Glick was their pick: Last week, The Villager reported quite a bit on the Assembly and State Committee primary elections in Lower Manhattan’s 65th Assembly District. They were competitive elections, and the race for former Speaker Sheldon Silver’s seat was an exciting one! We didn’t want to forget about the race in the largely West Side 66th Assembly District. So we asked Deborah Glick how she felt about winning re-election by a 4-to-1 margin over upstart challenger Jim Fouratt. “I’m very gratified by the support, which was very strong and broad, and I think reflects what we expected,” Glick said. “The public approves of what I do, and it’s gratifying to have any challenge that one defeats so handily.” Asked if she had learned anything from the experience, she told us, “I learned that it’s always good to be prepared for a challenge. What I have always believed is that working hard, doing your job is 90 percent of your re-election.” As for her campaign opponent Fouratt, Glick said, “He ran a very negative campaign — with attacks that I think were untrue.” Yet she said that style of campaigning just seems to be in vogue right now. “Look at what’s going on with Donald Trump,” she said. “He’s saying all sorts of things that are demonstrably untrue.” As for Fouratt, he said in a Facebook voice mail message to us: “I am very pleased with the results of how I did in a six-week campaign on limited resources — and, because of limited resources, having to use social media as my primary outreach to people. Getting 20 percent of the vote, I think, was quite good. Of course, I’m disappointed. Deborah Glick really has to ask herself why so few people actually came out to vote in the primary. She refused to debate me. She refused to answer any questions about local critical issues, which is the hospital, fracking, Hudson River Park air rights… . She did run on one issue — women’s health advocacy, most of which was done 20 years ago in Albany.” On election night, Glick and her supporters partied at Tio Pepe, Jimmy and Rocio Sanz’s Spanish-food mecca on W. Fourth St. … By the way, we hear Tio Pepe has just unveiled a new menu, and if it’s as good as their old one, diners are in for a treat!
Astor Place report: Reader Anne Mitcheltree from the East Village said she was coming out of the K-Mart at Astor Place last Wednesday when she bumped into an acquaintance who told her that local newsstand vendor Jerry Delakas had just been robbed. It apparently occurred around 3 p.m. or 4 p.m., sometime before the big rainstorm. “They took the cash box. It was a team effort — one guy to pull him out of the booth, and the other to go in the booth when he wasn’t looking,” she said. Mitcheltree said she said the haul was hardly chump change, and believes Delakas filed a police report. She didn’t have a description of the two suspects, other than that they were both male. She personally feels the new street furniture on the expanded “Alamo Plaza” is bringing in a lot of people to the area, some of whom, however, she fears might not have the best intentions. “All the new chairs and tables around there are attracting a lot of strangers — ‘stranger danger,’ ” she said. “It’s Zuccotti Park on the freeway.” However, Terri Howell, the Village Alliance business improvement district’s operations director, said she and her security team previously worked to address the problem when local school kids were trying to poach from Delakas. She said her team gets out on the plazas by 3 p.m. and knows the drill as far as keeping a watchful eye on the situation there. As for this past weekend’s Astor Alive! Festival, she said it went great from a safety standpoint. But she had her hands full with the homeless crusty punks, who — like everyone else — have taken a shine to the spiffy new public spaces. “There was a lot of pot smoking…untethered dogs,” Howell reported. … The BID threw a party Friday night at The Standard hotel penthouse on Third Ave. to celebrate the plaza project’s completion. (Well, everything is pretty much done except for the return of “The Cube.”) Among the crowd was Karen Bacon, the older sister of actor Kevin Bacon, who worked as an outside event planner for the successful festival.
