The Unlikely Rise of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito

Ross Barkan

One afternoon in early February, the new speaker of the City Council stood with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to announce that the scandal-plagued Puerto Rican Day Parade would be saved.

Along with Mr. Schneiderman, Ms. Mark-Viverito, a Puerto Rican native, met the press in the attorney general’s drab lower Manhattan conference room to tell them that more than half of the board of the nonprofit that managed the parade would be dismissed and replaced. A longtime private fund-raiser for the nonprofit had siphoned more than a million dollars, and the attorney general-driven shake-up was, in the words of Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, “stunning.”

But the new speaker, whose ascent to the second-most-powerful elected perch in the city once seemed improbable, wanted it known that Mr. Schneiderman could have gone further. After the press conference, Ms. Mark-Viverito, stone-faced, approached one of the few remaining board members.


Read more at http://observer.com/2014/06/no-2-and-trying-harder/#ixzz352CXIVCT