| History of
the Downtown Independent Democrats |
| By Jim Stratton |
The Downtown Independent
Democrats is the reigning Democratic club in a wide swath of Lower Manhattan.
The club covers
one of the largest land areas of any in Manhattan. Neighborhoods
represented by the club include Battery Park City, the Financial
District, TriBeCa,
Hudson Square, SoHo, NoHo, the South Village, the Washington Square area,
Washington Square Village, Silver Towers, Village View,
and parts of the Lower East Side and
the
East
Village, as well as Governor's Island. D.I.D. is represented
by four District Leaders from two State Assembly districts,
the 66th District, Part B and the 64th District, Part C.
The D.I.D. is a reform
Democratic club, dedicated to support progressive government and issues,
help elect intelligent and honest candidates, and to support judicial candidates
found Most Highly Qualified by the party's independent screening panel.
It is rare among political
clubs in that political ambition has seldom been a divisive issue in the
D.I.D. history. Active members number more than one hundred, and traditionally
its headquarters has not been a clubhouse but homes of its members.
The club has often
worked peacefully with other political clubs to help elect good candidates.
Background
In the 1950's and '60's,
a New York City judge was more likely to be found on the golf links than
in a courtroom. Most judges got their jobs the old-fashioned way: by giving
money, and favors, to local politicos.
Defendants languished
in prison without their day in court. Plaintiffs waited in line. The judicial
process often took years.
It was only one of
the problems of old-style, "Tammany" politics that had come to
wreak havoc upon the city. Political pay-offs, favoritism, and patronage
affected business, real estate, schools.
A spirit of reform
arose in the 1950's, and was strong on Manhattan's West Side. By the late
1960's, reform-oriented political clubs were taking on entrenched "regulars" in
much of Manhattan.
The original Downtown
Independent Democrats was put together by reformers in the South Village.
Most had been members of a parent club in Greenwich Village until redistricting
divided their neighborhood. Dubbed the "Charlton Street Conspiracy," they
were only a tiny reform oasis in a huge downtown area.
Their turf was a largely
non-residential region of factories, warehouses, and financial buildings.
Politically it was dominated by "regulars" in Little Italy and
the South Village.
In the late 1960's,
artists began taking over empty warehouse spaces throughout the non-residential
district. At first, most were much too paranoid to vote. Voter registration
would have revealed their illegal homes, and brought down building inspectors
to evict them.
But by 1971 the influx
of loft-dwellers was huge, many of them owners of their own homes and buildings.
A rezoning movement had legalized artist residency in SoHo, a 43-block
area of manufacturing buildings between Houston and Canal Streets, West
Broadway and (roughly) Lafayette.
Everyone below Canal
Street remained fair game for building inspectors. And no one, anywhere,
had any idea what even the SoHo legalization portended in terms of dealing
with the City leviathan.
The mood was optimistic,
but pugnacious. Paranoid loft-dwellers were ready to fight for their rights.
Enter the New D.I.D.
In 1971 two SoHo loft-dwellers
decided that the area needed a strong political voice if their young district's
future was to be secure. Larry Tierney and Jim Stratton joined the old
D.I.D. to press the cause of the loft-dwellers. But they arrived just in
time to see the club disbanded by redistricting.
Taking the old name,
the two set about to organize the club around the new settlers in SoHo
and south of Canal. It was 1972, when anti-Viet Nam war sentiment was high.
The club registered more than one thousand new voters in only a few months
before the 1972 George McGovern primary.
The D.I.D. put together
a multi-faceted fund-raiser for McGovern in SoHo, raising more than $12,000
for the anti-war candidate. Every penny went to the national campaign.
The D.I.D. kept none of it.
The club didn't need
it. In one previously safe "regular" election district, the primary
vote was 307 to 14 in favor of reform.
In 1975 the club elected
its first District Leader, Kathryn Freed, who later was elected to the
City Council. After being defeated only by Term Limits, Freed was elected
to the Civil Court where she still sits today.
The new club immediately
joined the New Democratic Coalition, an aggregation of reform-oriented
clubs working to elect progressive candidates. A decade later the N.D.C.
was put out of business by success. In the early 1980's, reformers rewrote
Democratic Party rules to eliminate the last of Tammany influences, and
most of Manhattan's leadership was soon working to reform guidelines.
As the D.I.D. entered
the 1990's, its area ranged from western Chinatown to Battery Park City,
stopping at Houston Street to the north and Lafayette Street to the east.
But redistricting came again. The area below City Hall was shunted into
a new Assembly District.
That lower part of
the D.I.D. area was combined, non-contiguously, with the Village View area
of the East Village. The result was an Executive District (see Overview
below) that had no active Democratic club within it.
Village View and Lower
Manhattan activists (many of them already D.I.D. members) decided quickly
to combine with the existing D.I.D., and they have remained with the club
ever since.
The D.I.D. early on
made close friends of its representatives: State Senator Fred Ohrenstein,
Assemblyman Bill Passanante, and Congressman Ted Weiss. These three excellent
lawmakers were soon joined by Councilmember Miriam Friedlander, whom the
club supported early and helped to elect to nearly two decades in office.
After the death of
long-time friend Ted Weiss, the club supported early, and helped to elect,
Jerry Nadler to Congress in 1992.
Our club has always
pressed its representatives to support good causes in our neighborhoods
in exchange for our strong support for them on election day. As a result,
the Washington Market Community Park was created, nurtured, and built;
P.S. 234 and P.S./I.S. 89 were guided into existence; zoning was modified,
landmark districts created; dozens of non-complying high-rises, discos,
and other disturbances were fought throughout the district; and all with
the help of D.I.D. leaders and our elected officials.
The club today continues
to operate without a clubhouse, without deep-pocket financial backing,
but with great trust from the thousands of residents in the multi-faceted
neighborhoods it represents.
Manhattan Political
Overview
District Leaders and County Committee Members
Political clubs generally
organize within "Executive Districts," referred to as "Parts,"
which are areas carved out of State Assembly Districts. Each "A.D." has
two to four Executive Districts, and rival clubs often battle in the September
primary
to elect
candidates
for "District
Leader." Democratic voters of each Executive District
elect two District Leaders, one male and one female. These leaders help
Democratic candidates get on the ballot in their area, and help get them
elected at the polls.
Manhattan usually has
sixty or so District Leaders, who as a group comprise the County Executive.
More than 100 years
ago the County Executive went by the nickname "Tammany Hall," famed
for corruption and misuse of power. Coincidentally, two of Tammany's most
famous bosses, William Marcy (Boss) Tweed and George Washington Plunkett,
both held leaderships in what is now the D.I.D. area.
In the early 1980's
the last vestiges of Tammany were erased when reformers enacted rules in
the Democratic County Committee that severely limited the power of district
leaders. The D.I.D. was part of that reform make-over.
The party's rule-making body is called County Committee,
and is as democratic as the rules can make it. County Committee members represent
the
smallest
possible political area,
the Election
District. An Election District (called a precinct elsewhere) is essentially
the area whose voters use a single voting machine on election day. An E.D.
can be as small as a single large apartment building or as large as a few
residential blocks.
A typical E.D. has 400 to 800 voters, never more than 1,000. From
two to four County Committee members are elected from each E.D., depending
on the number of
registered voters in the E.D.
County Committee is
therefore very large. More than one thousand committee members often show
up to vote at the September meeting.
Getting on the Ballot
When a person wants to run for office as a Democrat, the
candidate must first win the Democratic primary. In order to appear on the
primary ballot, the candidate must file a petition carrying the signatures
of a large
number
of Democratic voters.
The number of signatures
required depends on the size of the district. A District Leader candidate,
for instance, must file 500 verifiable signatures; for State Assembly, the
number is
1,500.
(Signing such a petition does NOT require a signer to vote for the candidate
so endorsed; it is simply the voter's agreement that the person deserves
to appear on the ballot.)
Political clubs are
of vital importance to candidates because clubs assist with the manpower
to collect signatures and get out the vote on election
day. The endorsement of a political club is often the determining factor
on Election Day. District leaders
of
clubs like the D.I.D. remind their office-holders of that support when
issues arise that affect their voters and communities.
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