Preliminary Tallies Indicate Downtown Is Deeper Blue Than City or State, But Paler Than Manhattan
Incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul (shown here dedicating the Hurricane Maria Memorial in Battery Park City, in September, 2021) bested opponent Lee Zeldin in Lower Manhattan vote tallies by a comfortable margin.
Unofficial election night results show that incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul won Lower Manhattan by a smaller margin than she did Manhattan as whole, but with a wider lead than she earned citywide and statewide.
As of 11pm on Tuesday evening, Ms. Hochul was leading her opponent, Republic challenger Lee Zeldin, by 69 percent to 30 percent in all of the five boroughs, and 82 percent to 17 percent in all of Manhattan. (For all of New York State, her cushion was a narrower 57 percent to 42 percent.)
A closer look at Lower Manhattan requires analyzing the two Assembly Districts into which the formerly unified community was broken as a result of the chaotic legislative redistricting process earlier this year. The 65th Assembly District includes the eastern portion of the Financial District, as well as the South Street Seaport, the Civic Center, the Lower East Side, and the Two Bridges area. In this catchment, a total of 26,960 were cast, of which 74 percent were for Ms. Hochul and 25 percent went to Mr. Zeldin.
The southern section of the Financial District, along with Greenwich South and Battery Park City were split from the 65th Assembly District earlier this year, and grafted onto the 61st Assembly District, which also includes the North Shore of Staten Island.
In the portion of the 61st Assembly District that falls within Manhattan, a total of 5,116 votes were cast. These broke down between the two gubernatorial candidates almost identically to the split in the 65th District, with 73 percent going to Ms. Hochul, and 26 percent tallied for Mr. Zeldin.
In the section of the 61st Assembly District that is located on Staten Island, the proportions were markedly different. There, with 22,154 votes counted, 60 percent went to Ms. Hochul and 39 percent were won by Mr. Zeldin.
With many hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be tallied throughout the State, the outcome is far from assured, and all of these totals are likely to shift at least incrementally before a winner is declared. But with almost all the ballots counted in Lower Manhattan, the community’s status as a progressive enclave appears to poised to continue.
Elsewhere on the local political scene, Democratic candidates representing (or aspiring to represent) Lower Manhattan coasted to victory. Incumbent State Senator Brian Kavanagh, incumbent Assembly member Charles Fall (in the 61st District), and Assembly candidate Grace Lee (in the 65th District) were not meaningfully opposed by Republican challengers, after winning their respective Democratic primaries over the summer.
For these races, although Tuesday’s election technically decided who would represent Downtown in various capacities for the next two years, the heavily “blue” political landscape of Lower Manhattan usually makes the nod of the Democratic party tantamount to winning the wider contest, and often relegates the actual election to the status of a near-formality.
Matthew Fenton
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Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, BWV 76; Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott, BWV 101. The Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Trinity Baroque Orchestra; Avi Stein, conductor. Free.
Gibney Center presents new works by Gibney Company Artistic Associates and the 2022 Company Choreographic Fellows Alexander Anderson and Jie-Hung Connie Shiau on November 9 and 10, and the 2022 ILLUME Choreographic Awardee UNA Productions led by Artistic Director and Choreographer Chuck Wilt on November 11 and 12. $20-$25.
Lower Manhattan Greenmarkets
Tribeca Greenmarket
Greenwich Street & Chambers Street
Wednesdays and Saturdays, 8am-3pm (compost program: Saturdays, 8am-1pm)
Bowling Green Greenmarket
Broadway & Whitehall St
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8am-5pm (compost program: 8am-11am)
The Outdoor Fulton Stall Market
91 South Street, between Fulton & John Streets
Indoor market: Monday through Saturday,11:30am-5pm
CSA pick-up: Thursday, 4pm-6pm; Friday, 11:30-5pm
Outdoor market: Saturdays, 11:30am-5pm
Today in History
November 9
Architect Stanford White’s buildings can be found from the Bronx to Lower Broadway, and they include Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the Washington Square Memorial Arch, Bowery Savings Bank, and the Cable Building (above) at Houston Street and Broadway. Photograph by Tony Hisgett.
1620 – Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sight land at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
1799 – Napoleon Bonaparte pulls off a coup and becomes the dictator of France.
1851 – Kentucky marshals abduct abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Indiana and take him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave escape.
1872 – The Great Boston Fire consumed about 65 acres of Boston’s downtown.
1906 – Theodore Roosevelt is the first sitting President of the United States to make an official trip outside the country. He did so to inspect progress on the Panama Canal.
1918 – Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates after the German Revolution, and Germany is proclaimed a Republic.
1967 – The first issue of Rolling Stone magazine is published.
1979 – The NORAD computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland detect a purported massive Soviet nuclear strike. After reviewing the raw data from satellites and checking the early-warning radars, the alert is cancelled.
1985 – Garry Kasparov, 22, of the Soviet Union becomes the youngest World Chess Champion by beating fellow Soviet Anatoly Karpov.
1989 – Fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, allowing its citizens to travel to West Berlin.
1994 – The chemical element darmstadtium is discovered.
1998 – Brokerage houses are ordered to pay $1.03 billion to NASDAQ investors to compensate for price-fixing.
2019 – Prominent Russian history professor Oleg Sokolov discovered with severed arms of his murder victim in his backpack when rescued from Moika River, St Petersburg
Births
1731 – Benjamin Banneker, mathematician, astronomer, surveyor of Washington, DC, and almanac author (d. 1806)
1853 – Stanford White, American architect and partner, co-founded McKim, Mead & White (d. 1906). He was responsible for many New York City structures during the Gilded Age, including the Washington Square Arch. His personal life was filled with scandal—his relationships with 16-year-old Evelyn Nesbitt led to his murder on June 25, 1906.
1918 – Spiro Agnew, 39th Vice President of the United States (d. 1996)
1924 – Robert Frank, photographer and director (d. 1956)
1928 – Anne Sexton, poet and academic (d. 1974)
1936 – Mary Travers, singer-songwriter (d. 2009)
Deaths
959 – Constantine VII, Byzantine emperor (b. 905)
1924 – Henry Cabot Lodge, historian and politician (b. 1850)
1940 – Neville Chamberlain, English businessman and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1869)
1953 – Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet and author (b. 1914)
1970 – Charles de Gaulle, general, 18th President of France (b. 1890)
1988 – John N. Mitchell, lieutenant, lawyer, and politician, 67th United States Attorney General (b. 1913)
2003 – Art Carney, actor and comedian (b. 1918)
2004 – Stieg Larsson, Swedish author, dies of a heart attack at 50
2006 – Ed Bradley, journalist, dies of lymphocytic leukemia at 65
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