Salon.com > Queens

Who is the real Anthony Weiner?

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:46:00 +0000

The news that Anthony Weiner raked in serious cash last year as a corporate consultant – an ambiguous job that seems a lot like lobbying -- may seem jarring to national observers who viewed him as a liberal firebrand. But, playing a loud progressive on cable TV doesn’t necessarily make you one. And for Weiner, this stint as not-technically-a-lobbyist signals merely the latest turn for a politician who's craftily straddled the line between outer-borough Ed Koch-style moderation and Alan Grayson-style liberal activism.

The question is how much longer he'll be able to straddle.

Weiner's professional political life began in 1991, when he ran his maiden race for City Council. As Steve Kornacki detailed for Salon, he won a long-shot bid as a 27-year-old, in part by anonymously sending mailers linking his opponent to African-American figures (namely, Mayor David Dinkins and Jesse Jackson) unpopular in his white district. Appealing to the white ethnic constituency, he cultivated an identity in office as an outer-borough moderate, focusing on issues like graffiti, airport regulations and fire alarm boxes.

Even a Mets fan can be optimistic on Opening Day

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:12:00 +0000

It was sunny and clear on Monday for Mets Opening Day, with no noisy planes overhead, so we could hear every bit of the conversations around us. The lulling pitter-patter of “fucks” in row 3 bemused our whole group—not just my father, who was new to Mets baseball, but the veterans of the trip to Flushing. I was there with my old roommate; we used to live in Flushing and walk to games along Roosevelt Avenue, through the carbon monoxide haze above the Whitestone Expressway and past the Iron Triangle's auto repair shops and psychotic guard dogs, restrained from tearing you to pieces by chain-link fences that also allow you to look into their eyes and see the contempt you’ve earned. Getting to the game in this way can be loud and gray and windy and sticky and dirty all at once and altogether disorienting, which is why almost nobody does it. Arriving at the park doesn’t seem like you’ve reached paradise, or that you’re free of any of this filth and misery—these are the Mets we’re talking about, after all. In terms of misery and pride, it’s hard to know where the team ends and the rest of Queens begins, except on Opening Day; then, for three hours, people are happy. On Opening Day, Flushing is a place transformed, all smiles and radiance in a generally fraught place just across the way from where your stolen car’s radials are being hawked at a chop shop.

Video shows NYPD brutalizing Queens teen

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 23:28:00 +0000

A video garnering viral attention Wednesday appears to show NYPD officers piling on top of Queens teenager Robert Jackson. The footage, caught on a cell hone in early January, shows two officers restraining the 19-year-old outside a YMCA. "I can't, I can't, please stop," the young man can be heard shouting while police demand he puts his hands over his head when he is pinned to the pavement.

The number of officers around the young man then increases to seven, and a number can be seen delivering punches and kicks to the restrained suspect. According to the New York Post, police arrested Jackson and charged him with obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest, unlawful possession of marijuana and disorderly conduct. But Jackson is taking his case to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. His lawyer, Jacques Leandre, said he wants the charges to be dismissed because his client is “an innocent victim of police brutality.”

According to HuffPo, "photos released to the press show a gruesome, crescent-shaped wound that the 19-year-old sustained in the incident as his left cheek was ground into the cement sidewalk."

Warning, the video below includes graphic content:

Wrapper’s delight

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

It’s seven p.m. on election night, yet a steady flow of pedestrians are still streaming in to the London Candy Co. to assuage their sweet tooths with imported delights—and to calm their caffeine jitters with gourmet coffee. Beneath the Upper East Side shop’s Day-Glo paintings and amid its colorful displays of Chupa-Chups and shelves stocked with Curly-Wurly bars is Jason Liebig, shuffling through a sampling of his personal collection of candy packaging—bright plastic and paper wrappers that most would consider trash, or at best a tease.

Liebig, 43, wears corduroys, thick black glasses and, fittingly for the playful setting, which is bustling with adults and kids, Chuck Taylors emblazoned with Union Jacks. He selects a glassine folder from the pile, containing several examples of Kit Kat wrappers dating back to the candy’s official incarnation in 1937, two years after its introduction under a different name.

A look inside a Rockaway high-rise, neglected after Sandy

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Reports coming out of New York's storm-struck Rockaway Peninsula have emphasized the lack of power in towering public housing blocks, the cold, the absence of food and supplies and the seeming neglect by FEMA and Red Cross relief efforts.

This video, posted Wednesday by relief volunteer Kate Baladina on YouTube, takes viewers through the pitch black corridors of a Far Rockaway housing complex, where residents -- seniors and non-English speaking immigrants among them -- complain about a dearth of official assistance. Baladina illustrates the bureacratic barriers inherent in alerting the authorities and the Red Cross to neglected areas.

At the time of filming, the building had only received help from volunteers with Occupy Sandy, home attendants and social workers.

Six alarm fire destroys 50 Queens homes

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:19:00 +0000

A six alarm fire, reported Monday night at 11pm in Breezy Point on New York's Rockaway Peninsula, destroyed 50 homes. Hampered by flood water from Sandy, around 200 firefighters battled the blaze, the cause of which is unknown. There were no reported injuries as residents had been evacuated from the flood zone A area. Watch raw footage of the storm-tossed fire below, via YouTube:

A nice place to rest

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:00:00 +0000

If you want to make someone immediately uncomfortable, ask what he plans to do with his body, when his heart has stopped beating and his flesh has gone cold.

A few months ago, I received an envelope from the Pinelawn Memorial Park and Garden Mausoleum in Farmingdale, New York. Inside was a free booklet titled, “Let’s Face It Now” and a letter that explained how taking charge of your death—though the word “death” was never mentioned—offers a sense of accomplishment and peace of mind. I’m 31 years old. Other than mild asthma and the occasional cold, I am healthy. So I was unnerved and even offended that Pinelawn had targeted me as a potential customer.

But maybe the Pinelawn folks had chosen the right person after all. As an incurable procrastinator, one of the things that frightens me most about death is that I won’t be prepared. Death is not accommodating. Don’t I get one phone call? A final meal? One more paragraph in the novel I’m reading? I may never know how it ends.