By Kathianne Boniello
Claire Shulman spent one of her final days in office as Queens borough president last month showing off her staff’s latest creation: a little book the longtime Queens leader calls “the bible.”
The more than three-inch-thick report Shulman’s staff made for the incoming Queens city council delegation profiles each council district as well as the borough and is designed to give the newly elected politicians a headstart.
“It is a bible, down to the last detail,” Shulman said in a Dec. 21 interview. “Everyone who gets this will hit the ground running.”
If there is anyone who could write the bible for Queens, it is Shulman — a mother of three who took over the borough’s top office after Donald Manes, a political mover and shaker, killed himself in the midst of a Parking Bureau violations scandal that was destroying his career.
When she was appointed by the City Council in March 1986, Shulman had never held public office before.
Although the Whitestone resident does not like to talk about the corruption that devoured Manes, she is credited with restoring credibility and public faith to an office badly shaken by dishonor.
After Manes’ suicide, Shulman assumed his duties under heavy pressure from those inside Borough Hall, the public and the authorities investigating the scandal who thought she had been aware of her late boss’s troubles.
“I had this wonderful ability to focus, so I just did my job,” said Shulman. “This job is about putting a shovel in the ground and funding a program.”
Shulman, who could not run for borough president again in 2001 because of the city’s term limits law, credits her ability to get things done at least in part to a lack of political ambition.
“I was never running for any other job,” she said. “It gave me the opportunity to really build the borough. It gives you a freedom to work at the job.”
With her focus on the mechanics of government and a sparkling public works record, one would think Shulman had been spoon-fed politics in her cradle. Some of her biggest accomplishments include the redevelopment of Astoria’s Kaufman Studios, the renovation of Queens Hospital Center, the city’s takeover of Bayside’s Fort Totten and new housing in Far Rockaway, to name a few.
Shulman describes herself as “a quick study,” something the Brooklyn native appears to have been her entire life. It was while attending college at 16 that she settled on her first major career move.
“I was riding in the trolley car to Brooklyn College and I looked up and it said ‘Join the Cadet Nursing Corps,” she said. “I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher, and nursing was exciting.”
The young Shulman then went to Adelphi University on Long Island, earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing.
“I went over to Adelphi. I was 17 years old,” she recalled, laughing. “It’s called chutzpah — I said to them, ‘If you accept all my credits from Brooklyn College and you give me a bachelor’s degree when I finish, I’ll come here’ — and they said yes!”
She eventually went on to train at Queens Hospital Center, where she met her husband Dr. Mel Shulman. At 21, Shulman became head nurse for female medicine at Queens Hospital Center.
It was not until Shulman became a mother of three and a member of the Parent Teacher Association that her political career began.
Having settled in Bayside with her family, Shulman became president of the Mothers Club of PS 41, a local elementary school, only to find the school was falling apart.
“We didn’t realize how much power we had,” Shulman said of her work in the late 1950s to fix up PS 41.
Shulman leapt from PS 41 to the presidency of the local planning board in 1969, the city’s precursor to community boards. In those years Shulman was also asked by Manes to join a committee to take housing out of criminal court.
When she was 45, Shulman was asked by Manes to join him at Borough Hall, and in 1972 she became director of planning boards for Queens and served for eight years before becoming deputy borough president.
His suicide catapulted her into the borough’s top office, where she went on to win handily four consecutive terms.
“My interest was more in how far can you push the envelope to make government really respond to what the real needs of the people were,” Shulman said.
“I kept getting re-elected because I did produce for the people as far as I could,” she said. “I wanted to participate in establishing and refining local input into a city the size of ours and as diverse as ours, so philosophically it was really where I wanted to be.”
Through her 16-year term Shulman has made the Queens borough president’s office her own by what she calls “putting the shovel in the ground.”
Over the years she kept at least eight ceremonial shovels collected from various groundbreakings in her Borough Hall office. Shulman has said she would like to stay in public service after Dec. 31 but does not have solid plans.
“I’m looking for something I want to do,” she said. “I don’t want to retire. I do know the government and I do know how to make it work.”
As she leaves office, Shulman has some thoughts of her own on how to improve the role of a borough president.
“If I were doing a charter revision today, I would add to the responsibility of the borough president in a very specific way because you function as a county executive,” she said. “I would establish what you have to accomplish while you’re here.”
Her own philosophy of management focuses on respect.
“The worst thing you can do is to treat people as if they were inferior,” she said. “That’s the worst way to deal in government.”
Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.
