Neighbors In The News: Steve Slavin Remembers His Old Friend, Presidential Candidate & Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders

Long before Bernie Sanders was a Vermont Senator running for President of the United States, the Democratic politician was a Brooklyn College student who loved staying up late listening to records and discussing Supreme Court cases in his apartment near Brooklyn College, his former roommate, neighbor Steve Slavin said in a New York Times story published Saturday, July 25.

Steve, a retired economics teacher who now lives near Ditmas Avenue and Marlborough Road, joined a chorus of people who knew Sanders for the article, which traces the impact our borough has had on the Vermont lawmaker.

“He was a lifer,” Steve told the New York Times, in reference to the Senator having grown up in Brooklyn — on E. 26th Street, near James Madison High School, with his brother, mother and father, a Polish immigrant and car salesman on Long Island.

The presidential candidate — whose favorability rating among Americans has recently doubled, going from 12 percent in March to 24 percent now, according to a recent Gallup poll — is running against a number of other Democrats, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And while Clinton previously represented New York in the U.S. Senate and recently set up her campaign headquarters in our borough, it’s Sanders who can claim the New York cred, the New York Times said.

The Times wrote:

Hillary Rodham Clinton may be a former senator from New York who located her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, but all it takes to know who really represents Brooklyn in the race for the Democratic nomination is for Mr. Sanders to open his mouth and utter a few syllables.

As Mr. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, draws large crowds on the campaign trail and enjoys an unexpected surge, his Brooklyn accent and upbringing in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush off Kings Highway have become a particular point of pride for friends, former schoolmates and fellow progressives in the borough where he was born.

“I’m very proud of the fact that he speaks Brooklyn, because he’s not a phony, and that shows,” said Marty Alpert, who used to cheer for Mr. Sanders when he was on the track team at James Madison High School, where she is now on the alumni board.

After his time as a student and track star at James Madison High School — from where Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer also graduated — Sanders went on to attend Brooklyn College, where he met Steve Slavin.

For the article, the reporter went with Steve to their old house on E. 21st Street — where Sanders “would curse when they heard their loathed landlady angrily marching up the stairs” upon hearing too much noise emanating from the apartment — and met the current tenants.

Sanders moved to the apartment with our neighbor because he “needed some space from the tensions at home,” where his mother was ill, the Times reported.

“Mr. Sanders was crushed when his mother died when she was just 46 after a second heart operation failed,” the Times wrote.

Following his first year at Brooklyn College, Sanders left the neighborhood for Chicago and, eventually, Vermont, but, no matter how long he has been gone, the Brooklyn still shines through.

From the Times:

Now, as he challenges the current Democratic powerhouse, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders’s hometown supporters hope that a combination of his unabashed liberalism, long-distance runner’s persistence and old-school Brooklyn charm will resonate with voters.

If you want to check out where our neighbor lived with Sanders, the New York Times interviews Steve in this video.