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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933
April 21, 2016 • $1.00 Volume 86 • Number 16
Cancel fends off Niou to win Silver’s old seat in Assembly election BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
A
lice Cancel, running on the Democratic Party line, was the winner of Tuesday’s special election for Lower Manhattan’s 65th Assembly District, according to unofficial Board of Elections results.
Cancel, a longtime Lower East Side Democratic district leader, lives in Southbridge Towers, on the downtown side of the Brooklyn Bridge. She will fill the seat — formerly occupied by the convicted former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — for Cancel continued on p. 8
Heavy metal Toledano; Tenements’ lead levels are through the roof BY YANNIC R ACK
W
hen renovation work started on an empty apartment in her building last month, Holly Slayton was annoyed that she would likely have to deal with nonstop construction noise for a few weeks. But as the work at 514 E.
12th St., a five-story walk-up near Tompkins Square Park, progressed, a more serious problem soon surfaced — lead dust, the highly toxic and potentially fatal substance that is often found in the paint inside old buildings, began to seep through every crevice. lead continued on p. 26
Sanders connects with strikers
page 4
Photo by Sarah Ferguson
Longtime East Villager Isabel Celeste, the mother of Bernie Sanders super-suppor ter actress Rosario Dawson, at Sanders’s Prospect Park rally last Sunday.
Hillary romps Downtown; Bernie runs strong in E.V. By Sarah Ferguson
O
n Tuesday night, even Downtown New York was Hillary Country. After losing the last eight contests, former New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walloped Bernie Sanders in New York’s hotly contested Democratic primary, besting the Brooklynborn Vermont Senator by 16 points. Clinton drew some of her most decisive margins in Chelsea, Union Square and Gramercy, where she garnered 68 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results.
She earned a solid 66 percent of the vote in the West Village, and carried the Lower East Side and Chinatown by 59 percent. Even the progressive East Village went for Hillary by a tight margin of 50.8 to 49.2 percent — a rather hairsplitting result, considering that a measly 7,500 people even bothered to go to the polls in those districts. However, Sanders held on to much of the heart of the East Village, winning with margins of from 51 percent to 58 percent, in most of the electoral districts stretching from E. 14th St. to E. Sixth St. from First Ave. to Avenue C, as well as some
E.D.’s south of there, and also some stretching to Avenue D and Second Ave. Like elsewhere in New York, there were reports of chaos and exclusion at the polls, where many voters said they were told they weren’t registered. “A poll worker told me that roughly 40 percent of the voters that turned up at the 22nd Electoral District in the East Village had to do affidavit paper ballots because their names were not on the voter rolls,” said Internet entrepreneur Paul Garrin, who runs WiFi-NY. That includes Garrin himPrimary continued on p. 6
Panic over missing poll mailer cards.................p. 2 Progress Report: Word from the BID’s...............p.17 www.TheVillager.com