Indie Campaigning in Ridgewood

“I can’t tell you how fun it is to cast a vote at Gottscheer Hall,” said Heaven Schmitt, a recent Ridgewood transplant, singer and longtime operator of the cafe employee hyperpop outfit Grumpy. More recently, Schmitt is picking up work touring in the backing band for country troubadour Zach Bryan.

Schmitt had been booked for a three-band lineup to fundraise for the candidacy of Samantha Kattan, a quiet once-research cochair of NYC-DSA’s Electoral Working Group, now selected by the party to run in November for State Assembly District 37, which represents a central chunk of Queens that stretches from Long Island City to Ridgewood, through Woodside, Sunnyside and Maspeth. But first, she has to win the Democratic Party primary on June 23 (Early voting starts June 13).

Kattan is running against two aspiring politicians from other parts of the district: Pia Rahman, a dietitian who sits on Community Board 2 in Sunnyside, and Melissa Orlando, a manager at Nuvance Health, a local chain of hospitals. (famous for losing a lot of money.)

As the DSA candidate, Kattan benefits from being run as the successor to Claire Valdez, current assembly member for SA-37 and, more recently, a candidate to take Nydia Velázquez’s seat in Congress. Valdez, herself a union organizer who did her time managing a narrowly defeated DSA assembly campaign in Bushwick, became the first party member to take the seat, winning it in a splintered election following the downfall of Juan Ardila, a flack from Brad Lander’s office who was accused of sexual assault shortly after ascending to elected office.

But in the basement of a second-wave cocktail bar (68-38 Forest Ave.) in Ridgewood, none of that mattered.

“I wrote this for the darlings in my band because five out of six of us are trans and it’s about being on the road and getting funny looks sometimes. Really, you guys are heroes for supporting a trans person,” said Schmitt, before playing “OBL,” an unreleased song the group has been trying out live over the past year, though the lineup that night was just Schmitt themself, out trying that and other new songs. After each one, Schmitt would jot down notes on a little pad: that one was super funny; everyone loved it; or: too punishing. Performed as stripped down indie folk songs, the new material was full of a kind of repeated yearning. I was disappointed they didn’t get around to playing “Queens,” another unreleased song, and one they had been planning on closing with before running out of time. I had heard them play it once before, a little more than a year ago, in a different Ridgewood bar (5-52 Grandview Ave.) and it conjured such a tender image of the unrushed early morning life in those overhead M trains, that I convinced their publicist to send me an .mp3. Release “Queens,” Grumpus!

As the six-person Grumpy, the group has released an album and then two EPs, the last two out on Bayonet Records, the local label started by Beach Fossils singer Dustin Payseur and his wife Katie Garcia, a former A&R rep at Capitol Records. As it happens, Garcia had mat Kattan while both were at Boston College in the late Bush-era.

“We’ve all known each other since college,” said Coco Segaller, a Kattan campaign volunteer who works for Secretly, another record label. Before arriving in Ridgewood, “We all lived in the same neighborhood and were in the same friend group,” she told me, “I actually only moved here last year. A lot of the group here are other college friends.”

Segaller’s energy was infectious and reflected the mood of the room and the larger campaign, a sense that Kattan had been there, even when there was somewhere else; but now there had arrived here, in Queens.

“I am primarily just a normal girl, just a regular girl, but my credentials make it not so random that I’m running for office,” Kattan told the group in her stump speech.

After graduating college, Kattan migrated to New York and spent the last decade working for the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, the same nonprofit that was the early stomping grounds for Cea Weaver, another prominent DSA committee member, recently appointed housing commissioner by Zohran Mamdani.

Kattan has made this work a focal point of her campaign; she has pledged to support the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, a piece of state legislation that the nonprofit is pushing that would make it easier for the tenants’ associations that the group works with to buy apartment buildings. Like Valdez, Kattan has also put in her time working on another DSA assembly campaign: Phara Souffrant Forrest’s more successful effort to unseat Walter Mosley in Crown Heights, running on a likeable enough anti-landlord platform.

“I have been to Albany a bunch of times as an organizer and I’ll tell you that it’s hard to overstate how bad we need more people in the state legislature who want to protect tenants. We need more organizers in the state legislature,” said Kattan, who ran unopposed for the DSA slot shortly before Valdez announced her move on Velázquez’s seat, as Peter Sterne tells it in City & State. For observers like Sterne, keeping the seat in the DSA’s hands functions as a proxy for the mayor’s support in the area, which went 54% for Mamdani during last year’s Democratic Party primary.

After Kattan, and after Grumpy, goes Wendy Eisenberg, who admits that she’s actually from far outside the district in another borough (Crown Heights). She played songs from her recent self-titled album, an intimate set of melancholy love songs that twinkled with a Pentangle charm. She played these by herself too, in a busily stirring sort of way, on a massive vintage guitar, older, she said, than even she was. When she said this, someone in the crowd let out a massive whoop.

“I’m actually having a lot of fun. That’s the power of civic duty,” said Eisenberg. “I don’t even live in this district, but I just love the fucking game.”