The Manhattan office of the Attorney General is located in the Equitable Building, a classical H-shaped anchorage of height and weight between Cedar and Pine Street. When it opened in 1915, the building was the heaviest on the planet, and claimed 1.2 million square feet of office space - a size unsurpassed by any building in the world at the time. The bulk and height shut out sunlight in the surrounding blocks like a solar eclipse, causing the city in 1916 to pass the Building Zone Resolution, the first municipal code regulating the construction of office buildings in NYC. Such civic advancement in favor of the public over corporate will parallels the type of political challenges against real estate and white collar crime taken up by AG James.

As City Councilwoman (2004 - 2013), Letitia James represented District 35, which encompasses the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, and Crown Heights, with headquarters in the Shirley Chisholm State Office Building, a former YMCA renovated in the 1980s and in 2010 named for the exalted “first Black woman Congressman” (as Ms. Chisolm put it) who blazed the trail for such milestones as AG James becoming “the first woman in New York to be elected as attorney general, the first African-American woman to be elected to statewide office and the first black person to serve as attorney general.” (NY Times, November 6, 2018)

Councilwoman James was the prime sponsor of the “Alternative Enforcement Program,” which allows the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development to pursue “violations of the housing maintenance code and multiple dwelling law,” and “to improve housing conditions by performing frequent inspections to monitor correction of violations, and issue Orders to Correct if the owner fails to act.” In the press release, Councilwoman James said “every day my office gets complaints about serious housing code violations that are not repaired for months. Too often these complaints come from the most vulnerable among us – seniors on fixed incomes, immigrants with limited English skills, and families with young children."

The Alma Mater of AG James overlooks the Narrows of New York Bay, built in the 1930s on Shore Road, a winding stretch of western Bay Ridge with a mixture of architectural styles as varied and unlandmarked as the menu at a Greek diner: gingerbread split-levels and Art Deco apartments; villas in Spanish Mission stucco, modernesque quadrangles, and turret-capped high rises; suburban ranch homes, 1915 mansions, 1980s coop complexes, and Fort Hamilton High School, in 1940s Greek Revival and virtuous flanging brickwork.

AG James studied psychology as an undergraduate at Lehman College, named after former New York Governor Herbert Lehman, who in 1938 appointed a special prosecutor to lead a long and vigilant anti-corruption investigation in Brooklyn, which, akin to the January, 2021, suit filed in District Court by AG James against the NYPD, found cops committing crimes against the public.

A resident of Clinton Hill when elected to the City Council in 2003, AG James was the first candidate to win city office on the Working Families ticket, defeating both the Democrat and Republican runners. No third party candidate had gained a Council seat since the 1970s. Championing housing and public education, Councilwoman James was later re-elected as a Democrat. Preferring to be called “Tish” by friends and colleagues, Councilwoman James was supposedly addressed more than once by Mayor Bloomberg as “Trish.” Bloomberg also put salt on his pizza; and the mass arrests at the 2004 Republican Convention when he was mayor are cited in AG James’ civil suit against the City as proof of systemic NYPD abuses.

In 2006, Councilwoman James advocated for landmark designation of 70 Lefferts Place, a suburban Italianate villa built in 1854 and targeted for demolition. The house was purchased in 1939 by the Peace Mission Movement, founded and led by Father Divine, a rousing preacher who owned vast real estate, forbade smoking, drinking and sex, and grew from a young root-and-branch pulpiteer living in the Pigtown waterfront ghetto of Baltimore, to buying a mansion in Hyde Park across the Hudson River from President FDR. In the late 1910s - around the time of this 1916 photo - Father Divine established a co-op housing group and employment agency for African-American New Yorkers on Myrtle Avenue. By the time of his purchase of 70 Lefferts Place - which served as an abode for “Miss Patience” and “Miss Kindness,” two of the Movement’s followers (known as “angels”) until 1981 - Father Divine had evaded several attempts at criminal conviction by white authorities. The speeches of Father Divine brimmed with invented words like “tangeblated” and “physicalating” to express new awareness. “God rematerialates and repersonifitizes!”

Councilwoman James was a fervent advocate against the Atlantic Yards real estate project at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue, which 22-acre, $4.9 billion redevelopment remains ongoing after completion of Barclays Center sports and entertainment plaza, the project centerpiece. The arena also served as a site of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Summer 2020, where violent conduct by law enforcement formed the basis of the recent court case against the city. “More than 1,300 complaints and pieces of evidence” against the NYPD are cited relating to the multitude of protests that took place in New York City beginning on May 28, 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis. A former hub of storefront businesses, walk-up multiple dwellings, and gas stations, Atlantic Yards remains the location of a humongous trainyard for the Long Island Railroad, and has since been renamed, in honor of bi-oceanic public space, Pacific Park.

The Office of the Attorney General is conducting a civil investigation of the Trump Organization for “potential fraud or illegality” related to real estate transactions, including 40 Wall Street, built in 1929 as the Bank of Manhattan Building and profiled in a 2016 Bloomberg article titled “Inside Trump’s Most Valuable Tower: Felons, Dictators and Girl Scouts.” The Bank of Manhattan itself was founded in 1799 when Aaron Burr - later the Vice President under Thomas Jefferson - formed a water company to provide the city fresh H2O during a yellow fever epidemic, but instead built a slapdash waterworks and used most of the money to form the financial institution that today is Chase Bank.

In a 2020 profile by Vanity Fair, AG James was asked to identify a “single case that, over the years, stands out as a hallmark of her work as a legal advocate.” Tish responded, “her victory last June that barred ICE officers from making arrests in New York state courthouses.”