A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from August 05, 2006
Bullwinkle District

The 12th Congressional District was called the “Bullwinkle” district in the 1990s because it’s drawn like Bullwinkle, the cartoon moose. The name is a play on that old odd animal of redistricting called the “gerrymander.”
 
   
USA Today
Velazquez drew the endorsement of former New York Mayor David Dinkins and defeated Solarz by five points in the primary.
 
Lines for the district - which wiggles through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan - had to be redrawn after the federal courts ruled the boundaries were created primarily for racial reasons. The moose-shaped district had been dubbed the Bullwinkle district.
 

2 July 1996, New York Times, “Hispanic District’s Makeup Is Challenged by Lynda Richardson, pg. B3:
The 12th Congressional District—a strangely shaped, cobbled-together collection of neighborhoods encompassing parts of Queens, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan—was drawn in 1992 as part of a statewide redistricting effort to increase the number of black and Hispanic representatives. The 12th District is largely Hispanic, and in the November 1992 elections Ms. Velazquez, a Puerto Rican woman, was elected to office. She was re-elected in 1994.
(...)
But the 12th District, which is nicknamed the “Bullwinkle” district because its lines resemble a moose head, residents have offered statistics showing that the district, however oddly shaped to include Hispanic neighborhoods, is far from exclusively made up of Hispanics.
 
 
31 July 1997, New York Times, pg. B3:
The 12th District, known as the Bullwinkle district because of its odd shape, is now about 48 percent Hispanic, 19 percent Asian, 14 percent white and 9 percent black.

Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityNeighborhoods • Saturday, August 05, 2006 • Permalink


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