Manhattan Media CEO Tom Allon has taken out a provocative new advertisement in a local newspaper in Christine Quinn’s home district that accuses the City Council speaker of letting St. Vincent’s Hospital close in order to reap real estate donations.
The ad leads in bold type with the words, DID CHRISTINE QUINN BET YOUR LIFE TO BECOME MAYOR and shows her kissing real estate developer Bill Rudin at an unidentified event.
Rudin Management has made a bid to redevelop the former hospital as a housing and retail space with a medical facility. Some community members have pushed for the hospital to be re-opened and fully operational, but the economics of that plan do not appear to be feasible either to Mr. Rudin or to city officials.
Below the ad, says Mr. Allon:
The cynical backroom deal that led to the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital demonstrates clearly how much New Yorkers have riding on who we elect as our next Mayor.
As long as we have a government that allows the rich and powerful to use their influence to close down desperately needed hospitals and build luxury condominiums, we are all at risk.
I am running for Mayor to bring an end to the era of pay-to-play politics. It’s about time we had a Mayor who put the people’s interests first.
From a political standpoint, it is a new development in 2013 to see Mr. Allon as the bomb-thrower, and to direct those bombs in the direction of Ms. Quinn. He entered the race essentially pledging to keep the Bloomberg agenda alive, but has gradually moved leftward and taken on a more populist tone, including sleeping out at Zuccotti Park with the Occupy protesters.
Last month Mr. Allon penned an op-ed in The Post that accused Ms. Quinn of turning a blind eye to member item abuse among members of the City Council. Accusing her essentially of murder, however, seems another matter entirely.
The ad appeared in the West View News, which is not a Manhattan Media publication.
Update:
A reader notes that Mr. Allon–or at least his newspapers–haven’t always been so anti-Rudin.
Over the summer, Our Town, an Upper East Side newspaper owned by Manhattan Media, had an article titled “A Family Bent On Building A Better New York” which described generations of Rudins of “helping build modern New York.”
The family was also honored over the summer as a “Family Making A Difference On The Upper East Side.”
Follow David Freedlander via RSS.
