Democratic congressional hopeful Hakeem Jeffries. (Photo by Gray Hamner)

If you were wandering down Fulton Street between Washington Avenue and St. James Place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Clinton Hill starving and with $3.50 to spend, you might stroll into trendy taqueria Cochinita and exchange it for a pork shoulder taco heaping with pickled onions. A couple of doors down, for the same price, Brooklyn Victory Garden would sell you a bagel slathered with “faux gras” (or, walnut lentil pâté—not that you didn’t know). Where you could not spend that small wad of dollars is the vacant storefront of Joloff, a shuttered Senegalese restaurant that, after 17 years in this location, has recently been nudged out and relocated deep in Bed Stuy.

Also nestled in this block of Fulton is the small campaign headquarters for Democratic congressional hopeful Hakeem Jeffries. On a visit last Sunday, The Observer found an array of frantic, fresh-faced college and high school students, typing away on brought-from-home MacBooks, noshing on tacos from the aforementioned Cochinita, and phone banking furiously. It is an odd (or perhaps perfectly fitting) place for an ideological battle to land: in a neighborhood newly defined by hastening gentrification, the race that has emerged is between an old-guard, ultra-left black Brooklyn politician and a young moderate, modern coalition-builder who has fairly painlessly raised $700,000.

That afternoon, the campaign office—staffed by living symbols of the population change—was in a fever pitch. Ten young volunteers circled a table with campaign-issued, pay-as-you-go cell phones, calling voters to politely remind them of today's primary.

The staff had been so busy for the past week that a copious bouquet sat wilting high above the office on a bookshelf, completely forgotten.

The Observer approached Eliza Schultz, an 18-year-old Johns Hopkins student pursuing international studies and public health, who was organizing a massive sandwich order for poll workers volunteering on primary day. As a sophomore in high school, Ms. Schultz had traveled to State College, Pa., for a week and volunteered on the Obama campaign, an experience she described as, “super exciting.” We asked her about the makeup of the regular volunteers in Mr. Jeffries’s office.

“It’s similar [to the Obama campaign volunteers. Most people you see coming in here are a certain age—a lot of us are in college, a lot from high school,” she said, shifting her weight in her wooden Swedish Hasbeens clog-sandals, favored by Sarah Jessica Parker and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

“It’s really amazing how many people were pulled from Uptown Manhattan [to come volunteer]. When I worked on the Obama campaign, we saw that, too. It’s amazing how many people have been pulled from all over the place. So many people come in from Westchester everyday. [Hakeem] has that same pull,” she said.

Indeed, for those whose first political solid food was the Obama run—or even those too young then to participate—the Jeffries run has provided a little bit of that old hope-and-change magic. Young and younger, they have flocked to Fulton Street for the latest hip political campaign to appeal to self-identifying locavores and proud public-radio supporters.

Andre Richardson, field director for the campaign, and Lauren Bierman, the campaign manager, emphasized that the volunteer base is broad and diverse and noted that there has been a unique word of mouth element to the high number of young volunteers.

“A lot of college students are here because they want to be involved ... Recruitment has come from word of mouth, and a lot of them bring their friends along,” Mr. Richardson said.

Ms. Bierman agreed, “If they hear about us, they bring their friends.”

Among the volunteers were several graduates or attendees from top-tier schools—Columbia, Brown, Yale and three of the campaign volunteers went to the tony St. Ann’s school in Brooklyn Heights together.

In a corner of the office, 19-year-old Emma Janger moved from task to task in her blue sundress with precision and assertiveness, dispensing instructions on how to purchase more cell phones for today's intense phone banking and juggling other tasks as we chatted. She’s involved with the College Democrats at Yale, where she will be a sophomore in the fall, and is currently living with her parents in Brooklyn Heights.
After she graduates, Ms. Janger says she wants to pursue politics, though she’s not sure in what capacity yet—all she knows is she’s going to buck the trend of her Boomerang Generation. “I love Brooklyn, there’s no reason not to be here—anything I want to do I can do it here ... It’s a debate with my parents right now. I do want to return, but I refuse to move home.” (She’s got a bit of Girls’s Hannah Horvath in her.)

A truly seasoned campaign volunteer, Tiffany Bryant, had set up shop in the back of the office, where we spoke. Ms. Bryant, since she graduated with a degree in political science from Columbia in 2008, has held a series of research and policy jobs. The Obama campaign was her first, and she made a point to do her volunteering in a swing state.

“Senior year of college, I [volunteered for Obama] in Pennsylvania and Ohio and then spent the summer and election in Florida, in Broward County. After 2000, I said, I have to be in Florida for 2008,” she said. “It was very exciting to be in a swing state for the election.”

Brendan Flynn, a Gowanus resident with side-swept bangs, is studying political science at the CUNY Graduate Center and working on his dissertation (the subject: “agriculture policy, sort of?”) and leading a fantasy basketball league (the most hipster of all fantasy sports endeavors), when he’s not spending eight-hour days at the Jeffries office coordinating volunteers. Mr. Flynn told us he too worked on the Obama campaign, canvassing in Philadelphia on election day.

It is not just these young people who note the similarities to Mr. Obama’s run. The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News and The Washington Post, to name just a few outlets, have also drawn comparisons. Perhaps the connective tissue is reductive (one Jeffries volunteer winced when we suggested the comparison, noting that these comparisons are only made for politicians of color or female politicians), but bear with us: both attended and excelled at law school (Obama at Harvard, Jeffries at NYU), did time as associates at white-shoe law firms, ultimately left the lucrative private sector for the public one to work on issues of importance in ultra-local politics, and both are family men with two young children. And though he and his handlers downplay this comparison, Mr. Jeffries accepted the president’s tacit support, posing for a photo-op with the him at the Waldorf, and conceded to The Washington Post (in an article headlined: “Hakeem Jeffries: Brooklyn’s Barack Obama?”) that, yes, he and Mr. Obama share a birthday.

In the run up to the 2008 election, Steve Hildebrand, deputy national campaign director of Obama’s first run, told the Boston Globe that not only did the campaign see young people being galvanized to vote (66 percent of voters under 30 would end up casting their ballots for Obama), but unprecedented numbers of people volunteered. “Millions of Americans who haven’t been involved in a political campaign ever in their lifetimes [became] very active,” he said, estimating that it was the first time for 70 percent of their two million grassroots volunteers.

Jumping into such a campaign, especially one with eventual national ramifications and featuring a star candidate, no doubt also contributed to the constellation of helpers in the room.

This is volunteer Steve Kung’s first campaign, and he came looking for that excitement. The 22-year-old, who graduated in May from Brown with a degree in history, is still looking for a job.
What kind, we wondered?

“I’m not exactly sure. I’m casting my net pretty wide because of the economy, but I’m willing to lend my hand to this” in the meantime, he said. Asked why he chose this campaign, Mr. Kung said it had a reputation. “Apparently it’s supposed to be really intense and heated, one of the most intense primary races in New York City,” he said.

Chloe Shanklin, 19, another first-time campaigner, sported hot pink shorts as she worked on a laptop, tapping her white boat shoes anxiously as we spoke. (She had things to do.) On the advice from a professor, she joined up. “I thought I’d try something new and ended up loving it and sticking with it,” she said.

Ms. Shanklin is taking a semester off from Hamilton, but the experience has shaped her interests. “Last semester I thought biology, now I’m thinking something on the politics end. It’s changed my viewpoint. Being involved is great and it’s something I want to keep doing,” she said.

Exactly zero of the above young supporters live in Mr. Jeffries’s district—but given the prevailing trends, they might just end up there soon.

There is a very real demographic creep happening in the district, and it’s not just anecdotal. A recent article by education analyst Michael J. Petrilli named 11238, the zip code in which the Jeffries HQ is squarely located, one of the fasting gentrifying neighborhoods in the country, with a “change in white share” of 21.5 percent between 2000 and 2010.

Nevertheless the 8th district remains hugely diverse, with mostly white neighborhoods in north and south Brooklyn (Coney Island, Brighton Beach and the gentrification centers Ft. Greene, Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights) and a middle containing Bed Stuy and East New York—primarily black neighborhoods thought to be strongholds for his opponent Charles Barron. (The district is 53 percent black.)

It’s been a weird journey, this campaign. After the long-term congressman for the district, Ed Towns, unexpectedly dropped out of the race, it was suddenly wide open. An endorsement war followed (Mr. Towns, the powerful DC37 municipal union and former klansman David Duke endorsing Mr. Barron; Sen. Chuck Schumer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and most every other union or politician who matters endorsing Mr. Jeffries), and despite Mr. Jeffries’s legislative accomplishments, star power and 10-times-greater fundraising cache, some began to worry that Mr. Barron was “surging,” as The New York Times put it.

The Jeffries campaign has publicly denied being worried, though the candidate did note in an interview that Mr. Barron had “morphed into an establishment candidate.”

Many agree today's primary election will hinge on voter turnout, which could well depend on Mr. Jeffries’s small army of young supporters.

A fact they no doubt had in mind Monday evening as they handed flyers to commuters disembarking the C train at the Clinton-Washington stop—many new residents in the neighborhood themselves.

lgriffin@observer.com

Mr. Barron currently is a member of the City Council, where his despicable rhetoric, we are happy to note, has had no visible impact on public policy and civic life. Yes, he embarrassed the city a decade ago when he escorted Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, a serial violator of human rights, into the Council chambers and proclaimed him to be a “bold African man willing to stand up to the world for his people.” But that episode did no permanent damage to the city’s reputation—indeed, it gave New Yorkers a wonderful opportunity to show their contempt for Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Barron, on the other hand, was exposed as a vicious hatemonger.

Mr. Barron’s time in the Council is drawing to a close, thanks to term limits. But he may not be done. Mr. Barron is running for Congress in the Brooklyn district currently represented by Edolphus Towns, who is retiring. With less than a week before the Democratic primary, Mr. Barron is thought to be in a close battle with Hakeem S. Jeffries, who is seeking promotion from the state Assembly.

To their ever-lasting disgrace, Mr. Towns and the city’s largest public-employee union, District Council 37, have endorsed Mr. Barron. That’s why many observers fear that Mr. Barron might well capture the nomination, which is tantamount to victory in heavily Democratic Brooklyn, next Tuesday.

One person could stand in the way of Mr. Barron’s ambitions. President Obama can and should intervene on behalf of Mr. Jeffries. The president doesn’t have to say a word about Mr. Barron, a fellow Democrat, although it would be nice if he called out the councilman for his horrendous rhetoric. A presidential endorsement of Mr. Jeffries certainly would be a blow for the haters, racial arsonists, and refugees from the 1960s who support Mr. Barron’s candidacy.

The district’s registered Democrats will, of course, have the final say. But the party’s leaders at the local and the federal level ought to make it clear that Mr. Barron will be a pariah if he is dispatched to Washington—if a portion of the district’s voters are looking to send some kind of message to the establishment, well, they’ve rallied behind a flawed messenger.

If Mr. Barron wins, he will have a national forum for his hate-filled rants. To be sure, he will be incapable of turning his views into legislation, but still—he will have greater access to the media and a bigger audience for his insulting rhetoric. And here’s the worst part: He’ll be identified as a Democrat from New York.

Is that what Democrats want? Is that what New York deserves?

Those are questions Mr. Obama should ponder in the next few days.

BY MONDAY NIGHT, the 10th day of the Occupy Wall Street protest, the miniature colony at Liberty Park Plaza was rather sophisticated. The “media tent,” which on Saturday had consisted of a MacBook and an umbrella, now looked like an amateur version of the CNN newsroom. Protesters crushed around a central table, tweeting, emailing and editing video, surrounded by a barricade of tables holding more computers, with the cracks in between filled in by sleeping bags, blankets and backpacks. One revolutionary with a hard face sat straight-backed, a cigarette poking sideways out of his mouth while he typed away. The computers and lights were powered by a generator, which briefly died when someone misplaced the gas can. The media center, as the always-lit hub of information and electricity, is the cornerstone of the encampment. Entry is restricted.

Next door is the kitchen, two rows of marble benches laden with pizza, fruit, dry noodles, bean salad and hot vegetarian chili with bread. Saturday’s dinner was self-serve; this time, a gentleman in a New York Film Academy T-shirt handed over The Observer’s brownie in a napkin. Next to the kitchen lies a field of protest signs—former pizza boxes—within easy reach. The rest of the park is residential, filled with sleeping bags, tarps, air mattresses and ordinary mattresses; a bench stacked with folded blankets for common use; and a living room complete with carpeting, chairs and a futon frame, which we observed being occupied by a family with three small children, and later by a pair of men bedding down in opposite directions. The east end of the park usually hosts the drum circle. The bathroom is located around the corner at McDonald’s, whose employees have been surprisingly accommodating, allowing protesters to come, go, use the electrical outlets and linger unmolested. The Burger King on the western border of the park, however, has reportedly told protesters they’re banned from making purchases.

The Observer arrived at Occupy Wall Street after chasing Monday evening’s march through the narrow streets of the financial district, following the group on Twitter and scrambling to catch up. The New York Stock Exchange—dead, but lined with cops. Bowling Green—quiet, no police presence. At Bridge Street, we noticed a helicopter above the skyscrapers. Heading up Broadway, we caught up with the motley but spirited crew of protesters bobbing their signs to the beat, and fell in between a pair of middle-aged moms and a boy with green-tipped hair in a ripped white T-shirt. Some people beat pizza boxes with empty water bottles. We spotted a sign: “Unfuck the world!”

As we rolled our eyes, we saw another: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Comparing the collection of apparent Burning Man refugees who have been demonstrating in Liberty Park Plaza over the past 10 days to the anti-colonial effort led by Mahatma Gandhi would be charitable. Even so, the Occupy Wall Streeters probably fit somewhere between Gandhi’s steps two and three. In the first week, media coverage was negligible. Then over the weekend, The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante weighed in with a piece that the demonstrators found condescending, in which she called the protest “a diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty by-products of wayward capitalism not easily extinguishable by street theater” and gave the final word to a floor trader who dismissed the movement because some protesters were using MacBooks.

Then on Saturday, a senior officer of the N.Y.P.D. was captured on camera spritzing pepper spray into the faces of two women. The video, along with reports of more than 80 protester arrests, gave the protest some legitimacy in the eyes of the media. While not especially impressed by the protest itself, The Atlantic’s James Fallows posted the video under an unusually sharp headline: “An Important Video to Watch: Pepper Spray by a Cruel and Cowardly NYC Cop.” Mr. Fallows explained his extreme reaction to The Observer in an email: “I am sure one reason is because I’ve spent much of the past five years in China,” he wrote. “I looked at that video and thought, how would I feel if I saw the Chinese cops doing that? Also, I have been on a slow boil about the security-state excesses of the past 10 years.”

Mr. Fallows is in exalted company. “Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street—financial institutions generally—has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world),” Noam Chomsky wrote in a letter to organizers Sunday. “The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.” The rapper and 9/11 Truther Lupe Fiasco attended, sent a poem and has been tweeting vigorously for the cause; Brooklyn City Councilman Charles Barron spoke at the protest Tuesday morning. Michael Moore, who paid a surprise visit to the park Monday night, took a harder line: “Tax them! They are thieves! They are gangsters! They are kleptomaniacs!”

It was too bad Mr. Moore was not present for the march earlier; he would have enjoyed the dozens of cameras as well as the spectacle of protesters dancing down cobblestone streets. “Banks! Got! Bailed out! We! Got! Sold out!”

Across the street, about ten tight-shirted men stared from behind the window of a clothing store, frozen, so that at first The Observer thought they were mannequins.

“Hey, do you guys want to help me do a chant?” Green Hair asked the marchers around him. “You just say, ‘Occupy Wall Street,’’ okay?” He cupped his hands around his mouth and hoarsely yelled, “ALL DAY! ALL WEEK!”

The Observer felt ridiculous, but we didn’t want to be a square. “Occ-u-py-Wall-Street!”

The idea of occupying Wall Street originated with an email blast by the lefty magazine Adbusters, best known for not accepting advertising. Adbusters is based in Vancouver but two-thirds of its readership is in the U.S., and in July senior editor Micah White and writers called for a 20,000-strong extended occupation on Wall Street, with the hope that Americans, complacent in the throes of a going-on-five-year recession, might adopt some of the outrage and effectiveness of the Arab Spring.

“We’ve been kind of watching the Egyptian uprising and the Spanish uprisings and wondering, why aren’t Americans also rising up against the financial fraudsters that are ruining people’s lives,” said Mr. White, who lives in Berkeley and has not ventured to New York for the proceedings. “I think we wanted to catalyze a people’s democratic spring in America.”

The email went out to Adbusters’ 90,000 subscribers.

“The basic model is to combine the Egyptian Tahrir uprising with the Spanish acampadas,” Mr. White said, referring to a string of extreme sit-ins across Spain in May and June. “You hold a symbolic space and you hold people’s assemblies.”

Of course, the protesters aren’t technically holding a space on Wall Street. Liberty Park Plaza, also known as Zuccotti Park, is two blocks away from Wall Street, where police regularly patrol the barricaded area around the New York Stock Exchange, a security measure implemented after Sept. 11.

“Adbusters put out the call, but they had no idea what they were talking about,” said Guy Steward, an 18-year-old unemployed New Yorker in thick glasses and a blue bandana. He read about the local effort on Tumblr and has been involved since the first day. “They’re a bunch of Canadians. They were like, ‘Go set up tents on Wall Street!’ You can’t set up tents on Wall Street. You’ll get shot.”

The grassroots New York City General Assembly, a scattered but competent body of activists, sprang up Aug. 2 and starting hammering out logistics through a series of hyper-democratic meetings in which everyone is given a chance to speak, every proposal is voted on, nothing happens without consensus (reached when there is no outright opposition to a proposal), and individuals are not bound by the group’s decision. The process is painstaking, but it worked—the group picked a place and the memo spread via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and word of mouth.

The protesters now hold General Assemblies twice a day. There are three key components to the meetings: the “human microphone,” in which the people closest to the speaker repeat his or her words in unison for the rest of the crowd; the “stack taker,” who manages the list of people who want to speak; and a set of hand signals that include “spirit fingers” to indicate assent and arms crossed in an X to indicate a question or objection.

On Monday after the march and pep talk by Mr. Moore, the crowd was feeling especially empowered and optimistic. “Mic check!” yelled a blond woman in a black tank top and yoga pants. “MIC CHECK!” the audience bellowed back. Lately, most of the business at the General Assembly has involved proposals for the formation of new committees. On Monday night, various protesters suggested an animal rights committee, a translation committee, a committee for “matching volunteers with tasks” and a diversity committee (most of the protesters are young, white English speakers). The “vision and demands” committee was slated to speak Monday night, but could not finish its highly anticipated proposal in time. “I must say—” one audience member said.

“I MUST SAY,” the crowd repeated.

“I am disappointed—”

“I AM DISAPPOINTED!”

“That we still do not have—”

“THAT STILL WE DO NOT HAVE!”

“A list of demands.”

“A LIST OF DEMANDS!”

Sure, there is an abundance of inarticulate hippie-types on hand, ever ready to assume the modified lotus and ostentatiously meditate. And yes, The Observer was forced to relocate to McDonald’s to write because three young men on the plaza wouldn’t stop crowing about how they were tripping on acid. But some protesters have managed to tow a more compelling line.

On Aug. 23, an activist—actually a reporter, who asked to remain anonymous because he was concerned about running afoul of his editor­—launched wearethe99percent.tumblr.com, which contains some of the stronger arguments for the Occupy Wall Street movement. “It’s time the 1 percent got to know us a little better,” the site says, referring to the nation’s richest percentile. Readers submitted pictures of themselves holding up signs. “I’m an unemployed college grad living with my parents,” read one. “Working 67 hours a week but can’t afford to buy school supplies for my daughters,” said another. “I’m 18, a college freshman. My dad has been unemployed for over two years and nobody is hiring. I haven’t been to the doctor’s since I was 14.” Most of the people pictured are 23 or younger. Student debt, health care and persistent unemployment are recurring themes.

The kitchen started serving coffee, juice and fruit at 6 a.m. as dawn broke over the plaza. Earlier, Mr. Steward had remarked that some pictures “made it look like a hobo camp,” which was exactly how the scene must have appeared to the business-attired professionals who were starting to appear on the sidewalk. At the west entrance to the plaza, a protester was sleeping in a chair with his mouth half-open, knees splayed apart, his head completely lolled to the right. Next to him was the orange poster bearing the day’s official agenda.

Correction: This story originally referred to Micah White as editor-in-chief of Adbusters; he is a senior editor. The Observer regrets the error.

(Illustration: Joel Kimmel)

In the marbled halls of a converted lobby in the Trump Building on Wall Street last week, a party was underway. Rihanna was blasting from turntables manned by D.J. Clue. A line of office workers waited for autographed photographs from baseball once-was Darryl Strawberry. Caterers in bow ties circulated trays of chicken skewers and stuffed peppers.

It almost could have been a nightclub, except that it was 11 a.m. and, in a corner, a woman presided over a table of free antifungal toenail spray samples. Despite the professional athlete and the music, this was a Duane Reade, the opening of the drug store chain’s new flagship store.

This store takes Duane Reade to previously unnecessary consumer heights: a search for contact lens solution took us past rows of gourmet chocolates and jars of chicken jalfrezi sauce, past the store’s “Look Boutique” with its shelves of antiwrinkle cream and touchscreen digital displays offering makeup consultation. Along with the refrigerated units filled with Chimay and sushi, and the station offering manicures, a hair salon offered blowouts nearby an entire room filled with perfumes. The pharmacy counter was in the corner in the back, an afterthought.

We ate a stuffed pepper from a tray, found and paid for our contact lens solution, and held out our hand out for free antifungal toenail spray and barbecue potato chips by Delish, Duane Reade’s in-house brand. Walking out the door, we were stopped one more time.

“Did you get your free gift?” asked a smiling woman. We shook our head no and dutifully put out our hand once again. “One hundred percent cotton panty liners,” she enthused. “You go, girl!”

Another day, another new Duane Reade.

Of late, the prospect of a single Walmart’s breaching New York City limits has sent local politicians into paroxysms of rage (at least those who have not received hefty donations from the company for pet projects). When the subject of Duane Reade is brought up, however, most local pols shrug. The similarities abound: ubiquity, megacorporate ownership, aggressive expansion and the drive to quash competition. Is there a difference?

Duane Reade is an inevitable retail experience for New Yorkers; a place to fill a birth control prescription when drunk at 3 a.m. on the Upper West Side or buy milk on a Sunday morning in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Universally experienced, it is less universally loved. To wit, the “I Hate Duane Reade” and “I’m Boycotting Duane Reade to Save Williamsburg” Facebook pages.

Mentioning the store at a party instantly provokes complaints about high prices (even candy has a mark-up over other stores), inattentive staff and locations with shelves half-stocked with none of the brands one wants. But despite the downsides, Duane Reade is inescapable. It is the largest drugstore chain in the city, with almost 60 more stores than Rite Aid and 138 more stores than CVS. Particularly in Manhattan, its logo is rarely absent from one’s peripheral vision.

The chain’s signs proclaim it to be “Uniquely New York since 1960.” True enough, but in the eyes of many New Yorkers, its proliferation symbolizes how New York has failed to maintain its uniqueness. And the beer bar installed when a new store opened in Williamsburg across the street from two independent pharmacies felt like an attempt to buy off the locals with a veneer of localism.

From 37 stores in 1992, Duane Reade has expanded to 257 today, and a company spokesperson confirmed that more stores will follow. It has been taken over by a private equity firm, gone public and then gone private again. Its former CEO, Anthony Cuti, and its former CFO, William Tennant, were convicted of falsely inflating the company’s financial performance. By 2006, its bond rating had been downgraded to “very weak.” With its heavy debt and tarnished reputation, Duane Reade might have been a victim of its own rapid expansion.

Then, in early 2010, Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens saw an easy way to capture a market where it previously had little penetration and gobbled up Duane Reade for $618 million in cash and $457 million in assumed debt. The “uniquely New York” chain is now part of the nation’s largest drugstore business, one whose fiscal year sales were $67 billion and that has 244,000 nonunion employees.

In its investor-relations materials, Walgreens boasts that 75 percent of Americans live within five miles of one of its stores. In New York City, it feels like at least 75 percent of us live within a block or two of a Duane Reade.

With a Duane Reade on every block, and with its diversification beyond mere pharmacy and into the realm of the bodega and small grocery, a few questions start to nag: the first, why is everybody so worried about Walmart? The second, is there another retail villain closer at hand? And, more important, will the Duane Reade-ization of New York City continue indefinitely?

The day after the boisterous opening of Duane Reade’s Wall Street megashopping emporium, a rally was taking place a few blocks away from the new store. New York state assemblywoman Inez Barron and union leader Rich Whalen stood outside the New York State comptroller’s office on Maiden Lane to announce their request for an audit of a controversial land deal: the purchase by the Related Group of what is the rumored future site of a Walmart in East New York. Protesters wearing “Wal-Mart Sucks” buttons mingled with union members and representatives of the Living Wage NYC campaign.

The difference, said City Councilman Charles Barron of East New York after the rally, is that when Duane Reade moves into a neighborhood, it’s “not going to create any competition, it’s not going to create any loss of jobs. It’s not big enough. It’s not powerful enough; they don’t have it like that.” It’s also not cheap enough.

Walmart, he went on to say, deals with sweat shops, hires only part-time workers and pays between $7.53 and $8.53 an hour. It also does not use local distributors. “Walmart is a rotating plantation looking for slaves to pay some low wages and continue to exploit communities to maximize its profits,” said Mr. Barron.

In many ways, Duane Reade is not comparable to Walmart. You can’t buy a BMX bike at Duane Reade, or a deck umbrella, or the latest Nora Roberts novel. Unlike Walmart, Duane Reade did not globalize retail. And aside from a short time seven years ago—when the now-convicted felon Anthony Cuti was running Duane Reade and tried to break the union—even labor has been on Duane Reade’s side.

“Duane Reade and Local 338 have a great working relationship; we’re prospering,” said Jack Caffey Jr., a union director. “Walmart is in its own league—they don’t respect their workers, they discriminate, they don’t pay their workers properly; but Duane Reade, they’re the definition of a company working with labor in place.”

The union got an employee, Juliette Richardson, who has worked at Duane Reade for 22 years, on the phone. “During the struggle when the former CEO Cuti did not want to renew our contract, that was a struggle,” she said. But once their contract was renegotiated, well, she said, “there has been a lot of improvements.” Walgreens does not have unionized employees, but the local New York union thinks that as long as Duane Reade remains a somewhat independent entity, its contract will be renewed when negotiations begin next year.

Duane Reade was started in 1960 by Abraham, Eli and Jack Cohen. The name came from the two streets in lower Manhattan that bordered its first warehouse, now represented as an intersection in publicity materials (“Yes, we know they don’t intersect … it makes for a better picture!” says a parenthetical qualifier on the company website). In 1992, the family sold the company for a reported $230 million, in a highly leveraged buyout to Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. According to an article in the New York Post, the chain had 37 stores at the time.

In 1996, Bain hired Cuti, the former president of Pathmark, shortly before it sold Duane Reade, reportedly for $350 million, to another buyout firm, DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, which took the company public in 1998. With the profits from the I.P.O., Mr. Cuti took over other New York City drug store chains—Love’s, Rock Bottom, Value Drug—and passed the hundred store mark.

In 2000, according to federal prosecutors, he started cooking the books, making the company more attractive to buyers and misrepresenting company finances when it went private again, purchased by Oak Hill Capital Partners for $750 million in 2004. Oak Hill fired Mr. Cuti a year later and redesigned the company logo, changing its color scheme from blue and red to lilac and black. It also set about remodeling stores, widening aisles, improving the lighting and adding levity to the once-oppressive Duane Reade atmosphere. The effect was to make the store feel more like drug stores in the suburbs.

Under Walgreens’s watch, Duane Reade has continued both its expansion and its remodeling. The store that opened on Wall Street is exemplary of the company’s new look, and its forays into luxury brands echo the layout of stores like Sephora and, strangely, New York’s independent drug stores, which set themselves apart by stocking posh cosmetics, soaps from Europe, specialty toothbrushes and other high-end items.

“The way insurance works these days it’s almost impossible to stay in business as an independent pharmacy,” said Ian Ginsberg, who owns C.O. Bigelow, a pharmacy that has been in Greenwich Village for 173 years and in Mr. Ginsberg’s family since the 1930s. He said that pharmacies all over New York City have had to increase their retail offerings to survive. But, he added, “the chains feel the same pain, which is why they’re in the food business. You look at the assortment there—frozen food, packaged food, dog foods—they can’t survive just being a pharmacist either.”

He said the chains have been around since he entered the business in the 1980s—there’s a Duane Reade down the street, he added (there’s always a Duane Reade down the street)—and that he does not worry about it too much. “Chains, no matter whether its Walmart or Duane Reade, they’re in the empty-box business,” he said. “I don’t think the experience matches the advertising.”

And independent pharmacies are not just the legacy of an older Manhattan. Chris Tsioros, an owner of Bridge Apothecary in Dumbo, opened his store four years ago. “I’ve always worked for an independent. I’ve never worked for a chain because there’s no service,” he said. “Nobody gives a damn when you go into a chain.”

Nevertheless, the chains dominate, and will likely continue to do so. Just last week, Crain’s New York Business pointed out an ingenious way that Walmart could infiltrate the New York market: buy Rite Aid.

ewitt@observer.com

2012: How to use Obama's new site. [Youtube]

Birther Responsibility: The media. [Brian Stelter]

Trump Reaction: "And that show is merely a showcase for the dishonor you have brought among anyone who would call themselves an American." [Baratunde Thurston]

Trump: "Aspiring to be the new Joe McCarthy...Trump has no evidence." [Bob Woodward]

Trump: Contradictory explanations about getting out of military service. [Ben Smith]

Trump: "The issue has clearly propelled his potential candidacy." [Roger Stone]

Trump: "Clinton was made into a racist by Obama" and "There is nobody who's less of a racist than me," he tells a NH journo. [John Distaso]

Trump: Maggie Haberman says GOP insiders in NH not won over. [Fred Dicker]

Headline: "Trump to Back Journalist: I Know You're A Big Obama Fan." [Think Progress]

Birth Certificate: Obama losing the "passion deficit" to Trump, says a local Fox host. [Dick Brennan]

Handcuffing Students: The Barrons oppose it. [Annmarie Hordern]

Tumblr: How to, for news organizations. [Sarah Marshall]

Hundreds of parishioners had gathered in the basement of the 96-year-old Brown Memorial Church in Clinton Hill for Pastor Appreciation Night. But before they could settle in for a dinner of green salad, fruit cup, turkey with stuffing and grilled tilapia, they had to sit through a keynote address-and more of the emcee.

"We know this man is talented," he went on. "And we know he is going to do even bigger and better things, but we also know how much he has sacrificed. ... The one, the only, the Honorable Hakeem Jeffries!"

The parishioners and many far beyond central Brooklyn have been expecting bigger and better things from Hakeem Jeffries since before he was even a candidate for the Assembly. His funky first name, his appeal to both black churchgoers and earnest reform types and his academic pedigree-graduate degree from Georgetown University, law degree from N.Y.U.-have earned him the label "Brooklyn's Barack."

"He's got charisma, he's personable, he's bright, he's good-looking, he's got a great family," said a local lawmaker who has served alongside him. "I think if most of his colleagues were being honest, they would tell you that they wouldn't mind being him. It's a good thing he's a nice guy, because it overlooks the fact that people are jealous as hell of him."

Mr. Jeffries, 40, has been floated for various offices up and down the ballot, from dark horse mayoral contender in 2013 to attorney general. But what has political circles buzzing is his long-talked-about run for Congress, perhaps as soon as next year, setting up an epic battle against the 28-year incumbent, Ed Towns.

When asked about a run, he refused to rule out the possibility. "I certainly don't envision being in the Assembly for the balance of my career."

At Brown Memorial, Mr. Jeffries, who grew up in Crown Heights, stepped into preacher mode, dropping his "er's," swapping out "isn't" for "ain't," punctuating his speech with "Can I talk?"

It was a different man than the one who, in interviews, speaks in deliberate and thoughtful paragraphs; who after law school went to work at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss; and who eschewed becoming a partner in order to run for the Assembly in 2000 against Roger Green, a two-decade incumbent and a favorite of the Brooklyn Democratic machine.

"It was just at that moment I believed Roger Green had lost some steam," he said. "I believe people should have choices, and I decided to present myself as another choice."

Mr. Jeffries was just 29 but gave Mr. Green a scare.

It took another two years to go from obscure Brooklyn political striver to something of a national face for good government. Then, as Mr. Jeffries was laying the groundwork for another campaign, Mr. Green redrew the home that Mr. Jeffries shared with his wife and two young sons out of the 57th Assembly District entirely.

"Brooklyn politics can be pretty rough," Mr. Jeffries said in a 2010 documentary about the ways in which politicians manipulate redistricting. "But that move was gangster."

In an interview in the pastor's office at Brown Memorial, Mr. Jeffries was looking typically bespoke-pinstripes and purple tie, with a matching purple pocket square.

He said that losing to Mr. Green and then having his house deleted from the district set him on his political path.

"When I was cut out, I made the absolute determination that I would challenge Roger Green again because of the principle involved," he said.

The next year, he had a chance to gain his first foothold in electoral politics when City Councilman James Davis was assassinated at City Hall. Labor groups wanted Mr. Jeffries to replace him, but Davis' younger brother, Geoffrey, wanted to keep the seat in the family. Mr. Jeffries tried to talk Mr. Davis out of running a few days after the shooting, knowing that even if he didn't run, whoever did would win. Mr. Davis insisted on carrying on his brother's legacy, and Mr. Jeffries stepped aside. Mr. Davis went on to get swamped by Letitia James, a staffer to Roger Green and now one of the strongest contenders for the central Brooklyn Congressional seat that Mr. Jeffries covets.

The funny thing about that seat however, is that it is not exactly available. Even though Mr. Towns has become an increasingly scarce presence in the district and was recently removed from his post as the ranking member of his House committee, he has given no indication that he intends to retire.

Mr. Jeffries has been a shrewd political operator-his detractors see him as overly calculating-since he finally won the Assembly seat, in 2006. He is a favorite of Brooklyn political boss Vito Lopez, but he is also close to a group of reformers who want to oust Mr. Lopez. He has come down in the middle of the heated fight over Atlantic Yards. His district includes some of the most rapidly gentrifying parts of Brooklyn, including Fort Green, Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill, but he has made a name for himself racking up legislative victories on issues that may matter more to the desperately poor precincts that surround those neighborhoods, including the outlawing of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk database.

If he takes on Mr. Towns in '12, he could have a clear shot at the longtime congressman. If he waits, he could see a Congressional district redrawn to better suit his political base, but he could face the prospect of running in a crowded primary that would feature not only Ms. James, but also Councilman Charles Barron.

Mr. Barron, a fiery former Black Panther who has taken to heckling Andrew Cuomo at his public events, is something of the anti-Jeffries.

"Why would I comment on Hakeem Jeffries?" Mr. Barron asked The Observer. "You only want to profile him because he is more acceptable to the establishment. He makes y'all more comfortable than I do."

As 2012 inches closer, Mr. Jeffries is keeping up a frenetic pace. In the past week alone, he went to four church services, including the one at Brown Memorial; two panels on redistricting reform; a funeral for a constituent; a 50th birthday party for another; and a handful of Black History Month celebrations. Seemingly everywhere there is a line of people waiting to speak to him, from the reporters at obscure foreign-language newspapers who want his opinion on Cathie Black (he is leading a lawsuit to have her waiver revoked); to the teacher's union rep who interrupts an interview on school closures to say, "Hey, pretty eyes"; to the earnest and bespectacled young men who want advice on how to start their own political career.

At Brown Memorial, Mr. Jeffries hit all the right notes. He quoted Martin Luther King. He talked about how black politicians like Barack Obama, David Paterson and Charlie Rangel are constantly under attack. He talked about the African impala, an animal he said had a phenomenal ability to leap and run but could be constrained inside a 3-foot-high fence because it won't jump over something if it doesn't see where it will land; he just as easily could have been talking about himself and his future-and that of central Brooklyn.

"I think there are a lot of folks out in the community who understand that change must happen but because they can't see clearly the outcome, they prefer just to stand in place," he said. "It's fairly obvious that if you take this leap forward, you won't be disappointed in where you land."

dfreedlander@observer.com

CHARLES BARRON

The Council

of

The City of New York

COUNCIL MEMBER, 42nd DISTRICT

718 PENNSYLVANIA AVE * BROOKLYN NY 11207 * 718-649-9495

________________________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 1, 2011

Open Letter to Public Advocate Bill De Blasio

I am writing to express my outrage over your blatant act of disrespect, extreme opportunism and profound unprincipled behavior regarding your "Johnny-come-lately" announcement to the parents, teachers and children of P.S. 114 informing them that their school will not be closed. We already had the good news and did not need your help delivering it to the stakeholders.

Mr. Public Advocate you did not do the work to get P.S.114, a school in my district off the closure list. This protracted struggle was successfully waged by the parents, teachers, my office represented by our education liaison Lamont Carolina, Councilman Lou Fiddler, Senator John Sampson, Assemblyman Alan Maisel, and many others. Mr. Public Advocate you were nowhere to be found when my community was struggling to avert the closure of P.S. 114; yet you are quick to claim credit.

While I understand that you have aspirations to become mayor, this is not the way to go about fulfilling your ambitions. Mr. Advocate, for you to receive the news that P.S. 114 would be taken off of the closure list, from your contacts at the DOE, then for you to relay that information, like some sort of knight in shining armor coming to the rescue is opportunistic; especially without the consent of the many stakeholders who fought long and hard to remove P.S.114 from the closure list.

Fortunately the parents, teachers, and students of P.S.114 know the 'real deal'. Shame on you Mr. Advocate, our children deserve a better role model.

Yours in struggle,

Council Member Charles Barron

42nd Council District

"Mayor Bloomberg, they say insanity is when you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. We've been this way before. Joel Klein was unqualified," Barron said.

Barron was joined by his wife, Assemblywoman Inez Barron, and a few dozen other supporters of Barron's Freedom Party, the third party that he founded this year to involve more blacks and Latinos in the democratic process.

Barron said the business-minded move was typical of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"The problem with Bloomberg: he's a businessman," Barron said. "He sees education as a product and he sees it as a business and our parents are his customers. So he has this business mentality, so he went and got a business woman to partner with him."

Both Barrons said that one of the primary problems with the selection of Black is that she lacks experience as either a teacher or an administrator.

"We can no longer have a person who does not have a clue about what they would they see should they walk into a class room to be able to evaluate the classroom, the children's functioning, and the  teacher," Inez Barron said. "We are no longer going to allow that type of person to head the system that effects our children."

Tuesday's announcement that Klein will be stepping down and replaced by Black has been met with skepticism and surprise by a number of elected officials. The mayor's office has refused to comment on who was a member of Bloomberg's search committee, and Klein was reportedly only told of the mayor's selection shortly before the announcement was made.

Councilmember Barron said that the decision can be reversed and hopes that the search expands to include more qualified candidates.

"He should rescind his decision and immediately open up a national search to find a qualified person, and to touch base, connect with, involve some of the educators in the African American and Latino community... who know how to educate our children, have a proven track record of it. Open up our search and do it right, Mayor, do it right. That's all were asking for is a just process."

While Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino are keeping up a maddening pace criss-crossing the state, the five "other" candidates for governor are mostly taking it easy today and tomorrow.

Warren Redlich, Libertarian Party: No campaign events. “Our campaign has been heavily focused on the internet and we will continue working there,” Redlich said via email.

Charles Barron, Freedom Party: Barron is attending a campaign event at Uniondale Library in Long Island at 7:15 tonight.

 Jimmy McMillan, The Rent is Too Damn High Party: 4:30-7:00, campaigning in Times Square at Broadway between 47^th and 48th. Spokesperson Caprice Alves said they chose this venue “to give him access and to have him have a forum to be himself, to be with the people that are supporting him.”

Kristin Davis, Anti-Prohibition Party: She will be doing radio interviews for Party FM, Fiesta, 95X in Syracuse and Mayor Jeff Graham’s show on WANT-FM in Watertown. Aside from the interviews, campaign aide Andrew Miller said Davis plans to “hang out and enjoy all the hard work we did.”

Davis is also hosting an election night party at Taj Lounge Tuesday night that her campaign said is open to the public.

Howie Hawkins, The Green Party: Hawkins is in Syracuse and will be campaigning all day, working out of his campaign office. 

The Freedom Party, he says, will unite "blacks and Latinos and working class and progressive whites and Asians," and he adds,  "If we can unite around this party and unite around other progressive parties in the state and say to the Democratic party and the Republican Party that we are no longer going to blindly follow parties that are controlled by corporate interests, greed and corruption."

He said he will have more than enough signatures to create a third party line and took a few shots at the Democratic standard-bearer, Andrew Cuomo, showing that he was prepared to make this fall campaign about more than symbols.

"Andrew Cuomo to me is not an option for black people, Latino people. Andrew Cuomo is on the side of corporate interests. He is the quietest gubernatorial candidate I have ever seen, he doesn't come out and have press conferences, not answering to nothing. He has these big thick worksheets or whatever they are, he is not confident enough to face you and deal with all of the contradictions between him and the powers that be and the corruption and where his money comes from...Cuomo is trying to stay out of the limelight as much as he can because he can't stand the pressure and the scrutiny that will show all of his hidden contradictions, and they are going to come out in the campaign."

Barron founded the Freedom Party after the Democrats nominated in all-white slate of candidates at their convention. If the Freedom Party gets 50,000 votes, it will earn a spot on the ballot as a major party for the next four years. Barron said that he expected the party to run a slate of candidates for the City Council in 2013, when more than half of that body will be term-limited out.

"We are going to rock this state. We are going to surprise a lot of people."