few community benefits, the need for a majority of Battery Park City residents on the Battery Park City Authority board, and progress on issues like resiliency planning and protection against climate change. I am grateful to the vast majority of my neighbors who came out to support me, and I am honored that almost 1,000 residents of Staten Island—where I was literally a stranger when this race began a few short months ago—also chose to give me their votes. I look forward to continuing to serve my community and to working with Charles Fall to ensure that the issues we face—on both sides of New York Harbor—are addressed, and that meaningful progress is made toward ensuring neither side is forgotten.”

The redistricting process that merged Lower Manhattan with the North Shore of Staten Island may prove to be short-lived. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled in June that the new lines for all State Assembly Districts are unconstitutional, and must be redrawn. The court allowed the current district maps to remain in place for Tuesday’s primary (as well as for the general election, in November), but ordered that the district lines be revised yet again before the next election cycle, in 2024.

Matthew Fenton

(Editor’s Note: Ms. Cuccia is related to the reporter who wrote this story.)

Reasoning in the Public Square

Residents Invited to Weigh In On Competing Visions for Esplanade Resiliency Plan

The Battery Park City Authority hosted an open house meeting about its North/West Battery Park City Resiliency Project on Wednesday, June 29, at Six River Terrace. The open house gave participants an overview of evolving plans for the North/West Resiliency Project, which envisions the creation of a flood risk management system stretching from a point near First Place and the Esplanade, along the Hudson River waterfront to behind Stuyvesant High School and into Tribeca.

The Line at Starbucks Is About to Get Longer

New Office Conversion in FiDi to Bring Another Thousand Residents to Lower Manhattan

A mostly empty office building in the Financial District is poised for conversion into an apartment building. In a story first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the 1960s-era commercial building at 55 Broad Street (at the corner of Beaver Street) will be converted into 571 apartments by a partnership between developers Larry Silverstein and Nathan Berman, who have paid previous owner Rudin Management $180 million for the structure.

Calendar

Thursday, June 30

5:30pm

Pier 17 rooftop

Concert.

Friday, July 1

10am-5pm

Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 36 Battery Place

Opening day of a new exhibition that relates the history of the Holocaust through personal stories, objects, photos, and film. Each room, and each object, contains generations of experiences and information about who Jews are, what sustains Jewish communities, and what life was like during the period of European modernization, World War I, and the political and social movements that brought about the rise of the Nazi Party. Within the Holocaust’s experiences of legalized racism and fascism, pogroms, ghettos, mass murder, and concentration camps are also instances of personal and global decision-making, escape, resistance and resilience, and ultimately liberation and new beginnings. Generally, the Museum is open Sunday, Wednesday and Friday from 10am to 5pm. Admission is $18 for adults; $12 for seniors, veterans and students; free for children 12 and under.

11am-5pm

Take a self guided tour of the tall ship Wavertree, and visit the 12 Fulton Street galleries to view the exhibitions “South Street and the Rise of New York” and “Millions: Migrants and Millionares aboard the Great Liners.” Free.

7pm-11pm

Governors Island Parade Ground

Free outdoor film screening. Catch John Cameron Mitchel­l’s 2001 cult clas­sic Hed­wig and the Angry Inch. Pre-show enter­tain­ment kick­s off at 7pm; film begin­s at dusk. Food and drinks will be avail­able for pur­chase, includ­ing a beer gar­den by Threes Brew­ing along with food from Piz­za Yard, Malai, Ter­ry & Yaki, Kim­chi Taco Truck, and Caripito’s.

Lower Manhattan Greenmarkets

Tribeca Greenmarket

Greenwich Street & Chambers Street

Wednesdays and Saturdays, 8am-3pm (compost program: Saturdays, 8am-1pm)

Bowling Green Greenmarket

Broadway & Whitehall St

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8am-5pm (compost program: 8am-11am)

World Trade Center Oculus Greenmarket

Tuesdays, 8am-5pm

The Outdoor Fulton Stall Market

91 South Street, between Fulton & John Streets

Indoor market: Monday through Saturday,11:30am-5pm

CSA pick-up: Thursday, 4pm-6pm; Friday, 11:30-5pm

Outdoor market: Saturdays, 11:30am-5pm

CLASSIFIEDS & PERSONALS

Swaps & Trades, Respectable Employment, Lost and Found

To place a listing, contact editor@ebroadsheet.com

Today in History: June 30

On this day in 1859, Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope for the first time. The rope was 1,100 feet long, 3.25 in diameter and 160 feet above the water. He repeated this feat a number of times in subsequent years, often with theatrical flourishes: blindfolded, pushing a wheelbarrow, on stilts, carrying his manager on his back, sitting down halfway across to cook and eat an omelette, or standing on a chair with only one leg balanced on the rope.

Photograph of the first crossing by William England.

1520 – Spanish conquistadors are expelled from Tenochtitlan following an Aztec revolt against their rule under Hernán Cortés during La Noche Triste (the Night of Sadness). Many soldiers drown in the escape, and Aztec emperor Moctezuma II dies in the struggle.

1859 – French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope

1860 – Evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

1864 – President Abraham Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for “public use, resort and recreation.”

1908 – A giant fireball flattens 80 million trees near the Stony Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia.

1936 – Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With The Wind published

1938 – Superman first appears in DC Comics’ Action Comics Series.

1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan.

2013 – Nineteen firefighters die controlling a wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona.

2021 – American Abhimanyu Mishra becomes the youngest chess grandmaster ever at 12 years and 4 months, surpassing Sergey Karjakin

Births

1889 – Archibald Frazer-Nash, English motor car designer, engineer and founder of Frazer Nash (d. 1965)

1917 – Lena Horne, actress, singer, and activist (d. 2010)

1966 – Mike Tyson, boxer (youngest ever heavyweight champion at 20 years old

1985 – Michael Phelps, swimmer (record 23 Olympic gold medals)

Deaths

1908 – Thomas Hill, American painter (b. 1829)

2001 – Chet Atkins, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1924)

2012 – Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, 7th Prime Minister of Israel (b. 1915)

2014 – Paul Mazursky, actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1930)

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