Bernie's Political Revolution Comes to Brooklyn



1 / 15 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Amy Lombard. Outside the offices at 131 Eighth Street.

In New York City, the neighborhood a person lives in can speak volumes. So when Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders returned to town, there was no chance he would set up his campaign offices on the Upper East Side, or in Tribeca, or in any of the tony neighborhoods that the 1 percent of the 1 percent call home. (God forbid he go anywhere near Fifth Avenue, where Trump Tower looms like an evil obelisk.) Instead, his campaign opened up its first New York headquarters in a warehouse near the Gowanus Canal, the notorious Superfund site, in the hopes of bringing the revolution to a more bohemian part of Brooklyn.

And this part of Brooklyn, it seems, appears ready for it. Gowanus is “a lot of industrial space that has recently been moved into by hipsters,” Tia Schellstede, a freelance video editor turned Sanders volunteer turned phone-bank captain, joked. Sanders’s HQ blends in naturally. It is hidden behind a car wash and across the street from a pie store, with an entrance concealed in an alley that is lined with rusting corrugated-steel sheets. (Or it would have been concealed, were it not for the dozens of blue Bernie signs marking the path from the street to the door, covered in even more Bernie signs.) The Morbid Anatomy Museum, a library dedicated to old-timey death-related artifacts, stands a block away. There’s a cloth-diaper store nearby. And then there is the Interference Archive, a library well known in activist circles, dedicated to collecting memorabilia from radical social-justice movements. It’s a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, which is housed in a nondescript corporate office building on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. (Politico New York called the area “an office district in the making.”)

But it wasn’t until I entered Sanders’s Brooklyn shop that I could truly behold the depths of its Brooklyn-ness. Inside is a starving artist’s dream: a warehouse with exposed wood beams vaulting into the ceiling, crammed with the normal detritus befitting a political campaign—boxes of flyers, bags of buttons and pins, foldout gray tables, couches seemingly sourced from the “free” section of Craigslist. And of course, ubiquitous Bernie posters, in all languages, in all colors, several of them homemade and scribbled by hand, others just silhouettes of his windblown white hair and glasses.

A man working by a pile of campaign flyers and posters, ready for distribution. Photograph by Amy Lombard.

Many of the Sanders campaign aides on site blended neatly into this narrative. Unlike most field offices, the national team had simply parachuted into the neighborhood, recruited an eager unpaid volunteer to be a full-time office manager, and turned the loft into the nerve center of the entire state’s operations, quickly assuming control of thousands of die-hard volunteers who had been canvassing and phone-banking from home. “The incredible thing is, the volunteers have been working here for months,” said Karthik Ganapathy, the press director for the Sanders campaign, standing next to a pile of ginger-spice cake baked by, and devoured by, volunteers.

“There’s pockets of volunteers all over the office. Like, on their own little gears,” said Nick Panken, a young man sitting near the door organizing piles of flyers, wearing a green button-down with Sanders’s face silk-screened on the back. (He made it at a woman’s shirt-printing party in New Hampshire right before the primaries.) A Brooklyn native raised in Ditmas Park, he believed that Sanders was the only one willing to address the “concerted effort to transfer, y’know, wealth to the wealthiest people in the country,” and that if the Democratic Party was unwilling to address income inequality at the ballot box, “it’s bound to happen with pitchforks. I don’t want that to happen, you know?”