Last night, as I left Bill de Blasio’s victory party at the Park Slope Armory, the sound of the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” was streaming through the loudspeakers, which seemed fitting. When I first moved to New York, almost thirty years ago, the white-boy rappers were setting out to put their home borough on the rock-music map. (At the World, in Alphabet City, I was lucky enough to see some of their early gigs.) And now, another Brooklynite, not a native but not exactly a blow-in, either, has won the biggest landslide by a non-incumbent since the five boroughs were united, in 1898.
Much can be said, and has been said, about de Blasio’s remarkable rise to City Hall. But the Brooklyn angle still bears inspection. In many ways, de Blasio embodies the transformation of a borough that was long considered a poor relation to Manhattan, a place many Brooklynites still refer to as “the City.” For a while now, it’s been clear that much of New York’s cultural and artistic energy has moved across the East River, vacating Manhattan—or the lower two-thirds of it—to its fate as an urban theme park and empty nesters’ retreat. Meanwhile, the home of Rhea Perlman, Vic Damone, and Mike Tyson has become an international brand name, a signifier of all things cool and urban. (“Trés Brooklyn,” the French say.) It has Jay Z, the Nets, and enough artisanal restaurants to feed an army of hipsters with Civil War beards. And now Brooklynites are setting the city’s political agenda.
It’s not just de Blasio. Across Flatbush Avenue, a bit to the north of where he was declaring that New Yorkers had chosen “a progressive path,” Letitia James, the city councilwoman for Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, who had just been elected as the new Public Advocate, was delivering a fiery speech, pledging to be “a fierce champion of working-class New Yorkers.” With the victories of de Blasio and James—who will be the first woman of color to hold citywide office—Scott Stringer, the new comptroller, who currently serves as Manhattan’s borough president, will be the only non-Brooklynite in the triumvirate of politicians who are elected by all New Yorkers.
Holding a victory party in Park Slope was another sign of how the city’s political geography has shifted. For as long as I can remember, these events have been held in midtown—often at one of the Sheratons on Seventh Avenue, or at the Hilton on Sixth. Last night, the television trucks were lined up on Fifteenth Street, just down the block from Prospect Park and a short stroll from the modest three-story townhouse where the de Blasios live. At the police checkpoint on Seventh Avenue, black town cars were dropping off guests from the city, but not as many as you might think. This was a recognizably Brooklyn crowd: goateed twentysomethings in narrow jeans, plaid shirts, and black blazers; besuited black men with homburg hats; orthodox Jews in skullcaps; professorial types with curly gray hair and wool sweaters; little old Chinese ladies wearing big smiles.
Making my way through the throng, I ran into Jack Mullan, a friend’s son, who grew up in Cobble Hill and is now studying political science at Vassar. Earlier this year, when de Blasio was miles behind in the polls, this young fellow had volunteered for his campaign, knocking on doors and doing local organizing. Earlier in the evening, he had taken the train from Poughkeepsie. “I wanted to come down and see it through to the finish,” he said.
Stopping by the press table, I asked a colleague whether there were any celebrities in attendance. She said Cynthia Nixon and Susan Sarandon were there somewhere, but I didn’t spot them. In any case, the real celebrities of the night were de Blasio and his family, who preceded him to the stage, beaming. I am here to report that Dante’s ’fro looked even bigger and more splendid than ever. His mother, Chirlane McCray, who met de Blasio when they both worked in the Dinkins administration, praised her husband’s drive and compassion, and said that he would lead the city with “courage and empathy.”
McCray didn’t say whether the new Mayor will continue to pick up the family wash from the laundromat, as he was pictured doing in the Post on Tuesday—but if he’s got any sense, he will. After twelve years of Mike Bloomberg flying off to Bermuda or London on his private jet, de Blasio’s image as an outer-borough man of the people is his biggest advantage. Whatever else he does when he moves his family to Gracie Mansion, he can’t afford to lose that populist edge.
Judging by his victory speech, in which he focussed squarely on the issue of inequality, he won’t let it go easily. Twice he averred that the inequality problem has been decades in the making and won’t be easily solved, but he also repeatedly promised to deliver on his pledges, saying: “The road ahead will be difficult, but it will be travelled. Progressive changes won’t happen overnight, but they will happen.” Normally a plain speaker, de Blasio also tried to summon up a bit of poetry, ending with an ode to the egalitarian values of another progressive who, for a time, plied his trade in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman:
Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite Whitmanesque. But it didn’t sound anything like Mike Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani, either. New York has moved on. And its new beat was laid down in Brooklyn.
Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty
