October 23, 2019

Backlash Against Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in Queens

By Azi Paybarah

It's Wednesday. There will be a curfew on Halloween in Yonkers for children 16 and younger, according to ABC 7.

Weather: Sunny, with highs in the mid-60s. Expect a moderate breeze.

Alternate-side parking: In effect until Sunday (Diwali).

Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

The crowd in Queens on Saturday was large and enthusiastic, packed into a park across the street from the nation's largest public housing project to watch as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.

In his remarks, Mr. Sanders called for investment in public housing, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore echoed his progressive agenda.

But in the days since, the rally has sparked an unexpected backlash from some public housing leaders, who said the Sanders campaign did little to include in the event the roughly 6,000 residents of Queensbridge Houses, the housing project across the street from where the rally was held.

The Sanders team pushed back. Mike Casca, a spokesman for the campaign, told The Times that it reached out to the Queensbridge Tenant Association president days before the rally, and that it provided fliers for distribution among the development's mostly black and Hispanic residents.

Still, the reactions further exposed the race and class tensions in this gentrifying slice of Queens.

"These people were coming from near, far — but they weren't from Queensbridge," the tenant association president, April Simpson, told a reporter for Patch. "That rally wasn't for us."

Ms. Simpson, who did not respond to requests from The Times for comment, told Patch that the Sanders campaign reached out only on Friday, and that the time of the rally conflicted with a tenants association meeting.

At the event, Mr. Sanders called it "absolutely unacceptable that the largest public housing development in North America, right across the street from us, lacks decent heat and hot water and is in urgent need of repair."

Ray Normandeau, who has lived in Queensbridge Houses since 1973, said he and his wife attended the event. By his estimation, a few hundred of his neighbors were there.

He said the website he runs about Queensbridge featured information about the rally about a week before it occurred.

To live in Queensbridge Houses and not know about the rally, Mr. Normandeau said, "sounds specious." He added: "Obviously, if 25,000 people showed up, it wasn't kept a secret."

Bishop Mitchell Taylor, a community leader, said the people in the park looked "like tourists." In the Patch article, he called the event "a pretty white rally."

Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's 2020 campaign, said he was proud of the Sanders team's outreach effort. "I was also very proud to see public housing highlighted in both of their comments and their legislative agendas," he said.

The Patch reporter, Maya Kaufman, wrote on Twitter that the Sanders campaign said it called to schedule a meeting between Mr. Sanders and Queensbridge leaders, but that Ms. Simpson said that wasn't true.

FROM THE TIMES

Explore news from New York and around the region

After Cyclist Deaths, City Adjusts Traffic Lights to Slow Cars

New York is calibrating some signals to give bikes priority for green lights. Drivers say the change worsens traffic.

by winnie hu

2 Proud Boys Sentenced to 4 Years in Brawl With Anti-Fascists at Republican Club

The men had been convicted of taking part in an attack on protesters outside the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan.

by colin moynihan

the neediest cases fund

She Survived Stalin's Police State, Then Found a Home in New York

Yevgeniya Grinberg's father was sent to a gulag, and she fled the Nazis with her mother. Now she has a new sofa bed for the home she has made for herself in Washington Heights.

by masha goncharova

Want more news? Check out our full coverage.

The Mini Crossword: Here is today's puzzle.

What we're reading

A city Department of Transportation worker accidentally killed a colleague while repaving an Upper East Side street, the authorities said. [ABC 7]

A sculpture of President Trump floating on a snake-infested raft was seen in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. [Patch]

A German adult-film star got a private tour of Police Department headquarters — and documented it for her Instagram followers. [New York Post]

Coming up today

Wondershow at House of Yes in Brooklyn features magicians, mind-readers, an aerial duo and a hula-hooping sensation. 7:30 p.m. [$39]

Children can make art from recyclable materials at Poe Park Visitor Center in the Bronx. 2:30 p.m. [Free]

Aretha Franklin's live concert film "Amazing Grace" screens as part of the BRIC JazzFest at BRIC in Brooklyn. 7:30 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

— Melissa Guerrero

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times's culture pages.

And finally: Where it is never not Halloween

Molly Fitzpatrick writes:

In Sleepy Hollow, about an hour north of Times Square, the street signs and fire trucks are orange and black. The ambulances are emblazoned with full-panel murals of the Headless Horseman.

And the most famous pair of empty shoulders in American literature moonlights as Sleepy Hollow High School's unsettling mascot (go Horsemen!).

For years, the village was known as North Tarrytown.

The rebranding of the area began in 1996. That year, the local General Motors plant — which had once employed 4,000 workers — closed, delivering a devastating blow to the village economy. The plan was to pivot toward tourism, focusing on the most famous work of the village's most famous resident.

[The headless horseman industrial complex: a story about a place in Westchester.]

The village voted to rename itself Sleepy Hollow, in honor of the short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," written by Washington Irving. The then-mayor, Sean Treacy, celebrated the result of the vote against the backdrop of a Headless Horseman banner: "This is now the place," he proclaimed, "where legends are made."

For Henry Steiner, the village historian who supported the name change, the opportunity was more profound. "I wanted to see this community called North Tarrytown not labor under a lack of identity," he said. "I wanted to seize this world-famous identity that had been buried."

It worked. In October, about 100,000 tourists descend on the Westchester County village of 10,000.

And the long-vacant General Motors site is now under construction as Edge-on-Hudson, a $1 billion residential and commercial development.

"We don't want people to think that Sleepy Hollow is, year-round, all about spooky stuff, because it's not," Ken Wray, the current mayor of Sleepy Hollow, said. "We don't want to be the Santa's Village of Halloween."

It's Wednesday — get into the spirit.

Metropolitan Diary: Two-drink minimum

Dear Diary:

I was a child of Chicago's northern suburbs. In summer 1975, when I was 12, my 23-year-old brother, who had attended New York University, arranged for me to come to Manhattan for a week's vacation. After I got there, we went to the Other End (a.k.a. the Bitter End).

"There's a cover charge and a two-drink minimum," the man at the door said. "Your small friend here can have his in hot chocolate."

Michal Urbaniak and Fusion were performing. I had all of their albums. I played in my junior high school jazz band and I got to talk shop with the drummer between sets.

A waitress accidentally spilled beer on me during the show. In the taxi on the way back to my hotel, the driver turned around.

"It smells like the little man had too much to drink tonight," he said.

— Roger Fortune

We're experimenting with the format of New York Today. What would you like to see more (or less) of? Post a comment or email us: nytoday@nytimes.com.