Idealistic Insider

IT was a lazy spring Saturday in the early 1970s in the mixed Italian/Jewish neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn — the kind of afternoon when many of the locals could be found taking in a ball game at the park or polishing their cars.

Not this day, however. Word had leaked that none other than New York City’s Mayor John Lindsay was coming to these parts, bringing the area’s staunchly conservative Italian-American residents out in force in a spontaneous show of displeasure with Lindsay, their liberal Democratic nemesis. Scores of people gathered outside the apartment building on Avenue P which the mayor had come to visit, as shouts of “Down with Lindsay! Down with Lindsay!” reverberated throughout the surrounding streets.

But why in the first place had Lindsay made the trip — police entourage, blaring sirens and all — from Gracie Mansion to Brooklyn, just a few miles from Bensonhurst but worlds away politically? He was there to hold a meeting of the New York City Board of Education at the home of Dr. Seymour Lachman.

The Board — a five-member body charged with setting policy for the city’s sprawling public school system — usually met either at City Hall or at Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. But this time, Mayor Lindsay had convened a Board meeting for a Saturday, and when Lachman learned of it he explained to the mayor that as an Orthodox Jew he would be unable to attend.