Hell Gate Life

It's September, and for once, voters outside of Astoria won't see Peter Vallone, Sr.'s name on the ballot.

No worries, though-the political biography of the former City Council speaker is now on bookshelves, explaining everything from his stewardship of the pre-term limits City Council, to his failed bids to become the city's mayor and the state's governor. Along the way Vallone explains the final days of his political mentor, Donald Manes, the Queens Democratic party boss and borough president who knifed himself during a phone conversation with his shrink.

But the timing of the book's release (in the final stretches of the mayoral primary) suggests maybe there's something more than revisionist history and tawdry details to learn (even though I love tawdry revisionist details). In fact, seeing how ferociously the outer-borough, white Catholic vote is being courted by two of the four Democratic mayoral candidates, maybe there's a good deal to learn.

First, though, you'll have to get past the uber-patriotic opening: "I finally understood why I love this country. It all started for me when I was born?"

From there we begin the Vallone legacy-with a "law in 1932 requiring every apartment to have a bathroom [that] spurred a great migration out of Manhattan into the suburbs."

Under the Hell Gate bridge is the Vallone and Vallone law offices (the other Vallone is his brother Peter, who word has it is after a council seat of his own), one floor above his old district office, now occupied by his son, Peter Vallone, Jr. Down the street is the Judge Charles Vallone elementary school.

In the largest Greek community outside of Greece, Vallone has managed to etch his family name into Astoria as sharply as the jagged rocks off its shore. Which seems an appropriate metaphor for the dangerous terrain of Queens politics that ushered the devout Catholic into power. What made Vallone an affable, if at times flawed, public servant, is also what make him an author worth reading.

"And yet there was [Jimmy] Breslin?making it sound as if Vito had been engaged in some kind of criminal activity," Vallone writes. "All that Vito had done was facilitate the payment of reduced fees for traffic summonses, and there was nothing illegal or immoral about that." Got it?

Aside from eavesdropping inside the smoky room of old school politics, Vallone drops other pearls of wisdom. About his failed bid to oust freshman governor George Pataki, Vallone writes: "On Election Day I did indeed lose statewide by a large margin?none of the Democratic candidates in the state were hurt because of my loss." Cue the sepia tones: "By the end of my campaign for governor I had traveled to all sixty-two of New York's counties and I now know why it was christened the 'Empire State.'" Aw. And just think, all that before he enters the bizarre 2001 mayoral bid. Read away, folks.