N.Y. lawmaker John Marchi championed Staten Island

Published 5:00 am Monday, April 27, 2009

John Marchi, whose 50 years as a state senator from Staten Island made him the longest-serving lawmaker in New York and one of the longest-serving state legislators in the nation, died Saturday while vacationing in Lucca, Italy, the home of his forebears. He was 87.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his wife, Maria Luisa Marchi, and other members of his family.

Marchi, a Republican who often ran with the endorsement of Democrats, retired in 2006 after 25 consecutive victories since he was first elected in 1956. He lost two New York mayoral races, to John Lindsay in 1969 and to Abraham Beame in 1973.

But Marchi was known as an effective advocate for New York, forceful in seeking federal loan guarantees and helping to craft the financial package that saved the city from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s. He was also a champion for Staten Island, the least populated of the city’s boroughs, with about 500,000 people, but also its most bucolic, with open areas that once were farms.

Like a distant village across New York Harbor, Staten Island has long been called a forgotten borough, neglected by city government, according to its residents. Indeed, Marchi’s popularity was partly a result of his sustained but unsuccessful efforts to win Staten Island’s independence from the city, a campaign that earned him the sobriquet “the Father of Secession.” Among his many honors, a new Staten Island ferry was christened the Sen. John J. Marchi in 2004.

“For five decades,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Sunday, “mayors of both political parties relied on John to represent the city’s interests in Albany — as the legislative architect of the state university system, as an advocate for equitable transportation and education funding, and on so many other vital issues, John was a true and far-sighted statesman.”

Malcolm Smith, the Senate majority leader, said of Marchi, “He had an unwavering dedication to the people he served, and Staten Island is an even better place to live because of his work.”

Marchi held conservative positions on most issues. Consistent with the teachings of his Roman Catholic faith, he opposed abortion and the death penalty, though many of his constituents favored capital punishment. He supported American involvement in the Vietnam War, calling anti-war demonstrations “a strike against America.”

In the 1990s, alarmed by an increase in the welfare rolls, he sought to change New York’s law to read that the state “may provide” rather than “shall provide” benefits. “If we don’t stop this welfare trend,” he said, “New York will be able to afford nothing else but welfare.”

He was born Giovanni Marchi on May 20, 1921, on Staten Island, the son of Luigi and Alina Girardello Marchi, who had emigrated from Lucca, a city in Tuscany. His father had been a sculptor but made a living making decorative waxed fruit.

He attended parochial schools on Staten Island, graduated with honors from Manhattan College in 1942, earned a law degree from St. John’s University in 1950 and received a doctorate from Brooklyn Law School in 1953. In World War II, he served with the Coast Guard on anti-submarine duty in the Atlantic and with the Navy in the Okinawa campaign in the Pacific.