There’s been no shortage of think pieces in recent years purporting to explain the emergence of Astoria, Queens as a hotbed of socialist politics. For the most part, such commentary tends to divide local history into two eras: a conservative pre-gentrification period and a socialist post-gentrification period. According to this narrative, the neighborhood’s native white ethnic working class – which favored small government, law and order, and family values – was gradually supplanted by a more diverse professional class committed above all to social justice. A popular anecdote illustrating this transformation is that before it was the People’s Republic, Astoria was the home of Archie Bunker.
And it isn’t only today’s journalists who helped craft this origin story. On May 16th 1970, the New York Times published a profile of the neighborhood that included the following details:
“State Senator Nicholas Ferraro…points out that most candy stores post plaques, issued by churches, vowing not to sell pornographic magazines. ‘The people here are dedicated to the education of the children and to own their own home. The whole community is like this.’
The area, he says, is very active politically, with about 50 percent voting in primaries. Nominally Democratic, it is conservative. Astoria supported Mr. Nixon in 1968 and went for Mario A. Procaccino, the Democratic candidate for Mayor, last year.”
Recall that Procaccino was one of two right-wing candidates in the mayoral election of 1969, the other being Republican nominee John Marchi. Incumbent mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican who’d lost the GOP primary to Marchi, refused to accept defeat and ran on the Liberal Party ticket in the general election. At this point in American history, the two major parties had yet to polarize ideologically, giving rise to this unusual assortment of candidates. Procaccino ran on a law-and-order platform in response to the race riots of the previous two years, coining the epithet “limousine liberal” to pillory Lindsay as a blue-blooded bleeding heart incapable of keeping the peace. Linsday prevailed with a coalition of affluent whites and racial minorities, but Procaccino came in a close second thanks to strong support from the white ethnic outer boroughs.
At first blush, the prevalence of Nixon-Procaccino voters in Astoria seems to suggest that the neighborhood really was a reactionary stronghold. But I’m going to attempt to persuade you that Astoria was actually home to a subtler ideology that is now more or less extinct, which is perhaps why it’s so difficult to recognize today. In order to do so, the first step is to dive deeper into the local demography.
I. Outer Borough Populism
At the turn of the twentieth century, Astoria was a largely Irish neighborhood that was well integrated into the Queens County Democratic Organization, better known as the Queens Machine. The Irish occupied all of the area’s civic offices, from elected positions in state and local government to party positions within the machine itself. Things started to change in the early twentieth century, when millions of Italian immigrants poured into New York City, many of them settling in Astoria. Though hard numbers aren’t available, reports suggest that by the 1950s, the Italian share of the population had reached parity with and perhaps even eclipsed the Irish share. However, while the Irish were willing to integrate Italians at the lowest rungs of the party organization for the sake of political expediency, they were unwilling to cede their own place at the top.
George Onorato, who represented Astoria in the State Senate from 1983 to 2010, once gave an interview in which he described the incident that finally caused this tension to boil over. Ralph Demarco, an Italian party soldier, approached Frank McGlynn, the Irish head of the local Democratic club, to recommend that an Italian lawyer of Demarco’s acquaintance be considered to run for office. McGlynn allegedly replied: “Ralph, we’re not ready for a ginny to be in an elected position. I’ll get him a job with the Sanitation Department.” For Onorato, it was an outrage that the Irish behaved with such imperiousness given all the discrimination they endured in the past. “They had forgotten that they went through the same things when they came here, when the middle-class, well-to-do Anglo-Saxons looked down to them and gave them a hard time,” he explained. Shortly after this incident, the Italians broke away to form a rival Democratic club, and within a few years they had purged the Irish from most local offices and established themselves as the dominant faction in Astoria.
Tensions between the two groups persisted for some time, though they appear to have eased by the last quarter of the twentieth century, when a mixed group of Irish and Italian politicians came to represent Astoria at various levels of government and within the party organization. By this point, decades had passed since the latest wave of Italian immigration, and multiple generations of Italian children had been born and raised alongside their Irish neighbors. Rigid social distinctions are difficult to maintain under such circumstances, particularly when the two groups already had much in common. Astoria’s Irish and Italian communities were both devoutly Catholic and largely working-class, and owing to their semi-recent arrival in the US, both embodied an Old World, communitarian sensibility that set them apart from American WASPs. Together, these factors enabled them to unite under a shared political program that I’ll call outer borough populism, characterized by economic liberalism on the one hand and cultural conservatism on the other.
Take Onorato, for example. Born in 1928 to working-class Italian immigrants, he spent the first part of his career as a union bricklayer and later became a full-time union official. He was also active in local politics through the Taminent Democratic Club – the Astoria affiliate of the Queens Machine – eventually becoming its president. With machine support, he was elected to the State Senate in 1983 and held on to the seat for the next twenty-seven years. Throughout his tenure, Onorato believed that it was his duty as a Democrat to advocate for the interests of the poor and working class. When asked to sum up the difference between his party and the GOP, Onorato replied:
“It’s philosophy, the agenda. The Republican Party is basically the party of the business community and the wealthy. Take a look at them. They represent mostly upstate, affluent, white communities. The city of New York is a mixture. We’re so diversified, we’ve got everybody here…And they are mostly poor. So, compared to the Republicans, we represent most of the people who need help.”
To that end, Onorato helped pass legislation that increased workers’ compensation benefits and cracked down on construction firms that misclassified their employees as independent contractors. He fought to grant New York’s farmworkers collective bargaining rights, raise its unemployment benefit by over fifty percent, prohibit state contractors from using offshore labor for contracted work, and punish businesses that ship jobs overseas by their revoking their tax breaks and government subsidies. He routinely pushed for greater investments in housing, education and healthcare financed by taxes on the rich. In 2004, for example, he proposed “closing a number of corporate loopholes that enable some companies to avoid paying their fair share of taxes,” noting that “more than 60 percent of American corporations didn’t pay any income taxes between 1996 and 2000.”
At the same time, Onorato was culturally conservative, favoring a tough-on-crime approach to public safety and so-called family values. Here’s how the New York Times described him during his reelection campaign in the summer of 1998:
“Mr. Onorato, who supports traditional Democratic positions like tenant and workers’ rights, has been endorsed by the state A.F.L.-C.I.O., which gave him a 100 percent rating…But Mr. Onorato, who is staunchly anti-abortion, is also well liked by the Christian Coalition…He said he believed that the group decided to support him ‘because of my family-oriented positions, such as against Medicaid-funded abortions and child pornography and for the death penalty.’
Another figure from this period who subscribed to outer borough populism was Denis Butler, Astoria’s state assemblyman from 1976 to 2000. Born in 1927 to a middle-class Irish family, Butler spent three years in the seminary as a young man before ultimately deciding to pursue a family and a career. He got into local politics through the Powhattan Democratic Club – another affiliate of the Queens Machine in Astoria – eventually becoming its chairman. He was initially slated to run for State Assembly in 1974, but in a sign of how much interethnic relations had improved by then, the Irish party boss passed him over in favor of an Italian with whom he’d orchestrated a backroom deal. A game of elected musical chairs opened the seat up again two years later, and this time Butler managed to secure machine support and win election to the assembly, where he’d serve for almost three decades.
Like Onorato, Butler was a friend to labor, supporting legislation to raise the minimum wage, strengthen unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation benefits, and crack down on workplace safety violations. He also believed in state support for the family, authoring a tax credit to reimburse New Yorkers for home renovations to accommodate aging parents. Such a policy “promotes the concept of the extended family, with two or three generations living together under one roof,” he explained. For those without homeowner children to rely on, he sponsored programs that froze rents for low-income seniors and subsidized the cost of their prescription drugs. A longtime volunteer at Lighthouse for the Blind, he was even behind an early push to improve safety infrastructure in the subway for the visually impaired. Butler’s advocacy for workers, families, the elderly and the disabled were all expressions of what he viewed as his pro-life philosophy, which also included opposition to abortion.
Butler was notorious for introducing legislation every year to strip funding for abortion out of the state’s Medicaid budget, though his efforts never succeeded. He had more luck securing funds to provide free medical and social services to poor mothers and their children, and he was a particularly strong advocate for New York’s Maternity and Early Childhood Foundation. For these reasons, the Brooklyn Diocese presented him with its Pro Vita Award in 1988, and the New York State Catholic Conference gave him its Public Policy Award in 1992. Notably, Butler framed his opposition to Medicaid-financed abortions in terms of the need for greater investments in social welfare. “There isn’t enough money to do for the living what we want to do,” he once remarked on the assembly floor. “We believe that [public funds] should be used for the living, rather than as an instrument of death.”
The other major exponent of outer borough populism from this period was Peter Vallone Sr., Astoria’s City Councilman from 1974 to 2001. Born in 1934 to a prominent family, his father was a judge associated with the Queens Machine while his mother was a Democratic state committeewoman. An exceptionally devout Catholic, Vallone started attending mass every morning as a teenager to pray for his mother’s recovery from cancer, a practice he kept up for the rest of his life. He spent the first part of his career as an attorney before winning his seat on the City Council, eventually becoming its majority leader in 1986. Three years later, voters approved a revision to the City Charter that eliminated the Board of Estimate – the obscure body that controlled the city’s budget and land use processes – and transferred its powers to the City Council. This left Vallone in a position of great influence, which he ended up using in surprising ways.
During his first three terms on the City Council, Vallone’s sole responsibility was to represent the views of his socially conservative constituents in Astoria, and he devoted considerable energy to prosecuting the culture war. For example, he was a fierce critic of a bill to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which he spent years bashing in the press. He also complained that safer sex advertisements on city buses promoted homosexuality. But once he became majority leader, he recognized that he had a responsibility to the people of the city to ensure that their will became law. Thus, one of his first actions as leader was to allow the anti-discrimination bill – which his predecessor had kept bottled up in committee – to come to the floor for a vote, knowing that it would pass. Although he voted against that bill, Vallone eventually came around on gay rights, sponsoring legislation that gave domestic partners the same rights as married couples. And while he never renounced his personal opposition to abortion, he did push through a law to crack down on protestors who to tried to block access to abortion clinics.
At the same time, there were several areas where Vallone maintained his conservative views even after assuming his leadership role. He supported tough-on-crime policies like capital punishment, and he worked tirelessly to cut taxes on the middle class and small businesses. For these reasons, he often found himself on the same side as Rudy Giuliani throughout the 1990s. When asked by a reporter about areas of disagreement with the Republican mayor, Vallone once replied: “It’s pretty tough…Ideologically, we have the same philosophy.” There were also areas where Vallone’s position seemed to switch from one year to the next. For example, though he was usually happy to accommodate Giuliani’s proposed budget cuts, he ran on dramatic expansions to the city’s welfare state during his campaigns for governor and mayor, the former in 1998 and the latter in 2001. It was this flexibility that led the New York Times to remark that Vallone “cannot be classified as a party loyalist, nor a liberal, nor a classic conservative…above all he is a pragmatist, willing to shift his position when the political winds are against him.”
In summary, Astoria prior to gentrification wasn’t the pit of reaction that many believe it was. While most residents were culturally conservative Irish and Italian Catholics, most were also working-class, and they demanded representatives who were willing to stand up not only for their religious values but also their economic interests. That being said, it’s important to note that the label “working-class” encompassed everything from low-wage tenants struggling to make rent to labor aristocrats paying down their mortgages. There were also the needs of the local petite bourgeoisie to consider in light of their outsized political influence. That’s why I’ve chosen to describe the economic dimension of outer borough populism as liberal rather than progressive. The goal was to avoid class conflict through concessions to labor that were meaningful yet limited; any remaining contradictions could be papered over through appeals to religion that transcended class lines. This was outer borough populism in a nutshell: class compromise and a common culture, enforced through the power of the state.
II. Hellenization & Gentrification
Despite their history of antagonism, Astoria’s Irish and Italian communities managed to bury the hatchet once sufficient time had passed for the salience of their cultural differences to diminish, a process that culminated in the formation of a politics that was responsive to the values and interests of both. But as is so often the case in New York City, it wasn’t long before the neighborhood’s demographics shifted once again in ways that threatened to destabilize its new consensus. The first of these changes was the arrival of Greek immigrants to Astoria following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system that had limited immigration from non-Western countries to the US. Over the next fifteen years, as many as one hundred thousand Greek immigrants poured into Astoria, transforming it into the largest such community outside of Greece or Cyprus. By the 1980s, the number of Greeks had surpassed the number of Irish and Italians, yet their community was still unrepresented in government.
One reason was that many Greeks had yet to become citizens and thus couldn’t vote, while those that had were politically disengaged. In 1977, the State Assembly adopted a resolution declaring March 5th to be Greek-American Voter Registration Day in order to remedy the fact that “the Greeks [were] the most underregistered ethnic group in Queens,” according to the resolution’s sponsor. Another reason was that to the extent there were politically engaged citizens of Greek descent in Astoria, many were no doubt satisfied with the representation that the Irish and Italians were providing. As Orthodox Christians, they shared the cultural conservatism of their Catholic neighbors, and they occupied the same range of class positions. This allowed them to reap the rewards of outer borough populism despite not having one of their own in office. But like the Italians before them, the Greeks eventually grew dissatisfied with their exclusion and started organizing to take power themselves.
The man who led the charge was a lawyer by the name of Kimon Thermos. Born in 1966 to a Greek father and a German-Irish mother, Thermos grew up in Astoria and became politically activated through the campaign of Democratic vice presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. In 1994, he decided to challenge Denis Butler for his seat in the State Assembly, ultimately losing by two thousand votes. The experience motivated him to revive the Aldos Independent Democratic Organization – a political club that sought to organize the neighborhood’s Greek community some years earlier – which he used as a power base to challenge Butler again in 1996. This time Thermos came within two hundred votes of victory, much to the annoyance of the Queens Machine. Here’s how the New York Times described the campaign following Butler’s narrow victory:
“Mr. Thermos’s supporters accused the Irish- and Italian-Americans who dominate the local Democratic Party of unwillingness to share power with a Greek-American.
From the start, the Butler-Thermos race had been bitter. Angered by what they saw as a brash upstart who dared to buck the establishment twice in four years, the Queens Democratic leaders took the Independence Party of Queens to court after it anointed Mr. Thermos as its candidate, guaranteeing him a spot on the November ballot even if he lost the Democratic primary. On a technicality, the Democrats succeeded in having Mr. Thermos disqualified as an Independent candidate.
And what about Mr. Thermos’s chances of picking up support from the Queens Democratic Party in future races? ‘He is somebody who ran against us two times in a row and caused us grief,’ said an aide to a party official… ‘He’s burned his bridges and that’s duly noted.’”
Relations between the Greeks and the Queens Machine soured even further in 1998, when Thermos challenged Butler for a third time and again came within two hundred votes victory. A month later, the Aldos Independent Democratic Organization decided to back Republican governor George Pataki for reelection; his Democratic opponent was none other than Peter Vallone Sr., who supported Butler in each of Thermos’ campaigns against him. The rivalry between Aldos and the machine clearly played a role in the club’s decision to endorse Pataki, which club leaders more or less admitted at the time. But there were reasons to believe that ideological motivations were at work as well. After his first loss to Butler, Thermos spoke to the press about his willingness to cross party lines and back Republican candidates in his war against the machine; he installed Republicans in key fundraising posts on his various campaigns; and after failing to win elected office, he moved to Whitestone and started organizing with the local GOP while continuing to support Republican candidates in Astoria.
Thus, the machine’s refusal to integrate the Greeks was not only undermining their own grip on power, but it was also enabling political reaction to flourish where economic liberalism had long prevailed. The machine might have continued down this self-destructive path had it not been for a fortuitous turn of events in Albany at the dawn of the new millennium. In May 2000, Butler participated in a failed coup attempt against Sheldon Silver, the notoriously vindictive speaker of the State Assembly. Two days later, Butler announced his retirement from the assembly – less than four months out from that year’s Democratic primary – before Silver could strip him of his leadership post and the generous pension associated with it. Thermos was in the middle of his fourth campaign for Butler’s seat, and now freed of the obligation to back their incumbent, the machine chose to run a Greek candidate of their own whom they hoped would bring his community into the fold on their terms: a young lawyer named Michael Gianaris.
Born in 1970 to Greek immigrant parents, Gianaris grew up in Astoria and became politically activated through the Dukakis campaign alongside Thermos. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he took a job as an aide to Congressman Thomas Manton – the boss of the Queens Machine at the time – and later served as counsel to the State Assembly. He was also a loyal member of the Taminent Democratic Club, the same one through which Onorato and Vallone had come up. For these reasons, the machine designated Gianaris as Butler’s successor as soon as the latter announced his retirement, much to the consternation of Thermos and his allies. From an article entitled “Divide and Conquer” that appeared in the Queens Gazette in July 2000, written by a Greek civic leader in Astoria:
“[After Butler’s retirement], it seemed hopeful that a Greek–American could win this election and serve his community. Believe or not, however, the powerful Democratic ‘machine’ of Queens County produced another Greek–American by the name of Michael Gianaris, a former staff member of the same powerful Democratic group of Queens. There was no need for a second Greek–American candidate, but the only chance they had to win was to split the support for Thermos.
You must wonder why the ‘machine’ resorted to such dirty politics…The Democratic leaders of Queens, Tom Manton and Peter Vallone, want to maintain control of the elected officials of this county. So, too, does Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly. Unfortunately for them, Thermos is an Independent and therefore a threat. Gianaris, on the other hand, a ‘party loyalist,’ would be under the control of Tom Manton, Peter Vallone, and Sheldon Silver.”
Perhaps because of its shamelessness, this plot doesn’t seem to have been very effective. Gianaris won the primary by less than one hundred and fifty votes, suggesting that Thermos retained almost all of his Greek support. Nevertheless, his fourth loss in a row persuaded him to finally abandon his electoral ambitions, and no other Greek insurgents ever emerged to continue his struggle. Whatever skepticism they may have initially harbored for Gianaris, his community ultimately accepted their assigned seat at the table and let him to cruise to reelection unopposed for the next decade. Thus, the Queens Machine managed to integrate the Greeks into Astoria politics in a way that maintained the status quo. It was a victory that paid dividends for many years to come, as Gianaris and the cohort of Greek leaders who came up with him held the key to defusing another threat to the machine: an influx of young, liberal gentrifiers to the neighborhood.
The gentrification of Astoria began in the early 1980s, as spiraling rents in Manhattan began pushing its residents toward the outer boroughs. In the summer of 1989, the New York Times ran a profile of the neighborhood that noted: “For the last decade, young professionals, and a few artists, have been pouring into Astoria for its convenience – just a 15-minute subway ride to midtown Manhattan – and its still relatively low apartment prices.” The same process was unfolding in adjacent neighborhoods like Long Island City and Jackson Heights as well, bringing significant changes to the entirety of Western Queens. Among the most notable was the emergence of a progressive political movement opposed to the outer borough populists who had long dominated local politics. Thus, while Butler was fending off challenges from the right, Onorato was facing a revolt on his left led by the gay rights activist Ed Sedarbaum.
Born in 1945, Sedarbaum grew up in Queens and became a social worker before moving to Jackson Heights in the late 1970s. By this time, the neighborhood was home to the largest gay population in the city outside of downtown Manhattan, though the similarities ended there. Gays in Jackson Heights were primarily working-class Hispanics, many were closeted owing to the religiosity of their families, and they were more politically quiescent than their compatriots in Greenwich Village. Things started to change in 1990, when a young gay man named Julio Rivera was brutally murdered by three skinheads who targeted him on the basis of his race and sexuality. Rivera’s death galvanized the gay community of Jackson Heights, including Sedarbaum, who co-founded a group called Queens Gays and Lesbians United and became a leader in the neighborhood’s burgeoning gay activist scene. He spent the next few years organizing a number of initiatives, including sensitivity training for the local police precinct and lobbying for a hate crimes bill in Albany, before launching a bid for Onorato’s State Senate seat in 1998.
Sedarbaum ran on a progressive platform during the Giuliani years, when many Democrats felt that the moment called for them to move further to the right. He had an excellent foil in Onorato, who had long attracted criticism from the left over his culturally conservative views, particularly his opposition to abortion. His campaign was powered by an army of over three hundred volunteers and backed by prominent liberals like Public Advocate Mark Green, City Councilman Thomas Duane and State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick. He even clinched the endorsement of the New York Times, which wrote that Onorato’s old-school politics were “increasingly at odds with his changing community.” From the New York Daily News, August 17th,1998:
“Some of the views held by Sedarbaum, the ones that make him a ‘real Democrat,’ are anathema today. He thinks that the job of government is to give help to those who need it. He believes that education is the best investment…He is also pro-choice and pro-immigration. Overcrowded schools, substandard housing, air and water pollution worry him. He wants to keep pushing for a hate-crimes bill.
A Sedarbaum victory in conservative Queens will be a powerful message to the Democratic Party, he says, that it is time to go back to its roots. ‘I want to show the party…that we do not have to be afraid of our own voters.’”
Unfortunately for Sedarbaum, his community wasn’t changing rapidly enough, and Onorato prevailed by a two-to-one margin. Nevertheless, his campaign demonstrated that Western Queens was home to an increasingly organized progressive insurgency that might one day pose a threat to the party establishment, which is perhaps why Onorato started to moderate on the culture war. By the time of the primary, he was already a cosponsor of the hate crimes bill that Sedarbaum was lobbying for, and he further pledged to support a ban on anti-gay discrimination as well. In 2002, Onorato kept his word and voted for the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, which became law that same year. He even renounced his support for the death penalty in 2006, explaining that he no longer believed it deterred violent crime. But in the end, these concessions were merely delaying the inevitable. The gentrification of Western Queens continued apace over the next decade, and by 2009, it was generating a conflict over a cultural flashpoint that Onorato would not survive.
In May of that year, the State Assembly passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, but the measure faced an uphill battle in the State Senate, where all Republicans and a handful of Democrats – including Onorato – opposed it. For the rest of the year, advocates undertook a vigorous lobbying effort to try to win over the Democratic holdouts, with Onorato among their top targets. They started by sending representatives to explain the practical and moral urgency of this issue for same-sex couples in New York. When that didn’t work, they began staging protests outside of his office and holding rallies across the district. This culminated in an event at Athens Square Park that drew more than two thousand participants, making it the largest political demonstration in Astoria history prior to 2020. But despite having come around on a number of gay rights issues over the previous decade, Onorato refused to budge on marriage owing to his Catholic faith. In December, he and seven other Democrats voted with all thirty Republicans in the State Senate against the bill to legalize same-sex marriage, igniting a firestorm of criticism among his constituents.
Progressive activists immediately began plotting a primary challenge to Onorato, provoking anxiety within the Queens Machine. Although he’d easily dispatched his last such opponent, his chances this time around appeared slim. Twelve years had passed since the Sedarbaum campaign, and the district was now among the most heavily gentrified in the city. At eighty-two years of age, Onorato was the oldest member of the State Senate and largely unknown to his young professional constituents, save for his opposition to a cause they supported. Plus, the scale and sophistication of the marriage equality campaign had created organizing infrastructure that eclipsed anything the district had previously seen, which the machine feared they lacked the capacity to overcome. Thus, following some arm-twisting behind the scenes, Onorato announced in January 2010 that he would not seek reelection and endorsed Michael Gianaris to succeed him, alongside the rest of the Democratic establishment.
III. Outer Borough Liberalism
One reason the machine rallied behind Gianaris was that as a sitting state assemblyman and a prolific fundraiser, he was well positioned to defend Onorato’s seat against any potential progressive insurgent. But they also hoped that they could avoid a showdown altogether by convincing progressives to accept him as one of their own. This was possible because during his time in Albany, Gianaris chose to break from the legacy of outer borough populism and honed a new style of politics that I’ll call outer borough liberalism, which was a much better fit for the Astoria of the new millennium.
The biggest difference between Gianaris and his predecessor in the State Assembly was his cultural liberalism. Whereas Butler had spent his entire career attacking state subsidies for abortion, Gianaris was unapologetically pro-choice. He also supported same-sex marriage, voting in favor of a bill to legalize it back in 2007. He even backed a number of criminal justice reform initiatives, such as reducing penalties for low-level drug offenses, cracking down on police misconduct, and setting up a commission to investigate wrongful convictions. While there’s no evidence to suggest that his views on these topics were anything but genuine, there’s no denying that they helped the machine adapt to Astoria’s shifting demographics. Recall that the Sedarbaum campaign took place just one cycle before Gianaris ran for office, and though it failed to achieve victory, it did signal a growing desire for a new kind of politics in the neighborhood. By endorsing Gianaris for State Assembly, the machine may have been attempting to kill two birds with one stone: pacify the Greeks with an appeal to identity while placating the gentrifiers with an appeal to ideology.
But threading this needle required some finesse. In a 2019 interview, Gianaris recalled that toward the beginning of his career, some of his more reactionary constituents bristled as his social views. “When I came around, it was like, ‘Oh, this guy is out there for us,’” he explained. To shore up support among these voters, Gianaris devoted considerable time and attention to hyperlocal quality-of-life issues that helped his cultural liberalism go down a little easier. For instance, Astoria is home to the densest concentration of power plants in New York City, which have long been a source of pollution. During his first year in office, Gianaris managed to pass legislation that sped up the process for modernizing these plants, thereby reducing toxic emissions. He also provided strong oversight of Con Edison, the city’s electrical utility, proposing stiffer penalties for service delivery failures and consistently opposing rate hikes. Other examples include initiatives to reduce noise pollution, increase the number of traffic lights, regulate the placement of cell phone towers and beautify commercial corridors.
In summary, both outer borough populism and outer borough liberalism sought to unite two formerly antagonistic communities into a new political coalition. In the case of the former, it was the Irish and Italians. In the case of the latter, it was white ethnic voters – by this point predominately though not exclusively Greek – who comprised the neighborhood’s traditional Democratic base and the newly arrived liberal gentrifiers. Besides their content, the biggest difference between these ideologies was that due to the considerable overlap between the Irish and Italians’ interests and values, outer borough populism was a coherent program that more or less reflected Catholic social teaching. Outer borough liberalism was a more ad-hoc innovation that identified the top priorities of two disparate groups and sought to deliver for both whenever possible. Of course there were occasions on which their priorities clashed, but in the fullness of time, Gianaris managed to navigate these contradictions and earn the trust of Astoria’s two largest voting blocs.
For these reasons, progressive activists concluded that opposing Gianaris for State Senate would be too heavy a lift and decided to forego the race. But that still left the question of who would succeed him in the State Assembly, and predictably, the Queens Machine already had a candidate waiting in the wings: a lawyer and political operative named Aravella Simotas.
Born to Greek parents in Rhodesia in 1978, Simotas immigrated to Astoria at six months of age and spent her entire life in the neighborhood. She attended Fordham University for both her undergraduate and law degrees before going to work for the Vallone family, which made her a loyal ally of the machine. She was also a cultural liberal, a fact that Gianaris made sure to verify before approving her bid for assembly. In a 2019 interview, Simotas recalled that “the first question he asked me when we were talking [about a potential campaign was], ‘What is my position on choice and what is my position on marriage?’” She took this to mean that Gianaris was deeply committed to his views on these topics, which may very well have been the case. But he also likely recognized that if the Greeks hoped to inherit control over the machine and bring it into the 21st century, they would have to do under the rubric of outer borough liberalism, abandoning once and for all the cultural reaction of their Irish and Italian forebears. Having acceded to this strategy, Simotas launched her campaign in April with the full weight of the Democratic establishment behind her.
But progressive activists were loath to concede both races to the Queens Machine, and they remained eager to flex the organizing muscle they developed over the course of the marriage equality campaign. Thus they resolved to field a candidate of their own to oppose Simotas for State Assembly: another young lawyer by the name of Jeremiah Frei-Pearson. Also born in 1978, Frei-Pearson grew up in Baltimore and attended Stanford Law School before moving to Astoria in his twenties. By day he worked as a children’s rights attorney, and by night he was a cofounder of Western Queens for Marriage Equality, the main vehicle for pressuring Onorato to reverse course on same-sex marriage. Though not gay himself, Frei-Pearson had earned the trust of the movement with his strong allyship over the previous year, and they originally wanted him to challenge Onorato for his seat in the State Senate. But after the old man announced his retirement and Gianaris emerged as the prohibitive favorite in that race, his comrades persuaded him to switch gears and run for assembly instead.
Frei-Pearson sought to position himself to Simotas’ left, though this was complicated by the fact that at least on the surface, their views on cultural matters were identical. To that end, he tried to sow doubt as to her actual beliefs, telling the Advocate in June that “to the best of my knowledge, she didn’t have a position on marriage equality until she knew I was entering the race.” He also emphasized her connections to the reactionary elements that supported Onorato for decades. “I’m not running against Senator Onorato, but I’m running against the out-of-touchness and the callousness of the machine,” he explained in the same interview. The primary caused a minor schism within the city’s LGBT community. Gay elected officials allied with or at least friendly toward the machine – such as City Councilmembers Christine Quinn, Daniel Dromm and Jimmy Van Bramer – lined up behind Simotas, while organizations like Stonewall Democrats and Marriage Equality for New York endorsed Frei-Pearson. Both candidates raised upwards of six figures in short order, and by the summer, it seemed that their contest had the potential to be a bitter and protracted struggle.
But then something strange happened: in July, Frei-Pearson shocked observers by abruptly dropping out of the race. He explained that since he and Simotas held similar views on many issues, the only way to defeat her would be through a highly personal and negative campaign, which was a path that he didn’t care to trod. Shortly thereafter, the Queens Machine lauded Frei-Pearson for his decision to avoid a costly and divisive primary, and hinted that the rivalry between him and the establishment was not as heated as it may have appeared. “We have been talking to him all along. He wanted to demonstrate to us his ability to put together a campaign,” machine official Michael Reich told the press. “We look forward to working with him in the future.” Whether Frei-Pearson was always a stooge for the machine or whether he genuinely got cold feet about what it would take to win, his decision allowed Simotas to coast to the nomination and an easy victory in the general election. She then spent the next decade championing the agenda of outer borough liberalism that Gianaris had pioneered.
Simotas was particularly interested in matters impacting women and children, which were the focus of almost all of her legislative achievements. For instance, bills that she introduced and that later became law designated pregnancy as a qualifying event for enrollment in the state health insurance exchange, required insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization and fertility preservation treatments, and established a pilot program to provide baby boxes to low-income parents. She was also an advocate for survivors of sexual violence, passing legislation to address the state’s backlog of rape kits, prevent the premature destruction of evidence in rape cases, extend the statute of limitations for rape, and strengthen protections against harassment in the workplace. Thus, not only was Simotas notable as the first woman to represent Astoria in state or local government, but her liberal feminism was especially remarkable in a neighborhood that once exclusively elected culturally conservative men.
That being said, Simotas’ commitment to women and children wasn’t universal. In 2014, the city announced plans to convert the Westway Motel in Astoria – which was then being used as temporary accommodation for homeless families – into a permanent residential shelter. The move ignited a ferocious backlash across the neighborhood, as residents feared that it would strain local resources, exacerbate crime, and send property values plummeting. All of Astoria’ elected officials vocally opposed the shelter, but it was Simotas who went the extra mile in trying to block the conversion. In November, she filed a lawsuit alleging that the city had failed to follow the proper procedures for establishing a permanent shelter at that site, thus rendering its operations illegal. While the suit was unsuccessful, the episode provided Simotas with the chance to signal her commitment to a quality-of-life politics designed to appeal to Astoria’s middle-class homeowners. Her other efforts to preserve the character of the neighborhood included crusades against topless bars and lewd adverts on billboards.
The other exponent of outer borough liberalism from this period was Costa Constantinides, who represented Astoria on the City Council from 2014 to 2021. Born in the neighborhood in 1975, Constantinides was the son of Greek Cypriot immigrants, a group that accounted for a significant minority of the local Hellenic population. He entered politics in his twenties via the establishment route, working as a staffer for several machine-aligned politicians, serving as president of the Queens County Young Democrats and getting elected as a district leader within the party structure. He might have made it to the City Council sooner, but upon his retirement in 2001, Peter Vallone Sr. decided to back his son Peter Vallone Jr. to succeed him. Vallone Jr. served three terms before the seat opened up again, allowing Constantinides to run with machine support. Although Gianaris and Simotas were now ensconced in Albany, a Greek-American had never before been elected at the municipal level, a fact that was central to Constantinides’ campaign. “It’s time for us as a Greek community to elect one of our own,” a local leader declared at his very first fundraiser.
During that campaign, Constantinides also received the endorsement of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, in part owing to his longtime advocacy for environmental issues. Much like Gianaris, Constantinides had spent years positioning himself as a crusader against the pollution generated by Astoria’s power plants, and his broader environmental agenda was a key pillar of his campaign. Parts of said agenda that he managed to achieve once in office included legislation mandating that the city reduce its carbon emissions by eighty percent, expanding the use of geothermal and solar energy in city-owned buildings, and requiring home heating oil to contain at least twenty percent biodiesel. He was also outspoken on the issue of climate change, joining the People’s Climate March in 2014 and lobbying the state to better integrate the subject into its K-12 curriculum. Over time, Constantinides came to be known as a progressive policy wonk, a fact highlighted by his endorsement of Elizabeth Warren during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
Constantinides also found ways to integrate his passion for environmental causes into the quality-of-life politics demanded by his constituents. For instance, another pillar of his first campaign was an initiative to beautify Astoria by curbing littering and illegal dumping, doubling trash pickup, improving the quality of public parks and cracking down on graffiti – all issues that he made progress on during his early days in office. He also secured millions to revitalize the neighborhood’s waterfront, which included preparing for the arrival of ferry service in Astoria, the construction of an “eco-dock” to host educational programming for children, and upgrades to the parks and playgrounds in the area. Constantinides won further plaudits for the deal he negotiated with the developers of the Astoria Cove project, which brought almost two thousand units of new housing to the neighborhood – nearly five hundred deeply affordable – plus commitments to use local labor in their construction and another five million dollars for infrastructure improvements.
Epilogue: Outer Borough Socialism
While outer borough populism endured for decades in Astoria, outer borough liberalism was much shorter lived. The first cracks started to form in 2018, when the neighborhood propelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to victory against Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s fourteenth congressional district, despite the fact that Gianaris, Simotas and Constantinides had all endorsed their party boss. One year later, Tiffany Cabán’s blockbuster margins in Astoria were largely responsible for getting her within sixty votes of the Queens District Attorney’s office. Among its three Greek representatives, only Gianaris saw which way the wind was blowing in that race and made an eleventh-hour endorsement of Cabán, insulating himself from criticism that he was out-of-touch with his constituents. Simotas and Constantinides both stayed neutral, but the latter was about to be term-limited out of office, leaving no opportunities for reprisal. By contrast, Simotas’ neutrality turned out to be the last mistake of her political career.
Had she simply endorsed the candidate who won almost seventy-five percent of the vote in her assembly district, NYC-DSA wouldn’t have had any justification for attempting to primary her. But by placing herself on the wrong side of history in two consecutive, high-profile races, Simotas exposed herself to accusations that she placed loyalty to the machine that put her in office above her allegedly progressive values – accusations that Zohran Mamdani used to great effect in his successful primary challenge to her in 2020. A year later, Cabán returned and sailed to victory in the open race for the neighborhood’s City Council seat. By this point, it was clear that non-socialist candidates were increasingly non-viable in Astoria.
Recognizing the danger, Gianaris used his influence over New York’s redistricting process in 2022 to carve out the patch of northern Astoria where he lived and tack it onto a district centered further inland. The most radical areas along the East River became the core of a new district that included the left-wing stronghold of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and a section of Midtown East in Manhattan. Later that year, Kristin Gonzalez romped to victory in that seat with NYC-DSA’s support. And with that, the era of outer borough liberalism came to a rather abrupt close. In a space of just two years, the legendary Queens Machine – which had ruled Astoria for nearly a century through the power of ethnic patronage – had been purged from the neighborhood and replaced by a new machine centered around an ideology that I’ll call outer borough socialism.
Despite what their critics say, no meaningful share of the millennial gentrifiers who comprise NYC-DSA’s base have trust funds. True, many boast a high degree of educational attainment, but many also have high levels of student debt to match. True, many are more economically advantaged than the poor and working-class voters with whom they sympathize, but many are also feeling the pinch of the cost-of-living crisis themselves, particularly when it comes to housing and childcare. And they’re certainly worse off than the wealthy Manhattan liberals who long dominated reformist politics in New York City, which is why they moved to the outer boroughs in the first place. Eventually, they concluded that their interests were poorly served by the insular, conservative ethnic cliques that controlled their neighborhoods and began organizing for an alternative.
Thus, outer borough socialism – with its calls for aggressive state action to lower costs – appeals to the young middle-income professionals of Queens and Brooklyn more than the doctors, lawyers and financiers on either side of Central Park. Despite their history of liberal reformism, the latter appear reluctant to help foot the bill for a more generous social safety net, which is why they broke for Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary. Cuomo also prevailed in the city’s poorest areas during the primary, which have become the last bastions of those old-school ethnic cliques. Despite the fact that they would benefit the most from a socialist agenda, they remain skeptical of those they consider outsiders, and NYC-DSA has yet to make significant inroads among them. However, the fact Mamdani flipped most of these neighborhood in the general election through the power of the Democratic ballot line suggests that they’re open to persuasion, particularly if he succeeds in delivering on his agenda.
Many people have lamented these changes in Astoria as an example of the consequences of runaway gentrification: outsiders with no roots in the neighborhood and no real stake in its future coming in and imposing their will on so-called real New Yorkers. Gianaris himself made this point – though more magnanimously – in a 2019 interview, observing that:
“[The old ways] got stymied by a young energy that you’re seeing in the neighborhood now…It’s been really vibrant and a great influence on the community, but it has broken that traditional pattern of the next immigrant group coming and laying roots here, and now it’s become a place with a lot of energy, a lot of young people and the progressivism you see.”
But is it true that this pattern has really been broken? Once upon a time, non-native labor poured into New York City in ethnically homogenous waves from abroad in order to build out its physical infrastructure and work in its industrial sector. Non-native labor is still pouring in today, only now a bigger share is coming from the suburbs and consists of ethnically diverse white-collar professionals. In both cases, the newcomers eventually grew dissatisfied with the politics of their neighborhoods and began organizing to seize power. In both cases, their attempts were bitterly resisted by agents of the status quo and generated fearsome nativist backlash. And in both cases, the realities of demographic change ultimately overwhelmed the ancien régime and gave rise to a political revolution. This latest cohort of laborers may not all have grandparents who farmed eggplants together in Sicily, but as it turns out that isn’t a prerequisite for forming a cohesive community. In the end, what this political history really proves is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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