Stop-off at the Hynes Bay Ridge Storefront

More that a recon operation for the local GOP  —   More than a research trip for this blog  —  Visit to Hynes' political storefront "operation"  was a trip down Memory Lane 

A  couple of nights back a local Republican District Leader asked me to look in on the Hynes for DA storefront on 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge to see how it was functioning as a “GOP Headquarters for the GOP candidate for DA”  —   Charles “Joe” Hynes.

I went in there at about 3:30 this afternoon and found some things that I expected to find, but also quite a few things that I didn’t expect. About a week ago I’d read a blog posting about the opening of  Hynes’s headquarters in and for Bay Ridge ( See ““Hynes Campaign Opens 3rd Avenue Storefront” by Kip, 10/12/13,  Bay Ridge Journal
[http://bayridgejournal.blogspot.com/2013/10/hynes-campaign-opens-3rd-avenue.html]). What I pretty much saw earlier today was not very different from what Kip described a little more than a week ago, and the picture that accompanied that article  —   a “Hynes... storefront” near the corner of 84th Street and 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge.

The large pro-Hynes sign and the poster-covered front window were exactly as depicted, and there were folding tables near the door.  However, whereas Kip said the tables “were covered with neat piles of campaign literature, and the new storefront was staffed by a couple of older blonde women”;  when I walked in this afternoon. the blonde women were gone and in their place were a couple of guys, and the neatly arranged tables were hardly covered by anything. In fact, when I first asked for literature one of the men said they didn’t have any.

After explaining that I was there from the local Republican Party, and that I also planned to do this blog posting about the campaign headquarters, both men loosened up and tried to do whatever they could to help. They let me look around the storefront, which still had some of the wall fixtures of the women’s beauty shop that had been there before it was a political office.

When I observed out loud that there really wasn’t very much there  —  no computers, no phones, and not very much in the way of political material  —  one of them gestured and said, “All we have is this.”  With that he gestured around to bunches of posters on sticks, some other posters without sticks and some very small stacks of palm cards and 8x11 paper handbills. When I asked if there were going to be any events at that location, both men said they didn’t know anything about what was planned or how the storefront fit into Hynes' campaign strategy.

One of the things that one of the men said impressed me as being very strange. “We really don’t want to mention the whole ‘Republican Thing’ very much... because Lhota is killing us... ”  Just as I was pointing out that the handbill specifically mentioned "looking for Hynes on the Republican line," the other man jumped in and asked the first one to try to understand where I was coming from, and why I was interested in the “Republican Thing” regardless of how Lhota was doing.  Then the first guy talked about knowing Eaton, and Phyllis Carbo and Russell Gallo; and the other talked about Ayn Rand and several of her books. After about twenty minutes, we all said, "Best of luck !"  And I left.

What struck me about the whole thing, more than anything else, was how nostalgic it all was. If only there were a few campaign buttons and bumper stickers, it would have looked like something out of the 1960s  —   in  particular, it reminded me of  a Barry Goldwater storefront on the west side of Fifth Avenue, a store or two in from 77th Street.