ABSTRACT
Twenty-two years after I left Ben Rosenthal, I returned to Queens to“soak and poke” with his successor, Representative Gary Ackerman. I went out of curiosity. What, how, and how much, I wondered, might have changed in nearly a quarter of a century? The inevitability of change had, after all, been the one certainty of all my visits in the 1970s. And what, I wondered, was the new guy like-or, really like? Representative Ackerman was then in his seventh term. I knew that in the most recent redistricting, his district-his place-had been radically reconstructed. He had been given large pieces of two new Long Island counties-Nassau and Suffolk-and a much reduced portion of his home base in Queens. His readjustment, I thought, might be a doubly interesting story-about representation in, and representation of, “Queens Plus.”
