ANTONIO PAGÁN--FASCIST PIG POLITICIAN FROM
THE LOWER EAST SIDE--IS DEAD
By A. Kronstadt

Antonio Pagán, one of the worst political influences on the political life of the
Lower East Side and one of those most responsible for turning a once vibrant,
inclusive downtown community into a hideous real estate showcase that is now
collapsing from its own sterility, has died. The villainous politician who will
always be remembered as the destroyer of the Tompkins Square Park bandshell
succumbed to the excesses of his empty, greedy life at the age of 50 on January 26,
2009. Being hailed in death as one of the first openly gay people to be elected to
the New York City Council and a fighter for Puerto Rican representation, in the
Lower East Side he his remembered as a loyal advocate for real estate and police
state. In a 1997 Shadow editorial we wrote "...Antonio Pagán was a kind of precursor
to Giuliani--a kind of evil John the Baptist who carried forward the message of Rudy
the Antichrist."

Antonio Pagán was a strange phenomenon in New York City politics. Every city in
America has its poverty pimps who profit from government anti-poverty programs by
wheeling and dealing in government money and government-owned land, and Pagán was
certainly one of those. But he was more that just a calculating corrupt politician,
he was a self-centered drama queen and lunatic uniquely suited for hurting people
and brushing off criticism. Pagán started out in public life in the early '80s by
getting fired from the resident office of the Government of Puerto Rico in New York
City. His superior at the office who dismissed him was Nydia Velazquez, who now
represents the 12th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. An ugly
incident ensued in which Pagán locked himself up in the Puerto Rican government
office in Union Square and refused to leave until he received a phone call from the
Governor of Puerto Rico himself confirming that he had been fired.

It was after this that he got into poverty pimping via homesteading on the Lower
East Side, where unwanted and run-down buildings that had been repossessed from
their landlords for nonpayment of rent were being given away for nominal amounts of
money. Although some of the early homesteaders were bona fide low income people
interested in developing affordable housing, there were another group of people who,
foreseeing the great real estate boom that would take place as the 1980s wore on,
approached the vast stock of abandoned and tax-foreclosed property with
monopolization and profit in mind. Pagán became the director of a group called Lower
East Side Coalition Housing Development (LESCHD), which obtained "site control" from
the city for numerous buildings, some of them empty and some already occupied by
homesteaders and squatters whom Pagán and LESCHD battled to evict and replace with
their cronies. LESCHD would receive the buildings for free from the city, which
would pay his group hundreds of thousands of dollars to gut renovate each one; the
Shadow reported in the beginning of 1995 that LESCHD had already amassed thirteen
properties, and this was before the 13th St. squats and a half-dozen community
gardens were evicted and turned over to LESCHD later that year. Pagán himself
"homesteaded" an apartment at 7 E. 3rd St., between 2nd Ave. and the Bowery, where
he pushed out an elderly Puerto Rican woman whose apartment he had occupied on the
pretext of house sitting, and then took over. He spearheaded a co-op conversion of
the building under the Temporary Interim Lease (TIL) program for homesteaders, and
continued to live the apartment for $75 per month.

Upon entering local politics, Pagán became the protege of Roberto Napoleon, a man
who could be described as the original Lower East Side poverty pimp and a key player
in the power machine surrounding State Assembly Democratic majority leader Sheldon
Silver. Silver, in turn, is even today one of the "three men in a room," the other
two being the governor and the State Senate majority leader, who control New York
State's dysfunctional politics and can nullify the will of the whole state
electorate. This was Pagán's introduction to politics, and Pagán became a member of
Community Board 3 as a loyal member of the Napoleon machine, representing the
interests of the real estate brokers and construction contractors that he and
Napoleon worked with. Community Boards in New York City are essentially powerless,
local pseudo-legislative bodies that give approval and disapproval to proposals for
land use, permits, and some other issues that the city government may then heed or
ignore; Community Board 3 has jurisdiction, for what it is worth, over the area
around Tompkins Square Park.

Genial, smarmy, and smirking, Pagán hypocritically played up Puerto Rican
nationalism when he wanted to attack other people in the homesteading movement or
anyone else that he perceived as enemies, although genuine Puerto Rican activists
like Armando Perez of Charas were Pagán's most determined opponents. At one
Community Board 3 meeting in 1989, Pagán referred to himself and other Puerto Rican
people in the room as "those of us who have Ricky Ricardo accents." Pagán's identity
was with the rich and the powerful, and indeed, when he was running for City
Council, he directed campaign flyers at the gay community in which he gave his name,
without the accent mark, as Anthony Pagan, a gay community leader, and did not
mention his Latino origins at all, while he simultaneously distributed literature in
heavily Hispanic Alphabet city in which his sexual orientation was not discussed.

In the mid-80s, Pagán was a driving force in the creation of a bizarre group of
right-wing community activists with the histrionic acronym Before Another Shelter
Tears Us Apart (BASTA, spelling out a Spanish word meaning "enough," or "stop it").
The ideology of this group centered around the idea that the Lower East Side was
home to too many institutions catering to poor people, and that this was the reason
for blight in the area. In effect, BASTA was a political pole for people who
supported gentrification and were looking for a rationalization that did not sound
quite as selfish and antisocial as their real motivations. One of BASTA's key aims
was to close or scale down the Third Street men's shelter, located across the street
from Pagán's "homestead" and no doubt, at least in Pagán's own mind, limiting his
apartment's resale value.

After the stock market crashed in September of 1987 and the Koch administration fell
into discredit, the Lower East Side became a hotbed of political dissent and radical
politics took center stage. Squatters, many of them in contention with Pagán and his
allies for site control over city-owned and abandoned properties, became a political
force to be reckoned with. Tompkins Square Park became an open-air forum for a new
critique of gentrification and greed. In July of 1988, the right-wing faction on
Community Board 3, with Pagán leading the pack, pushed for a police enforced
midnight curfew on Tompkins Square Park citing alleged "quality of life" issues, and
bullied the rest of CB3 into voting for it. The backlash against this measure, which
was really an inkling of the Giuliani era several years before Giuliani's election
as mayor, was enormous, and the inept efforts of the police to deal with a massive
anti-curfew demonstration at the park on August 6, 1988 caused a full-scale
community uprising with scandalous police brutality and mayhem, forcing the curfew
to be lifted. In the following months and years the L.E.S. became famous worldwide
as a center of political activism and counterculture. Even in respectable circles,
squatting was being suggested as a solution to the massive homelessness that
resulted from the collapse of the Reagan economic boom.

Pagán, Napoleon, Silver, and the whole rest of the clique felt directly threatened,
since the revolt was in a very real sense directed at their little Tammany Hall
style control over local government. The street revolt embarrassed the liberals on
CB3, and they and progressive City Council member Miriam Friedlander were forced to
withdraw their support for the curfew and even give the squatters certain assurances
that they were not attempting to evict them. The right-wingers took a while to
recoup their position and redefine their constituency. Instrumental to their plans
was a redistricting, touted by the government as promoting "racial balance" within
electoral districts, that took place in 1990-1991. This redistricting essentially
eliminated the Lower East Side as a political entity, splitting Lower Manhattan such
that residents of the East Village, which is the politically left-leaning area
around Tompkins Square Park, would no longer elect their City Council member
together with their fellow tenement dwellers of the Lower East Side and Chinatown
further downtown, but would be part of the same electoral unit as the wealthier
areas further uptown, including parts of Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. This
neutralized the ability of people downtown to unite electorally in an effort to
defend affordable housing, and set the stage for real estate interests to get rid
Miriam Friedlander, who was at least a loyal defender of tenants rights, and replace
her with a council member directly beholden to them. The candidate that they had in
mind was none other than Antonio Pagán.

In 1991, Pagán rallied his forces, both the honchos of the Napoleon/Silver political
machine and the "grassroots" ideologues in BASTA, and formed the Democratic Action
Committee with the stated aim of replacing Miriam Friedlander with himself in the
newly gerrymandered council district. One of his key ideologues was Steven Vincent,
a writer who founded a newspaper called the East Villager that took up the call to
restore law and order and property values in the neighborhood. With Vincent as its
propaganda minister and a tightly-knit group of neighborhood right-wingers as
activists, The Democratic Action Committee collected a war chest from real estate
developers and Pagán was elected to the City Council in November of 1991 by 121
votes out of a total of 12,000. Under New York City electoral law this gave him an
initial two-year term on the council. Vincent shared with Pagán not only the fact
that he was a homesteader with ambitions of being a property owner, but a common
interest in sadomasochistic sexual practices; both of them were right-wing power
freaks of a type that one would expect to encounter in 1920s Berlin. Vincent later
became a true believer in Bush's Iraq incursion, reinvented himself as a
superpatriotic war correspondent, and was murdered outside Basra in 2005, apparently
as a result of his attempts to meddle in Shiite politics.

One of the first two openly gay people to be elected to the City Council, Antonio
Pagán was no Harvey Milk. Pagán's election coincided with a major wave of repression
that crushed the Tompkins Square Park rebellion and put in place a "proto-Giuliani"
regime in the Lower East Side intended to drive the counterculture from the streets.
While still a candidate in May of 1991, Pagán appeared on a stage with Silver,
Borough President Andrew Stein, and State Senator Martin Connor and announced the
impending closing of Tompkins Square Park, which was accomplished days later with
the help of 600 police, With the park locked down in 1992, Pagán and the new regime
on Community Board 3 approved the demolition of the Tompkins Square bandshell, the
site of innumerable political events, in an act of pure spite intended to show the
community that it no longer had the power to defend itself. In the Council, Pagán
politicked with right-wing Democrats and became one of the few allies of upstate
Republicans in the council, even voting to repeal New York City's rent regulations,
which protect tenants from arbitrary rent hikes and evictions.

Pagán supported Republican Rudy Giuliani's mayoral run in 1993. After assuming
office, Giuliani wasted no time in evicting the 13th Street squats, employing
hundreds of cops and an NYPD armored tank, and turning site control over to Pagán's
group. The buildings were then renovated by LESCHD's contractors and turned over
temporarily to low-income people with a patronage relationship to Pagán, with a
proviso that they would revert to market rate in six years, with proceeds to be
collected by Pagán and LESCHD. Pagán became one of Giuliani's most active supporters
on the council. Pagán again defeated Miriam Friedlander in 1993, and served a
four-year second term on the City Council.

With Giuliani in office and Pagán as its council representative, the Lower East Side
went through some dark days. Pagán maneuvered in 1997 to have five unique L.E.S.
community gardens turned over to one of his major campaign contributors, developer
Donald Capoccia, to be developed as pricey condominiums which were falsely
classified as "affordable" because the building offered government backed subsidies
to buyers (see "Garden Plot," Shadow #43). These buildings, would be managed by
LESCHD, which Pagán still controlled under a limited partnership even though he was
forced to resign from his position as executive director of LESCHD when he assumed
his council seat. Pagán's group similarly developed the rest of the properties that
it had been holding on to during this time, creating low-rise housing that in fact
housed very few people and did nothing to prevent displacement, and which eventually
reverted to high-rent yuppie accommodations.

In 1997, Pagán left the council and mounted a highly unsuccessful run for Manhattan Borough President. After this electoral failure Giuliani rewarded his loyalty by appointing him Commissioner of Employment. In later years, he fell into obscurity. In spite of the gerrymandering his City Council seat was eventually regained by people who are considered Lower East Side progressives, starting with the 1997 election of Margarita Lopez. But the damage had already been done to the Lower East Side's housing stock, and to our culture. That is the legacy of Antonio Pagán.   

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ANTONIO PAGÁN: 1958-2009
DEATH OF A RIGHT WING POLITICAL PROSTITUTE
By Chris Flash

Antonio Pagán was a slimy opportunistic politician of the worst sort. Pandering to conservative right-wing NIMBY elements, as well currying favor from an acting on behalf of monied interests, Pagán divided the Lower East Side against itself in order to further his miserable short-lived political career as he carved out his own mini-real estate empire.

Using his ethnicity, poverty pimp Antonio Pagán created a phony "low-income" housing group that acquired buildings from the city free of charge and financing from the city and state to be used at Pagán's discretion to rehab those buildings, all under the guise of providing "low-income" housing that was not low-income at all.

Though Antonio Pagán and his cronies claimed that squatters and homesteaders of city-owned buildings (who renovated their buildings at NO cost to taxpayers in order to create truly low and even zero-income housing) were "stealing" housing from the poor, the ownership of the city-owned buildings Pagán snagged reverted to Pagán himself after a token ten years, at which time they were subject to higher rents and able to be sold at the peak of the real estate market.

Among Antonio Pagán's accomplishments during his brief reign of terror: Pagán campaigned against the rights of homeless residents of the men's shelter on East Third Street to register to vote; Pagán declared war on the homeless and on the Lower East Side squatters, having both groups attacked and raided by police; Pagán was a key plotter behind the phony midnight curfew that led to the infamous Tompkins Square Police Riot on August 6, 1988; as the chair of the Land Disposition Committee on the City Council, Pagán oversaw the transfer of city-owned properties to his friends and his corporate cloaks; under the city's TIL program, Pagán forced out several tenants from his apartment building at 7 East Third Street so that he and his allies could double the size of their units and enjoy a city-funded million dollar plus renovation, for which Pagán and his pals paid only $250 per apartment. And there is so much more....

Though Antonio Pagán is largely forgotten and unknown by most Lower East Side residents today, the damage to our neighborhood inflicted by the gentrification and over-development that Pagán facilitated as a hired lackey of real estate interests will continue to be felt here for decades to come.

Under Antonio Pagán, the Lower East Side was stabbed repeatedly in the back. Though scarred and missing vital parts, our neighborhood has survived. Pagán did not live to see the Lower East Side completely transformed into a paradise for the wealthy -- despite Pagán's best efforts, the Lower East Side has outlived him.

Antonio Pagán's death in 2009 is too little too late. If only he had died 20 years earlier, the Lower East Side would be a much better place to live in today!

[We will have an in-depth report on Antonio Pagán in the next issue of the SHADOW (Issue #54) that will be posted on this site]