With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (17 page)

Everybody said there was no way we could come up with a meaningful bill that all sides would support, but we did. The bill gave the Department of Housing’s code-enforcement unit more latitude to arrange the necessary repairs on these buildings, and it gave the city the ability to sue these landlords and seize their assets to pay for the work that the city had done. And at the end of the day, if a landlord didn’t pony up and fix things, we could take away the building and sell it to a responsible nonprofit or to the tenants or to some other entity that would manage and maintain it properly.

The bill passed and was signed into law. We held a press conference at a building in Brooklyn that was in really bad condition but was about to enter the new program as the first building to fall under our new law. A few months later we went back to see the building after it was redone, and it really looked nice.

We visited another building about ten blocks away that was a horror show, and we were able to tell the people there that we’d done something that would help them. I could see skepticism in their eyes, and I didn’t blame them, because I could only imagine how many times their government had said it’d do something to help them and then nothing had happened. But I was able to say, “Don’t believe me. Go see what the city did to your neighbors’ building. This community organizer can take you there.” And they went. Knowing that their building would get to be as livable as the other one because of the Safe Housing Law was just a remarkable feeling.

My only disappointment was that I wanted to do that press conference in Brooklyn with everybody—with both tenant organizers and landlords. But they refused to stand at a press conference with each other! I learned a long time ago that you never get everything you want, and this was one of those occasions where I had to be satisfied that I got nearly everything. And now we have a powerful weapon in the fight against deadbeat landlords.

P
HOTOGRAPHIC
I
NSERT

Just married! My parents, Larry and Mary Callaghan Quinn, on their wedding day at Good Shepherd Church, Inwood, New York, June 14, 1952.

All dressed up with my family on the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York, January 1968.
From left to right:
Aunt Julia, my mom, and my grandparents, John and Nellie Callaghan.

A stylish threesome on Fifth Avenue in 1971, with my aunt, Julia
(left),
and my sister, Ellen
(right)
.

With my mother at my home away from home, the Glen View Farms stables in Glen Head, New York, in the mid-1970s.

At a horse show my sister was in in the late 1970s.

My father and I managed a little sightseeing while looking at colleges in Maine in the summer of 1983.

Who is that under all those feathers? Dressed up as the Bantam, the Trinity College mascot, Hartford, Connecticut, mid-1980s.

With my father on graduation day at Trinity College, 1988.

While I was executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, I held a joint news conference with then City Councilman Tom Duane to raise the alarm about an increase in anti-gay violence, June 1998.

On a Hudson River pier in Chelsea with my friend Wayne Kawadler and our coparented dog, Andy, 1998.

Steven Macauley

We won! Celebrating my first election to the City Council with my political consultant, Mark Guma
(far left),
and Maura Keaney, my campaign manager, February 16, 1999.