Bernie Sanders Rally By Queensbridge Houses Blindsides Residents

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his supporters flocked to Queensbridge Park for a campaign rally Saturday, residents who live across the street in Queensbridge Houses — the nation's largest public housing project — were in their monthly tenant association meeting.

The campaign hadn't told them about the Sanders rally, they said.

April Simpson, president of the Queensbridge Tenants Association, said she got a call from the Sanders campaign only the day before to inform her about the rally and ask if she was attending. She told the campaign staffer about the scheduling conflict.

"These people were coming from near, far — but they weren't from Queensbridge," Simpson told Patch in an interview. "That rally wasn't for us."

A Sanders campaign spokesperson said the team handed out flyers to Queensbridge residents the day before the rally and that they reached out to Simpson as soon as they got her contact information and invited her to meet with Sanders — but Simpson insists that isn't true.

"The residents that were sitting in the meeting, they said they found out from all the people going past," Simpson added, calling the lack of outreach "disrespectful."

Simpson said there were no flyers publicizing the rally in Queensbridge's buildings, which more than 6,000 people call home. (The campaign did not respond to emails and calls requesting a copy of the flyer the spokesperson said was distributed.)

She says the campaign only offered to arrange a meeting with her, other Queensbridge community leaders and Sanders after this article was first published.

And yet Queensbridge Houses served as a rallying cry for the elected officials on stage Saturday, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was there to officially endorse the Vermont senator for president.

"Let’s acknowledge the ground that we are on, which is the ground zero for the fight for public housing, and fully funded, dignified housing in the United States of America," Ocasio-Cortez said during the rally, according to a Gothamist report.

Corbin Trent, a campaign spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, declined to comment for this story.

Bishop Mitchell Taylor, a community leader who grew up in Queensbridge Houses, said he was concerned the Sanders campaign didn't reach out to residents prior to the rally and added that it "seemed to be a pretty white rally " when he passed by.

"They chose a picture over a population," he said in an interview. "How could you use Queensbridge Park as your rallying point but not engage Queensbridge people as a part of the rally?"

The Sanders campaign previously told a news reporter for Gothamist that staffers had posted flyers leading up to the rally but didn't specify where the flyers were.

Instead, it was the flood of attendees emerging from the 21st Street-Queensbridge F train station that clued many Queensbridge residents in to what was happening in the park that bears the same name as their home.

"Everybody was like, 'What's going on?'" community activist and lifelong Queensbridge resident Billy Robinson, 55, told Patch. "We just saw a stream of people coming from the subway to the park with Bernie Sanders signs."

"You've got the biggest projects in the world, and you didn't even let the people there know what's going on in their own neighborhood," Robinson said.

This story has been updated to include additional comments from the Sanders campaign and Queensbridge Tenants' Association president April Simpson.