Housing Desegregation Opponents Celebrate Victory in Yonkers Vote

At the Italian City Club in Yonkers, straw-hatted supporters of victorious Republican mayoral candidate Henry Spallone were holding up mock newspapers with the headline: “Yonkers to Wasicsko: Goodbye.”

But it was not just ethnic pride that stirred jubilation at their candidate’s triumph over one-term incumbent Mayor Nicholas Wasicsko in Tuesday’s election. Like Spallone supporters all over Yonkers, they were overjoyed at getting a mayor who opposes compliance with a highly controversial public housing desegregation plan.

The plan, ordered by a federal district judge in Manhattan last year, mandates the construction of 1,000 units of new public housing on the city’s predominantly white East Side. In a confrontation that attracted national attention, the judge imposed heavy contempt-of-court fines on the city and defiant City Council members until they eventually agreed, by a 5-2 vote, to go along with his order.

But that vote has never set well with many of Yonkers’ 190,000 residents--particularly on the East Side.

Spallone, 63, a three-term councilman and one of the two holdouts against approval of the plan, campaigned vigorously against the housing order, contending that the judge’s action in fining the city and councilmen was unconstitutional.

Spallone won the election with 29,025 votes, or 53.5%, compared to Wasicsko’s 24,559 votes, or 45.2%. Spallone was backed in his campaign by the Save Yonkers Federation, an organization of 43 East Side neighborhood organizations.

What Spallone can do to block or overturn the plan, however, remains unclear. Wasicsko, who favors compliance, contends that any attempts to undo the plan would be costly and futile.

During the campaign, Spallone said he might be able to unravel the plan if the Supreme Court rules, in a case argued earlier this year, that the fines against him and the three other councilmen are unconstitutional.

Since the election, however, Spallone has said little directly about the plan but, instead, has talked about redeveloping the depressed West Side.

Elizabeth Hemingway, of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said many black Yonkers residents see only “a lot of doom and gloom ahead.”