Among supporters joining Congressmember Jerrold Nadler, right, at his fundraiser at Barolo in Soho on Sunday were Julie Nadel, left, and Doug Hawley. Nadel is a board member on the Hudson River Park Trust and active in Lower Manhattan politics. Hawley, who will turn 84 in May, is Soho’s longest-tenured resident. He moved into his apartment in the former light-manufacturing district in 1952, when Robert Moses was planning to obliterate the neighborhood with a cross-Manhattan expressway. A survey by Moses had found only 38 families living in the project area. Hawley paid $72 for his rent-controlled apartment at Spring and Wooster Sts. when he moved in. He pays $719 today. His new downstairs neighbor, meanwhile, pays more than $4,000 per month. Hawley used to run an overnight service delivering stock tip sheets to brokerage houses across the country. Nadler, in his eighth term in Congress, spoke about being chairperson of the new Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He blasted the Bush administration for “violating Magna Carta” by denying habeas corpus — a prisoner’s right for a court to determine whether there are legal grounds for him to be held — to those deemed “enemy combatants.” Nadler said, since its writing in England in 1215, no one had deigned to flout the Magna Carta — a bedrock of constitutional law — until the current Bush administration. In fact, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
