Donuts Coffee Shop on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope was Ken Diamondstone's pick for his breakfast with OTBKB. Diamondstone, a candidate for City Council in the 33rd district, loves diner food.
When he arrived at the booth in the back where I was sitting he launched into a friendly conversation with the waitress about the St. Clair Diner where she used to work.
"Do you remember their pot pie and short ribs?" he asked her.
She did and she remembered Diamondstone and his partner who were regulars there for years.
"We used to go there late at night after political meetings," Diamondstone told me.
We both ordered fried eggs. Diamondstone asked for his with "whiskey down," diner-speak for toasted rye bread and I asked him whether he likes to cook. That's when he told me about starting the Touch Community Dinners at the Quaker Meeting House on Boerum Place during the height of the AIDs crisis. "Every Monday night since 1988 we've been cooking dinner for people with AIDs. We've served 70,000 meals since then and it's a joy for me to be there."
A lifelong New Yorker, Diamondstone was born in 1941 in Queens to a dentist and a homemaker (who took writing courses and volunteered at Hadassah) with progressive politics.
He spent summers at Camp Woodland in Phonecia, New York where Pete Seeger was once the music counselor. There, he says, he learned "to honor diversity, peace, that the Constitution is an important document, and the good of unions."
While a student at Queens College, where he studied political science, he remembers collecting money for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. He joined the Nassau County Young Democrats, the beginning of a lifelong passion for local electoral politics and community and social activism.
Diamondstone pursued a master's degree in public policy at NYU where he studied with Joseph D. McGoldrick, who was city comptroller under Mayor LaGuardia. Later he worked with McGoldrick on a Temporary Commission on City Finances, which focused on East River tolls and salary increases for uniformed workers.
"Even then I was for East River tolls," he told me.
Later Diamondstone studied psychology and took a job working with emotionally disturbed kids. That led to a job as a supervisor of a Beth Israel clinic for longtime heroin addicts.
Eventually he grew frustrated with his managerial desk job at Beth Israel Hospital, where he observed that "sometimes the bureaucracy works against the interest of their clients. It works for itself and the clients become secondary."
He also had a "conflict of values" with his superiors. "I wore my hair long down to my butt and I insisted on that. They said it set a bad example. I said, 'I'm responsible.'"
Soon after he left Beth Israel and decided to take some time "to try understand what life means for me and what I can do as an individual."
A turning point in his life, Diamondstone decided to do something very unusual and interesting.
With a $5,000 inheritance, he bought a large Harlem apartment building from the City (at a time when the City was selling off property). Diamondstone wanted to turn the building, which was full of tenants, into a low-cost tenant's cooperative. "I wanted it to be a non-profit so that people could take over their lives," he told me.
He organized meetings and brought in local tenant organizers to help convince the tenants to buy into his plan, which was only going to cost them what they could afford.
"That was a fairly Utopian plan," I said to Diamondstone. He agreed. But it didn't work. None of the tenants wanted to own their own apartments.
"My effort to do something valuable didn't work out. It was very disappointing. I had to convince the city to take the building back," he told me.
But that didn't quell Diamondstone's fledgling commitment to affordable housing. Soon after he bought a house in Park Slope, renovated two apartments and began life as a landlord with a mission: "to provide nice spaces at low prices."
Diamondstone estimates that he has owned approximately 20 properties over the years and currently oversees 85 units of housing which he rents at "way below market value."
"I could have made a killing in real estate over the years," he said. But that wasn't his interest. Clearly, Diamondstone business has sustained him over the years and allowed others to live well, too. Recently he found someone to manage his real estate holdings, which gives him more time to devote to his political goals.
Affordable housing is clearly Diamondstone's passion and with his business has been able to translate his ideals into action. He is also a member of three local Democratic clubs and was an early opponent of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. For Diamondstone, who is openly gay and lives with his longtime partner, Joe, the rights of gays, bi-sexuals and trangendered individuals is high on his list of priorities as is the environment. In the 1970's he helped start the first environmental coop in Brooklyn, a storefront on Atlantic Avenue that provided insulation for use in energy conservation during that decade's fuel crisis.
He is currently chair of the Brooklyn Solid Wast Advisory Board, which advises the City on solid waste, recycling and re-manufacturing and was involved with the Zero Waste Coalition and NYPIRG's Bigger, Better, Bottle Bill.
In his behind-the-scenes way, Diamondstone personally delivered a document that lists all companies that manufacture products with recycled content to Martha Hirst, Commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative
Services, when he found out that she didn't have a copy of this important resource.
This is not Diamondstone's first run for the City Council in the 33rd. He ran in 2001, the year David Yassky won the seat. In 2006 he ran against State Senator Marty Connor, "who did numerous things that were not good for his constituents or the city."
He is proud of that race because he was endorsed by the New York Times and won 47% of the vote in a district that includes parts of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. He considered running against Connor in 2008 but was tapped out financially and Daniel Squadron was running and he didn't want to divide the vote though he still regrets "that I didn't get to do it," he tells me.
"A campaign is grueling, it's wrenching. But it's worth the struggle," he said.
For years, Diamondstone has been involved in a laundry list of community organizations,
including Brooklyn Community Board 2, New Yorkers Against the Death
Penalty, Brooklyn Parents for Peace, The Brooklyn SWAB, and the
Citywide Recycling Advisory Board., as well as local Democratic clubs and the Lambda Independent Democrats.
So I asked Diamondstone how, with his wide range of accomplishment and affiliations, he plans to present himself to the voters.
"I'm not afraid to speak truth to power and I'm not interested in or tempted in climbing the political ladder," he told me.
My breakfast with Diamondstone confirmed that he has a quiet strength, a strong moral core, and genuinely humanistic values. The way he runs his real estate business with its emphasis on nice spaces at low prices I can tell that he puts his money where his mouth is.
Just as we were getting ready to leave I asked Ken if he has any heroes. He thought for a long time and said.
"All the people who've worked hard all their lives and never got any recognition. They're my heroes," he said as we walked down the narrow aisle at Donuts Coffee Shop.
