A dozen years ago, a single Brooklyn address became a national symbol for government failure.
It was 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights, headquarters to the old New York City Board of Education (BoE), and it aroused in reform politicians and editorial writers at the time an almost pathological desire to rant. One New York City mayoral candidate called it a “blob’, while a sitting mayor – pre-9/11 – said he’d like to “blow the place up”, if you’ll excuse the expression. Such was the affect of the bureaucratic stasis emanating from The Blob circa 2000 on otherwise rational people.
New York has another building worthy of such ire today, also in Brooklyn. This time it’s 2-4 Nevins Street, about a mile southeast of the old BoE. Call it Blob II, if you will, because it symbolizes what is wrong with government today just as accurately as the BoE did in its day.
The Blob II – Spawn of Blob? – serves as headquarters to New York’s Working Families Party (WFP) and the radical community organizing group, ACORN. They don’t call it ACORN anymore, of course. It became “New York Communities for Change” (NYCC) after the former group got caught on camera teaching an ostensible underage teenage prostitute how to defraud the government. When ACORN dissolved, NYCC sprouted roots in the exact same 2-4 Nevins Street space, with a virtually identical board of directors — a freakish coincidence that The New York Post reports on today.
The WFP and NYCC neighbors, whose members and leaders are inextricably co-mingled, are the chief proponents of the high-spending, high-taxing, and high-borrowing policies that have brought New York to its knees. The WFP is the proverbial tail that wags the Democratic dog in New York, yanking the larger Party further leftward every year with a hard pull of the leash. (To give you an idea of their politics, take a look at this video of Bertha Lewis, a board member of both the WFP and NYCC, at a gathering of the Young Democratic Socialists.)
The influence of the WFP and the NYCC cannot be overestimated. These are highly talented and well funded organizations – and they are not going away.
Time Square might be the crossroads of the world, but make no mistake where the radical center of New York politics is today: 2-4 Nevins Street. It makes the old 110 Livingston Street look genteel by comparison.
But what to call it?
The Blob that Ate New York?
Scratch that.
The hungry and industrious WFP and NYCC are hollowing out the foundation of New York State. How about…
The Termite Mound?
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