The Power Broker #13: Drop Dead City

Good Wednesday morning in New York City, where tourists aren't booking hotel rooms for the World Cup.

Here's what else is happening:

• The national soccer teams of Morocco, Brazil, Haiti and Senegal are all planning to set up their World Cup base camps in North Jersey this year.
• Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside an Upper East Side synagogue last night to oppose the activity inside: a sale of occupied West Bank real estate. 
• Health officials are warning that someone who tested positive for measles recently dined at an Italian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen.
• Opponents are saying Knicks star Jalen Brunson is tough to guard because he has a large head.
• Boulevard Drinks, a beloved almost-90-year-old hot dog stand in Jersey City, is in danger of being displaced by a Whole Foods.
• Toronto Mans.
• Man Band Summer.
• And finally, peck away:

Something has changed in Hudson County politics.

Three years ago, progressive candidate Ron Bautista faced stiff opposition from the Hudson County Democratic Organization in his run for a seat on the county’s board of commissioners. The powerful political machine had chosen to back his more moderate opponent, Anthony Romano.

” They spent a lot of money in that race. And on Election Day, they had a person like every block, just handing out flyers” for Romano, Bautista said in an interview.

Still, Bautista came within roughly 230 votes of winning.

Now, the longtime Hoboken resident is running for the same seat again, his third attempt in as many election cycles. This time, the county’s influential Democratic organization is backing him.

“ I found out the day I turned in 500 petition signatures to be on the ballot,” Bautista said about learning that neither Romano nor another machine-backed candidate was running against him.

Hudson County Executive Craig Guy, a local Democratic power broker, hailed the endorsement in March as “a remarkable show of Democratic unity and shared purpose to provide safety and affordability for county residents.”

But some of the party’s progressive insurgents see it instead as an indicator of how powerful their candidates have become, and what may be a seismic shift in New Jersey politics since President Donald Trump was re-elected two years ago.

“I see it as a reflection of or an observation of pragmatic political actors making practical decisions on the ground that reflect ground realities,” said Ravi Bhalla, a former Hoboken mayor and new member of the state Assembly.

Far-left, progressive Democrats have upended races across the state, even as they’ve faced opposition from their party’s well-connected establishment.

Last month, Bernie Sanders-backed Analilia Mejia capped off a surprising run in the state’s 11th Congressional District to win the seat previously held by Gov. Mikie Sherrill, defeating a crop of better-funded moderate Democrats in the special primary.

At the state level, other Hudson County progressives like Jersey City’s Katie Brennan and Bhalla — both of whom have endorsed Bautista — won seats on the state Assembly. James Solomon defeated former Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevey in Jersey City's mayoral race by running a progressive campaign.

Guy did not respond to a request for comment on the decision to back Bautista – or whether the county organization tried and failed to recruit a candidate to run against him.

In an interview with Gothamist, Brennan said members of the Democratic establishment “saw that they didn't have the momentum and the progressive candidate and the progressive movement is so strong that they bowed out.”

A fight against the ballot

Ron Bautista came to Hoboken in 1999 from his native Ecuador at age 12. He spent his first 11 years in New Jersey as an undocumented immigrant.

“ I came on a tourist visa. And we overstayed our visa,” he said. “It was a situation back in Ecuador that all our money became nothing.”

As a teenager, Bautista said he avoided wearing an Ecuadorian soccer jersey for fear it would summon the suspicions of local immigration authorities.

He said he paid his way through college cleaning houses in Hoboken with his mother. After he got his degree, he got his green card and became a U.S. citizen in 2016.

Now that he has the Hudson County Democratic Organization's backing, Bautista said he is keeping the machine at arms length, calling the relationship a “work in progress.”

“ I believe that there was a good effort from the machine side to read the room and see that we have to have a bigger tent,” Bautista said.

Nothing has changed about his platform, he said. Bautista didn’t tout the endorsement on his Instagram page the way he has other high profile endorsements. And his name will not include the Hudson County Democratic Organization’s slogan on the ballot.

But Bautista appears to harbor little animosity from those years fighting the more powerful members of his own party.

“ For the first few races, the fight wasn't so much with the machine as with the ballot,” he said.

In 2024, a federal judge blocked the state’s long-standing system for designing ballots. Under what was known as “The Line,” candidates endorsed by the powerful county political organizations appeared directly below often more well-known members of the party running, while other candidates were cast off to the side.

A new state law passed last year outlawed the practice and mandated that candidates be grouped on the ballot based on the office they’re running for.

“For so many years, nobody even tried [to challenge the machine] because of how fixed the ballot system seemed to people,” Bautista said.

‘Building power’

While county commissioners may seem to hold less clout than some other politicians, the boards possess real power. The Hudson County board has a $700 million budget and oversees all county-owned land, including roads, parks and jails.

Bautista said he wants to use the job to  guarantee free legal representation for all tenants in rent dispute cases across the county, make county roads safer and build affordable housing on county-owned land.

“For me, the county government should be the government that tackles challenges that are too large for just one city to take care of,” he said.

Bautista’s campaign is also part of a nascent strategy among progressives to focus on down ballot races in order to gain more power in the state — a tactic that establishment Democrats have successfully used for decades.

“What we see as a next step for us is, can we get majorities on some of these county commissioner boards to start to do that work to put pressure at the state level,” said Sunni Vargas, political director for the progressive New Jersey Working Families Party, which has backed Bautista and two other candidates for other seats as Hudson County commissioners.

Vargas says that the organization views the county as a “beacon for the rest of the state” that progressive candidates and policies are a winning strategy up and down the ballot.

“That's how we see ourselves building power,” she added.

Ice cream was popular in colonial times among the wealthy, and George Washington was a big fan.

Martha Washington hosted an A-list ice cream party every Friday evening at Mount Vernon, with lemonade served. Of course, the Washingtons probably churned their ice cream by a method that harkened back to the Italians, whereby the temperature of crushed ice was lowered by the addition of rock salt, which froze the flavored cream poured therein.

But modern mass-manufacture of ice cream depended on the ability to keep it frozen in large quantities until it was eaten. That knack was provided by the invention of commercial refrigeration, which appeared in the 1850s, paving the way for the first retail ice cream shop in New York City: J.M. Horton Ice Cream, at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue (now Madison Avenue) in 1863.

By the late 20th century, ice cream exploded, with the most sought-after flavor being a layering of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla sometimes known as Neapolitan, according to Joy Santlofer in "Food City."

Nowadays, with its wide availability in parlors and grocery stores, as well as the ever-present trucks, we take ice cream and its many frozen offshoots for granted. And the number of cold treats – some imported fairly recently from other parts of the world – has blossomed, so that a partial list includes Italian water ices, milk ices, frozen custard, soft serve, gelato, Turkish mastic dondurma, Mexican paletas, fro-yo, Indian kulfi, Caribbean and Far Eastern varieties, and plain old ice cream in too many flavors — some off the wall — to count.

What could be more New York (or more weird) than the pastrami-on-rye ice cream seen at Salt & Straw?

We’ve come a long way from George and Martha’s parties, but we still enjoy ice cream, as well as any number of other frozen semi-solids. Here are 10 of our favorites being served in New York City. Please mention your own in the comments.

Mixue

Mixue was founded as a shaved-ice business in China's Henan Province, and the fast food chain now boasts 53,000 branches in 13 countries, though most of them are in China. The United States has four branches, including one in Brooklyn. Besides smoothies, sundaes and Hong Kong-style milk teas, the main attraction is a soft-serve “king cone” in vanilla or chocolate, priced almost unbelievably at $1.19.

The product is especially light and airy, perhaps accounting for the bargain price.

519 Fulton St., Downtown Brooklyn

Lemon Ice King of Corona

The Lemon Ice King — perhaps the city's most famous purveyor of frozen treats — was founded in 1944, though its iconic location in Corona, just north of the Long Island Expressway, wasn’t established until 1964. The walk-up window stays open late into summer nights, dispensing Italian water ices — basically just ice, sugar, and finely ground flavoring — in 25 or so varieties.

Aficionados agree that the best are made with natural flavorings, including mint, peanut butter, watermelon, coffee, and, of course, lemon.

52-02 108th St., Corona

Ralph’s Famous

Ralph’s is one of Staten Island’s most famous culinary landmarks, though it has cloned itself all over town. The original branch is still the one to visit, selling water ices, milk ices, and ice cream made on the premises near the island’s bustling tugboat harbor. Milk ices are highly recommended.

But what’s a milk ice? Midway between ice cream and water ice, it’s similar to sherbet, allowing the flavors to shine better than in creamier formats.

501 Pork Richmond Ave., Port Richmond

Gelateria Gentile

Parts of town are paved with gelaterias — many of them chains that originated in Italy. It suggests that gelato is currently the city’s most popular frozen treat. They each have their thing: Amorino carves its gelato into flowers; Venti doubles as a chocolatier; Anita offers novelty flavors like white chocolate pretzel — the list goes on and on.

But the one I like best is Gelateria Gentile, a chain that originated in Apulia, the toe of the Italian boot. It makes gelato of surpassing subtlety in a restrained range of flavors. Some, like antiqua crema, don’t seem like flavors at all, which is not a bad thing if you love subtlety.

Also, don’t miss the granitas — liquid ices in flavors like cantaloupe, lemon, and almond.

498 Amsterdam Ave., Upper West Side

Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

When Chinatown Ice Cream Factory opened in Chinatown in 1978, it shocked the city. It offered flavors New York hadn’t seen before, like lychee, red bean, green tea, banana, almond cookie and black sesame. You’d take a tentative lick, and then your eyes would light up. Decades later, things are the same.

65 Bayard St., Chinatown

Van Leeuwen

Van Leeuwen is a homegrown ice cream chain that started in 2008 as a truck on Bleecker Street in the West Village. Its stated purpose was to make one happy via ice cream, and in general, the brand does just that, with flavors running to cookies and cream, Earl Grey tea, and Sicilian pistachio.

Perhaps more notable is their roster of vegan flavors made out of coconut milk, cashews, and oats, including banana bread pudding with chocolate swirls, and mango sticky rice.

620 Manhattan Ave., Greenpoint

Paleteria Los Michoacanos

Paletas are Mexican ice pops. Like popsicles, they come on a stick and are often wildly colorful, but instead of being artificially flavored, fresh fruit and dairy products make them delicious and even nutritious.

Some, like cucumber with chile, are salty, some, like mango and strawberry, are sweet, and there are further dry flavorings you can shake on. Other varieties include blackberry and cheese, mamey, rice pudding, apple with chiles, peach, and many others.

101-06 43rd Ave., Corona

Rita’s Italian Ices & Frozen Custard

Frozen custard predated soft serve — a thicker, richer product that contains eggs as well as cream. Though still popular in the Midwest, it was actually invented in Coney Island in 1919 and caused a sensation. Get it now at Rita’s — there’s a branch in Coney Island, which is open only in the summer — or go to the one in Midwood, which is open all year. Nothing tastes better than a vanilla or chocolate frozen custard cone (or a twist!) eaten with the salty sea breezes of summer whipping past.

1317 East 17th St., Midwood

Eddie’s Sweet Shop

Wouldn’t you like to eat your ice cream in an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, one with a soda fountain, wooden booths, and other antique furnishings? Though the décor dates to the 1940s, Eddie’s Sweet Shop was founded in 1968 and makes its own ice cream right on the premises, with typically 18 flavors. But the things to get are the sundaes. My favorite features vanilla ice cream and the store’s rich, thick hot fudge.

105-29 Metropolitan Ave., Forest Hills

Birdie’s

Frozen yogurt (dubbed “fro yo”) swept into town two decades ago, offering a tarter and generally grainier treat than ice cream, presenting itself as a healthier alternative. Los Angeles’ Pinkberry was a pioneer, but our own chain, 16 Handles, was quick to follow, offering frozen yogurt with a catalog of candy toppings. Now the fad is being revived at Birdie’s, in a space that resembles a Victorian sitting room.

The product is smooth and sweet, once again furnished with a choice of toppings, and a list of flavors that includes chocolate, banana, and “tart.”

152 Seventh Ave. South, West Village