Silver Helped Knickerbocker Village Weather the Storms, Tenants Say

It’s safe to say the political tide has turned against Sheldon Silver, as Democrats in the State Assembly press him to resign. But tenants of Knickerbocker Village continue to shower him with praise for having helped them rebound from Superstorm Sandy. (It’s the kind of praise Andrew Cuomo is hurting for this morning, in the wake of the blizzard that wasn’t.) When the longtime Assembly speaker was arrested on corruption charges Thursday, some of those who watched him in action during the crisis at the Lower East Side complex were nothing short of blown away.

According to tenant leader Bob Wilson, Silver “was right there” in 2012, when flood waters from the East River raced through nine of the complex’s 13-story buildings, knocking out power lines and trapping elderly and disabled residents in their apartments. “And if he wasn’t here, he was on the phone in Albany.” Wilson, who headed the Knickerbocker Village Tenant Association until the group disbanded in 2013, noted that Silver also helped secure disaster relief funds of nearly $1.5 million to repair elevators in the 81-year-old development for low- and middle-income residents.

Mary Keating, who heads a state-recognized Knickerbocker interim tenants association, said Silver was “wonderful” during Sandy’s aftermath, recalling that when she returned to the complex after spending a number of days with friends, she found her building was still a “mess” without heat or electricity. “There wasn’t a single message from management and no visible sign of management,” she said. “It was dark and cold and I was walking up and down 12 flights of wet stairs, clinging to the railings. It was a very frightening situation.”

Silver, she said, held a meeting for the tenants at P.S. 1 on Henry Street. “He had all the players there and he took questions. From that time on, all buildings had postings about the status of repairs and cooking gas and electricity. I heard he read the riot act to management.” She also claimed Silver “got the ball rolling” and “we got generators from the Midwest that arrived on flatbed trucks. The Red Cross was here.”

Currently, Silver is being pictured as a financial villain by talking heads and headline writers even before he goes to trial on a five-count criminal complaint by federal prosecutors who allege that he abused the prestige of his office to obtain millions in kickbacks for no-show gigs at two Manhattan law firms. (A Daily News editorial today variously called the speaker an “extortionist” and “conniver” and earlier called on Democrats to treat him as a “pariah.”)

But downtown community board members praised Silver as “smart, compassionate and staunchly progressive” and expressed “great admiration for his courage and conviction” to the New York Press. He retains many loyalists on the Lower East Side, his lifetime home and a neighborhood where his impact has been “immense,” as The Lo-Down has noted. Many of those loyalists reside at Knickerbocker.

“My husband called me about his arrest at work and he was very upset — basically very sad about what seemed to be transpiring out of nowhere,” said Isabel Reyes Torres, an Ecuadorian tenant activist and fourth-grade teacher at P.S. 20 who has lived at Knickerbocker for 18 years. She became a U.S. citizen at age 18 and noted that Silver has been helpful to Latino immigrants and to members of her family.

“The worst was seeing him handcuffed” on television, she said during a phone conversation with B+B. “I couldn’t look at it. I called my mom who only speaks Spanish and she feels someone was out to get him. She said in Spanish, ‘It must be that some people are trying to destroy him.’ But the truth will come out and we will keep praying.”

Other Knickerbocker tenants speculate that Silver was set up for a fall by people at the top of the state’s food chain– among them Gov. Andrew Cuomo who came under scrutiny by the U.S. Attorney last year after he abruptly disbanded the Moreland Commission, his own state ethics panel set up to clean up New York’s notorious pay-for-play political culture.

“I think he wanted to knock out Shelly,” said one elderly resident, referring to Cuomo. The tenant, who asked for anonymity, said several of his neighbors at Knickerbocker regard the speaker’s takedown by the office of Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney of the Southern District, as comparable to a mafia hit — an apt metaphor at the 1.590-unit complex that has been home to mob operatives like Nicholas “Nicky Glasses” Marangello.

Others believe Silver was targeted by major players in the real estate industry because of his longstanding support for rent regulations that are up for renewal in June. A longtime tenant advocate told the Wall Street Journal that Silver’s arrest was “not good” for efforts to keep the newly Republican-led state Senate from weakening rent regulation laws — though, with the fate of Silver’s position up in the air, it’s not certain how exactly his arrest will affect it.

At Knickerbocker Village, Mary Keating’s interim tenant association recently beat back an effort by the complex’s owners to impose a 13 percent rent hike on residents, obtaining instead an 8 percent increase over two years. Isabel Reyes Torres, a member of the association, said Silver was “the first” local official to speak to the commissioner of Homes and Community Renewal about the 13 percent hike, later co-signing a letter on September 8, 2014 with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer urging that it be rejected.

“Shelly was also instrumental in our getting rent rebates” for the loss of heat and electricity during Sandy, Reyes Torres said. “He’s been a fixture on the Lower East Side for so many years, providing major support for housing and education and for immigration reform.”

But in the Daily News, Bill Hammond insists Silver was “exploiting little guys with abandon” while he “self-righteously postured as the champion of the poor and downtrodden”; the columnist describes Silver as “allegedly shaking down major landlords who were lobbying him to weaken rent controls — and who, according to the feds, got at least some of what they paid for.”

Tenants of Knickerbocker Village remain deeply saddened and disturbed by his arrest. Wilson, who has known Silver for decades, said that his first reaction was “absolute shock. But the other word that came me was tragic. If the [charges] are true, this is tragic on multiple levels — and on a human level for Shelly himself. And it’s tragic for the district he represents. He has done a tremendous amount of good for the district and a tremendous amount of good for Knickerbocker Village. He’s contributed particularly for those in need — the lower income people, the lower middle class. Everyone’s going to get hurt by this.”