VITO BATTISTA GO FIGHT CITY HALL
By OWEN MORITZ Daily News Staff Writer
Friday, June 18th 1999, 2:10AM
NEW YORK taxpayers, oppressed or otherwise, never had a truer friend than Vito Battista, a rumpled, fiery son of Brooklyn who spent most of the 1950s, '60s and '70s running for practically every public office in sight - including mayor five times. "I'd rather be right than mayor," he always said, which was good, considering he never came close to getting elected.
But the man could put on a show. A flamboyant architect with a pencil-thin mustache, a black fedora, a vivid imagination and a voice that could shatter the reveries of the laziest bureaucrat, Vito Battista was one of the great artists of New York City political theater.
Park Ave. co-op types were not his people. His were the little people - the small property owners, small landlords and civic associations in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island he claimed as his constituency when, in 1956, he organized his United Taxpayers Party. He made his first independent run for mayor in 1957, managing to capture 70,000 votes in what was otherwise a lackluster race.
That was the most votes he ever got for any citywide office over the next 20 years, and recognizing that he was perhaps not really very electable, he turned his energies to comic opera, devoting himself to crazed stunts that regularly struck terror into the heart of public officialdom.
He brought an alligator to City Hall once, to illustrate the bite being taken by taxes. He strolled through midtown with a camel, warning that one more tax measure would be the straw to break the animal's back. He marched across the Brooklyn Bridge with an elephant and herded sheep through City Hall Park. He appeared on Wall St. wearing a wooden barrel.
He once delivered a black coffin filled with fake homeowner deeds at Mayor John Lindsay's office to make a point about public safety. "The only people making money in New York today are the guys who make electric locks and burglar alarms and those who train dogs," Battista shouted. He rode a horse and buggy down Broadway as the Board of Estimate debated repeal of the $15 auto-use tax: "We'll all wind up in horses and buggies," he yelled.
Politicians. They were all the same, he thundered. Government waste, bloated taxes, rent control, tax abatements, welfare, subsidized housing - the politicians were to blame for all of it. In the mid-'60s, he often made appearances with a pair of pet monkeys, named Rocky and Lindsay, after the governor and the mayor. He liked to stand outside City Hall holding up a Diogenes-style lantern and announcing to all within earshot that he was searching for an honest pol.
"You people accuse me of being a buffoon," he acknowledged to an interviewer on one occasion. "Listen, I'm liberal with my money - just conservative about the money City Hall spends."
No, he never seriously expected to become mayor. "I'd rather be right," he said, again. Serenely.
BATTISTA WAS born Sept. 7, 1908, in Bari, Italy, and came to Brooklyn with his family five years later. As a teenager, he studied at Brooklyn Evening High School while peddling ice during the day, very successfully; at age 18, he sold his flourishing ice company for $27,000 and used the money to pay for an education at Carnegie Tech. Graduate degrees in architecture and planning followed at MIT and Columbia.
He was a designer of the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. Afterward, working for the city's Department of Public Works, he helped design the Brooklyn Civic Center. Then he went into private practice and started his own architectural school in downtown Brooklyn. The Institute of Design and Construction would turn out 30,000 architects, planners and draftsmen in Battista's lifetime.
But the daily plight of the city's small property owners and "oppressed taxpayers," as he never failed to call them, became a siren song that finally drove him into politics in the mid-'50s.
He never got to be mayor, or controller, or anything else he ever ran for, until 1968, when, running as a Republican, he won the Cypress Hills-East New York Assembly seat. He served three noisy terms, mostly just annoying his fellow legislators. During one particularly do-nothing session, he suggested that everyone just go home. One colleague took umbrage: "There are millions of New Yorkers working, who would not be impressed if we adjourned at 2 p.m." Shot back Battista: "Yes, but they're accomplishing something."
In the post-Watergate elections of 1974, a Democratic challenger turned him out of Albany. One year later came New York City's fiscal crisis - and now, it appeared, everything he had ever said about bloated bureaucracies and overburdening taxes was turning out to be quite true.
FLEETINGLY HE entertained a vision that city voters might now see him a wise elder statesman. Well, no. His final race for mayor, in 1977, as an independent in a crowded field, fared not well at all. After that wild election was won by Edward Koch, Vito Battista folded his tent and stopped running for things.
He did, though, remain an active Republican committeeman, and, in 1984, in an appointment he treasured, President Ronald Reagan named him to a federal commission on architecture and transportation for the disabled.
He died quietly in 1990, age 81.
Notes: BIG TOWN BIOGRAPHY: Lives and Times of the Century's Classic New Yorkers
