Met Council Mourns Brooklyn Activist Joseph Weiss
By Jenny Laurie

Many of us at Met Council were very sad to hear about the sudden death of Joe Weiss, a longtime member and tenant activist from Bay Ridge. Aside from being a regular at hearings, demonstrations and pickets, Joe served as a mentor to young tenant organizers at Met Council. He trained five organizers that I know of, and probably countless more before my time at Met Council.

While we were learning the book stuff (the legal rights of tenants, how to deal with the DHCR and court), Joe was the best at showing us how to do the people stuff. Nothing is quite as frightening as going to your first meeting with a group of angry tenants who are older than you and who know a lot more about tenant problems than you do. And nothing was more comforting that going to these meetings with Joe. Like a giant making soup, he would use his big voice to stir up the tenants, get them to focus their anger at the landlord, then calm them down and get them working together to find solutions.

Into his 80s, Joe was still making himself available to go to all ends of Brooklyn with new organizers (and old ones too if they asked). One of his last battles against the city was his attempt to get a street in Brooklyn named after Vicki O’Mara, his longtime love and the head of Met Council’s Bay Ridge branch, who died three years ago. I know that there is a heaven for tenant agitators and that Joe Weiss and Vicki O’Mara are reigning over it.