UES Again Merged With Queens In New Assembly Maps, Sparking Pushback

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Just weeks after Upper East Siders helped defeat a plan to merge a chunk of the neighborhood with a Queens-based legislative district, an eerily similar proposal emerged this week for a different political body.

This time, it is a State Assembly district, rather than City Council, which would jump across the East River to cover both Western Queens and parts of the Upper East Side and Midtown East, as well as all of Roosevelt Island.

The new Assembly maps were released Thursday by New York's Independent Redistricting Commission, ahead of the next state elections in 2024.

Unlike plans for the State Senate and U.S. Congress, the Assembly maps drawn earlier this year by Democratic state lawmakers had been allowed to stand for the 2022 elections instead of being redrawn by a court-appointed special master. But in subsequent legal challenges, state judges ruled that the Assembly maps were invalid, too, and would need to be revised by early 2023.

The commission's new plan, released ahead of its court-mandated Dec. 2 deadline, notably calls for the 36th Assembly District — now based in Astoria and represented by Democrat Zohran Mamdani — to shift westward, taking over Roosevelt Island and roughly 60 blocks between East 42nd and 61st streets, east of Second Avenue.

Those East Side blocks are now mostly contained within the 73rd District, which runs from Carnegie Hill down to Murray Hill and will be represented next year by Alex Bores, who won last month's election to succeed Dan Quart.

Bores's new district would be shifted westward to cover more of Midtown. On Thursday, he quickly criticized the commission's plan, comparing it to the proposal earlier this year by the city's own districting commission to merge part of the Upper East Side with a City Council district based in Queens.

"Residents spoke up, and those changes were reversed," Bores said on Twitter. "Apparently the [commission] wants to hear from those same residents again."

The new Assembly maps are far from final: the proposal will face a series of public hearings before a final version is submitted next April — including a Feb. 7 hearing at Hunter College's Kaye Playhouse.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Rebecca Seawright's Yorkville-based 76th Assembly District would mostly retain its longtime shape under the commission's plan — though it would lose Roosevelt Island to the Queens-based 36th.

The similar City Council plan, proposed in July and revised by October, faced intense criticism on both sides of the East River from residents concerned that it would dilute the voting power of their respective neighborhoods.

Related coverage:

• Upper East Side No Longer Sliced Up By New Council Maps
• Divided-Up Upper East Side Council Districts Face Mounting Criticism
• Controversial NY Assembly Redistricting Maps Tossed By Judges