Back when she first announced that she was running for President, Hillary Clinton made such a big deal of opening an office in Brooklyn that most people thought she’d jettison the pantsuits for some high-waisted Jorts and a crop top from Urban Outfitters. Here was a candidate of yesterday, so tained with the scent of the 1990s that her very presence reminded everyone of padded headbands and Seinfeld, openly embracing the new hipsterdom of organic, fair trade, vegan coffee bars and food trucks run by people who use their profits for mustache wax. A miracle!
Like most things with the Clintons, the Brooklyn office turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate marketing scheme targeted at a specific demographic. Turns out, Hillary Clinton never intended to occupy the land she leased in New York’s grubby paradise of gentrification, and has, instead according to POLITICO, been spending the majority of her time at posh Manhattan digs, taking senior staff meetings and running her campaign from a high rise, where she’s safely out of reach of The Poors.
“Brooklyn, U.S.A,” Clinton says, between posing for selfies with supporters. “How can you beat that?”
But Clinton didn’t forsake the glitzier island of Manhattan — she herself still works exclusively in midtown when she is in the city, and holds senior staff meetings there, sources told POLITICO.
Clinton signed a two-year lease on the Manhattan suite of about seven offices on the 27th floor of Tower 45, a recently renovated office building on West 45th Street near Times Square, last August. The building has an outdoor plaza and lobby featuring “magnificent large-scale hanging lit sculptures,” according to the developer, SL Green. At the time she signed the lease, a spokesman said Clinton was setting up a personal office.
That space is now occupied by Clinton’s campaign; 10 to 15 campaign staffers and interns work there regularly, and meetings take place there. Senior staffers also use the office out of convenience, if they need a place to work in Manhattan between appointments around town. Because of that, the campaign is now footing the bill for the rent, a campaign official confirmed. (According to Federal Election Commission rules, the midtown office space had to be deemed a campaign expense, or an in-kind contribution from the candidate to her campaign.)
The office at “Tower 45” in the vicinity of 6th and Broadway, is well-appointed, and at a staggering $25,000 per month, it should be. It features newly-renovated elevators, a steakhouse and a 15 story atrium entranceway with “large scale hanging lit sculptures.” Clinton’s campaign holds 4,000 square feet of office space – a modest contribution – and shares the building with the University of Phoenix.
In contrast, her Brooklyn office, which Clinton seems to have only seen in pictures and on random donor tours, features shabby furniture, cardboard printer tables and the occasional Lena Dunham. It’s still, POLITICO notes, where the majority of her core staff works in abject hipster squalor, but not the Queen Bee herself.
