This morning's New York Times on the fallout from Tuesday's Primary:
The City Council will hold its first formal meeting since the
Democratic primary, an electoral housecleaning that cost at least four
members their $112,000-a–year jobs. It will be an awkward session, to say the least… A potentially icy reception for Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn. She backed several losing Council members and was humbled by an unimpressive re-election margin in her Manhattan district.
This afternoon, Margaret Chin, almost certainly Lower Manhattan's new councilmember, holds a news conference. We'll be there. In the past, Chin has said she would have to weigh whether to support Quinn as Speaker.
In a separate article the Times notes that Asian candidates (including Chin) won Primaries in three City Council districts this week:
All told, the developments amounted to something of a watershed
moment for Asian New Yorkers — the city’s fastest-growing minority
group, three-quarters of them foreign-born — and their involvement in
municipal politics. “It’s significant for the whole population to
see all these Asian-Americans taking political roles for the first in
public,” said Margaret M. Chin, a sociologist at Hunter College who studies Asian-American communities. “The West Coast broke this barrier close to two decades ago.” Chinatown
itself is likely to be represented by an Asian-American for the first
time, with the victory of Margaret S. Chin (no relation to the
sociologist), a community activist, over Councilman Alan J. Gerson, a
two-term incumbent… Of the 51 Council districts, 32 had primaries on Tuesday. Turnout in
the three districts where Asian-Americans won was among the highest in
the city: 17 to 18 percent, compared with a citywide average of 11
percent, according to the Board of Elections. “The one
constituency who had a reason to turn out and turned out in large
numbers were Asian-American voters,” said Evan Stavisky, a Democratic
consultant who worked on Mr. Liu’s campaign in 2001 and Ms. Chin’s
campaign this year… Unlike in 2001, when she and two other Chinese-American candidates
split the vote, this time Ms. Chin was the only such candidate in a
district where Asians are about 40 percent of the population, though
they accounted for only 18 percent of Democratic voters, Mr. Stavisky
said.
In an article headlined, "Fear in Alphabet City," New York Press reports, "The recent shooting outside an East Village bar shouldn’t have been
such a surprise. Bullets are more common in the neighborhood than most
people want to believe."
The Tenement Museum Blog brings us news of a new art project opening in one of the Essex Market's abandoned building's tomorrow:" FEED, the exhibit opening Friday, explores the market as a site of
various kinds of exchange – commercial, social, and cultural. Video
screenings, performance pieces, and interactive walking tours will all
be on offer."
