THE RISEN STAR 14
CityAndStateNY.com
August 24, 2020
By A. G. Sims Portraits by Guerin Blask
How Ritchie Torres – a young, gay, AfroLatino man from the projects – took charge of his political destiny
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N JANUARY 2014, the same week a new class of New York City Council members were sworn into office, a snowstorm blew through the city. The blizzard created a problem for former public school teacher Mark Treyger, who was then chair of the council’s brand-new Recovery and Resiliency Committee, which focused on recovery in communities affected by Superstorm Sandy and on long-term efforts to make the city more resilient to climate change. Public housing residents in Treyger’s Brooklyn district were experiencing heating outages in Coney Island. Projects in the Rockaways, Red Hook and other waterfront areas that had been hard hit by Superstorm Sandy just a year before were also affected. Their boilers were destroyed by flooding from Sandy, and now, during the coldest days of the year, in several New York City Housing Authority developments, the temporary boilers that the city had installed were failing. After inspecting the boilers himself late one night, Treyger went to NYCHA headquarters the next morning to get help. In the hallway, he ran into Ritchie Torres, then a 25-year-old council member, whom he had met at freshman orientation. Torres had been tapped to chair the public housing committee. His district in the South Bronx wasn’t experiencing the outages as badly, but helping Treyger and his constituents became one of Torres’ highest priorities.
“Ritchie barely knew who I was, and he stopped everything that he was doing. He listened to everything that I had to say, and his first response to me was, ‘Mark, how can I help?’” Treyger recalled recently. What happened next has become part of the lore of Torres, a rising star in the Democratic Party, who just prevailed in a 12-way Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. José E. Serrano in the South Bronx. Treyger and Torres approached then-Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito with a plan to go directly to the people. For the first time in City Council history, that February a public hearing was held in a NYCHA complex, at 2315 Surf Ave. in Brooklyn. The two freshmen lawmakers organized hundreds of residents from Coney Island, Red Hook, the Rockaways and elsewhere to testify about inadequate heat and hot water in their homes. A week later, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer announced a $3 billion investment in NYCHA from the federal government, the largest disaster relief grant in FEMA history. “I can tell you that when you hold government agencies accountable the way Ritchie does, you don’t make many friends in government,” Treyger said. “But he’s not in it to make friends in government. He is here to deliver to people. I saw it firsthand.” Before he was elected to City Council, Treyger went to school to