Taking a Trip Down Memory Lane in Primary Season

Memory lane—City Council District 4 is personal to me. While I now live in CD 5, the streets, the blocks, the avenues are a blend of neighborhoods—Lenox Hill, Yorkville, Carnegie Hill, and any other Upper East Side nomenclature used to described the East Side neighborhoods starting in the 60s and ending in the 90s. For me it’s all of the above. It’s been my home since the late 1960s and, with districts having been reconfigured, I’m sure as a once-itinerant Upper East Sider I’ve lived in all parts now known as CD 4 or CD 5.

In the early 1970s, I was an editor and reporter at Our Town, an assistant professor at Queensborough Community College, and living in the East 60s. In 1977, when then-Councilman Carter Burden announced that he was running for City Council president, I ran for his open seat and lost to Jane Trichter. Carter lost to Carol Bellamy.

In 1982, another young Upper East Side Democrat, Carolyn Maloney, ran for City Council in a contested primary against an incumbent. Maloney won and served on the council until 1992, when she ran for Congress and defeated incumbent Republican Congressman Bill Green. In the years that Ed Kayatt published Our Town, the paper’s policy was to endorse candidates. If I recall correctly, Maloney was usually endorsed. She continued to be re-elected for the next 30 years. In an August 2022 column I gave a shout-out to Maloney for her years of exemplary service after she lost to Congressman Jerry Nadler in a hard-fought Democratic primary after Congressional Districts 10 and 12 were merged.

With her new life as Eleanor Roosevelt Leader in Residence at the Roosevelt Institute of Public Policy, and as forever mom of a candidate now running for a seat on the City Council in District 4 (some parts of which were represented by Carolyn when she was either in the council or congress), I wanted to sit down with her and her candidate daughter, Virginia Maloney, to reminisce a little, and find out what it’s like having her daughter running for, ostensibly, her old seat. Quoting Carolyn: “As the first woman to give birth as a New York City Council Member (to wit, Virginia), it is thrilling to see future generations of women stepping up to tackle our city’s toughest problems. I truly believe that public service is the most noble and important career if it is done honestly, wisely, and with great dedication,” which is why she said she is proudly supporting Virginia in the CD 4 race, and that “a vote for Virginia is a vote for the city’s future, and a stronger, safer East Side.”

Virginia said she “loved hearing about how you [meaning me] and my mother originally met” and wanted to share stories about her upbringing in New York and “watching [her] mother representing the district during 9/11 and her long-fought battle to get healthcare to first responders, to my own time working for the government service during Hurricane Sandy.”

Virginia talked about her passion for environmental issues and her time in Bolivia working to install solar ovens and fuel-efficient stoves. And she won a grant to distribute these ovens to schools and to families in rural parts of the country. Presently, she is a product manager at Meta and leads a large engineering team to build and launch new technology. Most recently she worked on a pair of glasses to help the blind and vision-impaired navigate the world by connecting them with a live volunteer through eyeglasses. The eyeglasses can “see” what the blind person wearing them cannot and help the sight-challenged person navigate the world.

It was a lot to cover over a quick lunch at Le Pain Quotidien on Lexington and East 65th Street.

The right to be a write-in—The race for Public Advocate, according to the Campaign Finance Board’s voter guide, has five candidates. The two front-runners are incumbent Jumaane Williams and Jenifer Rajkumar. I didn’t see any instruction in the guide about write-ins, Shortly thereafter, an email was sent out by Valerie Mason, who is chair of Community Board 8 and has worked on behalf of the community through the East 72nd Street Neighborhood Association. The five candidates listed in the voter guide: Angela Aquino, Theo Chino Tavarez. Martin W. Dolan, Jenifer Rajkumar, Jumaane D. Williams. Mason’s email says that she’s “NOT soliciting money” but is “more qualified than any of them.” She said she is reaching out “to ask that you write in my name when you go to vote and to please ask your friends that they too write my name on the ballot.”

She says to write in a name, go down to the applicable write-in line for Public Advocate and write in her name. She goes on to explain that “Since this is rank-choice voting, I hope you will darken the oval next to #1, but even if you don’t write number 1, I hope you will choose to darken #2.”

Kind of late in the day to solicit write-ins. But there ya go.