A Red Hook houseboat: A strange tale of Brooklyn Democrats and a district that shouldn’t exist
Something smells fishy in the waters off the Brooklyn piers, and it’s not the fluke. While everyone expected the borough’s Democrats to elect 42 members to the party’s state committee — a female and male from each of 21 Assembly districts — this year the borough party wound up with 44.
Why? Because, somehow, four, and only four, Brooklyn voters on a Red Hook houseboat got counted as part of a Staten Island-Manhattan Assembly district. Read that again. Every weird word is true.
Each Brooklyn Assembly district gets two district leaders, and it’s not unheard of for a district to include slices of different boroughs; in the 64th, two party leaders represent the district’s 9,548 Democratic voters in Brooklyn, even though 25,541 live on Staten Island. What is unheard of is for the two leaders to equal 50% of their represented population, as is happening in the 61st’s Brooklyn portion.
The 61st, as drawn after the 2020 census, stretches from northern Staten Island to southern Manhattan, representing thousands of voters in each of those two boroughs, and appears to skirt Brooklyn entirely. But drill down to spreadsheets and you find a grand total of four registered Democrats in Kings County joining their 48,688 fellow Democrats. Whether by accident or on purpose, those four, in their humble boat, will send as many delegates to the Brooklyn Democratic Party’s executive committee as the 82,691 registered Democrats who reside in the 52nd District, which incorporates Dumbo, Gowanus and Cobble Hill.
The two who raised their hands and got petitions (one signature got them over the hump) are husband and wife Lenny and Mariya Markh. They live in another part of Brooklyn, which is allowed in a redistricting year. He is chief of staff to Sheepshead Bay Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz; she was a 2021 City Council candidate endorsed by, among others, Brooklyn party boss Rodneyse Bichotte. Both are unopposed, which means they’ll win. They won’t even show up on ballots.
Either this is all a funny story about a phantom district or it’s something more. Lenny Markh says he just happened to find an opportunity and seize it. But it is an eyebrow-raising happening in Brooklyn Democratic politics, where there’s a battle for control and where things are getting stranger after the discovery of forgeries of signatures challenging lower-level county committee candidates backed by reform groups. Brooklyn Dems get plenty wrong. But in this case, they didn’t miss the boat.
