Dinner With Sal Albanese

That was in 1997. The candidate was Sal F. Albanese, then a city councilman from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Mr. Albanese ran gamely in the Democratic primary that year. He finished a respectable third, with 21 percent of the vote. So it was startling, to race forward to 2013, that when he reached once more for the brass ring, he ended up a dismal eighth among nine candidates in the latest primary. He fell short of even 1 percent. The Democratic nomination, as you know, went to Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, who had built his campaign around the concept that New York had turned into — what else? — a tale of two cities.

“I coined that phrase,” Mr. Albanese said over dinner in Bay Ridge a couple of nights after the primary. Then he caught himself. There was this English writer, after all, who beat him to it long ago.

“Charles Dickens coined it,” he said. “But I talked a lot about it.”

“The ‘tale of two cities’ penetrates now a lot more than it did in ’97,” Mr. Albanese said of the 2013 campaign. “Everywhere I went, people were asking me about affordable housing. The city has become unaffordable, across the board.”

Take the Rockaways, still reeling from Hurricane Sandy. “When I was on the A train,” he said, his voice like sandpaper, “people were telling me they can’t find a job because they can’t afford the subway fare to go into Manhattan. I got that from several people, which was shocking to me. Then you look at the numbers and — what? — 20 percent of the city is below the poverty line. That’s an awful lot of people. They’re totally abandoned and forgotten.”

Mr. Albanese was invited to break bread in part to find out what impelled him to keep plugging away, day after day, in the face of opinion polls that consistently put his chances of victory somewhere between zero and nil.

He had believed, he said, that he could “catch fire” as the campaign wore on. That is what happened in 1997. Maybe fire, unlike lightning, could strike twice. Obviously, Mr. Albanese figured wrong. There was no disguising his disappointment over “the worst result of any campaign that I’ve ever been in.”

He failed to raise enough money to qualify for matching public funds. As a consequence, he found himself frozen out of several important debates. He received — unfairly, in his view — little ink and almost no television time. “I actually got more press in Italy than I did here,” he said with a laugh. (Mr. Albanese, 63, was born in Calabria, near the toe of the Italian boot. His family moved to this country when he was 8.) Yet one could say that he was as solid a poor-performing candidate as New Yorkers have seen, so much so that this newspaper’s editorial board condemned his exclusion from an August debate, calling him “a thoughtful contributor” to the political dialogue.

With a résumé that includes 11 years as a public-school teacher, 15 years as a councilman and a decade at a financial services firm, Mr. Albanese is not easy to pigeonhole.

Like many a liberal, he talks a good deal about economic inequality. Back in his Council days he sponsored a bill, enacted into law over Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s veto, that required city contractors to pay their workers higher minimum wages.

Like many a conservative, Mr. Albanese defends the police and their tactics against attacks he considers wrongheaded. As for Michael R. Bloomberg, Mr. Albanese said at dinner that the mayor had run a “well-managed” city and would “be sorely missed.”

“But you can’t go into a war without bullets, and I didn’t have the resources to project out,” he said. “We never got into sort of a viability stage.”

Mr. Albanese suggested dining not far from his home, at Eliá, a Greek restaurant on Third Avenue off 86th Street. In Greek, the name means “olive.” He was enough of a regular for the owner, Pete Lekkas, to come over to his corner table and ask, “You’re rested now?”

“I didn’t lose any sleep throughout the entire race,” Mr. Albanese replied.

Dinner lasted a leisurely three hours, and included two glasses of wine each for Mr. Albanese (cabernet sauvignon) and his interviewer (malbec). Mr. Albanese started with a Greek salad, his tablemate with a dish of manouri cheese dumplings. Both had grilled branzino as the main course, and ended with decaf espresso. Mr. Lekkas sent over glasses of a dessert wine for a final touch.

As food arrived, Mr. Albanese said he had no clear idea what he would do next. Inevitably, the conversation returned more than once to the question of why he would put himself through the ordeal of so fruitless a campaign.

“Here’s what I thought,” he said. “I thought that, like in 1997, when people started seriously homing in on this campaign they would look at my qualification, look at my vision for the city, and we would begin to pick up steam. And I really still believe that if we had the resources, that would have happened.”

In 1997, he said, “I jumped 12 points in a week and a half. I said it’s going to happen in this campaign if we are able to get our message out.” But the cycle of meager news coverage, scant campaign funds and exclusion from key televised debates — each of those factors feeding the others — proved fatal. His message stayed corked in its bottle.

With apologies, a somewhat rude question called out to be asked: Might not some people, on hearing how he thought he could “catch fire,” reasonably wonder if he was delusional?

“I can’t blame them,” Mr. Albanese said. “Maybe it’s an outdated race, the 1997 race.” Nonetheless, he asserted, “it’s not delusional” to have thought the past could serve as a guide. “Also,” he said, “there’s the fact that every one of these candidates had very deep-rooted flaws,” the victor included.

“De Blasio became the last man standing,” he said. “I thought I was going to be the last man standing.” He laughed. He well recognized that all that truly endured from 1997 was “a tale of two cities.”

“It’s resonating,” Mr. Albanese said of the phrase as he sipped his wine. “This is the year. This is definitely the year.” High rents, rising transit fares, a city slipping out of the hands of the middle class — “that’s all you hear, everywhere,” Mr. Albanese said, adding, “Big Bill caught the wave.”

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