Incumbent Marte Wins Four- Way Primary Battle in CD 1

After a frenetic last month of campaigning, including the election-eve shock announcement that Elizabeth Street Garden had been saved, incumbent District 1 City Council Member Christopher Marte cruised to primary victory.

Marte’s election-night event was held at Conbody, the renowned bodyweight training gym at 121 Ludlow St. with a prison-style theme inspired by founder Coss Marte’s own time as a convicted drug dealer. Coss, who hires other ex-cons as trainers, is the Council member’s brother.

The race wasn’t particularly close, with Marte on election night taking 49.2 percent of the first-round ranked-choice votes, just shy of the needed—and inevitable— 50 percent threshold.

Marte was endorsed by the left-leaning Working Families Party, and there wasn’t much room for his opponents to maneuver.

Just recently, Marte has stood up for Jewish mezuzahs, announced plans for a new dog run, protecting city retiree benefits and—in a surprise deal with the now Randy Mastro-influenced Adams administration—saving the contentious Elizabeth Street Garden, Marte always favored saving ESG while also bringing affordable housing to multiple other sites. And while a supporter of the controversial congestion pricing toll, he had pushed for exemptions for any residents caught in the toll zone below 60th Street.

Perhaps the greatest charge against Marte is that he’s “anti-development,” which is code for anti-big real estate. This is arguable, particularly given some of the skyscraper plans mooted for the so-called “Two Bridges” area north of the Manhattan Bridge.

But one should also consider the large extant housing developments that fall within Marte’s district: Alfred E. Smith, Rutgers, La Guardia, and Vladeck Houses.

There are also the large Seward Park and Amalgamated Dwellings cooperative apartment complexes, which reflect the Lower East Side’s heritage of Jewish socialism in a bygone era.

Just to mix things up, however, there’s also Knickerbocker Village—the only Manhattan voting precinct to go for Trump in 2024, and though once very Jewish and Italian, is today mostly Chinese. Southbridge Towers and its nine co-op buildings adjacent to the South Street Seaport is another large housing development in the district.

These are the realities, even in a partly gentrifying, partly affluent district, which still has a strong Latino base.

Though Elizabeth Lewinsohn spent big real estate PAC money and her background as a civilian employee in NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau is impressive, her campaign was undistinguished, save an endorsement from Marte’s predecessor and rival, Margaret Chin. While Lewinsohn’s 24-percent vote tally might position her to succeed the term-limited Marte in 2029, whether a white PAC-boosted Jewish woman can win large Chinese and Hispanic blocs is unclear.

Jess Coleman (16 percent), a “City of Yes” backer—which Marte very publicly opposed—and advocate of congestion pricing, making him an apostate among the radical anti-car lobby, placed third, and MTA director of Expense Analysis for Service Delivery in the Department of Subways Eric Yu (10 percent) finished last.

While Yu’s moderate pro-quality-of-life platform was appealing, he had little chance to poach substantial Asian votes from Marte, whose district office at 65 East Broadway makes him a constant presence in greater Chinatown.

Said an emotional Marte after his victory, “We have won this reelection with a historic number of votes and with more than twice the amount of votes than any other opponent. Winning so much so fast can make it all feel so easy.

“But we will never forget what we were up against: the most amount of real estate PAC money spent against any City Council candidate, the widespread misinformation hitting people’s social media accounts and mailboxes, and the hateful lies from campaign and PAC canvassers outside of poll sites. But we won, and won, and won. And in these next four years, we have so much more to win.”