Charles H. Tenney, 83, Judge and Deputy Mayor
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Charles H. Tenney, a senior judge in the Federal District Court in Manhattan and a former deputy mayor under Robert F. Wagner, died yesterday at his home in Islip, L.I. Mr. Tenney, who also had an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was 83. The cause was cancer, said Marguerite T. Embry, his daughter. For a decade and a half, until his death, he was a senior judge of his court, to which he was first named in 1964. Judge Tenney was a close friend of Mayor Wagner, who held office from 1954 to 1965. They were classmates at Yale College and roommates at Yale Law School. In 1955, he joined the Wagner administration as Commissioner of Investigation. He went on to be Corporation Counsel — the city’s chief lawyer — and then City Administrator before taking the job of Deputy Mayor-City Administrator until he became a judge. In his years on the bench, Judge Tenney presided over several highly publicized cases involving the issue of racial discrimination. In 1991, he signed a settlement ending a housing discrimination suit that was part of a feud involving different groups of Brooklyn residents. In the settlement, the New York City Housing Authority agreed to accept only black or Hispanic applicants for vacancies over several years in three housing projects, all in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where 68 percent of the residents were Hasidic Jews. In 1980, the judge issued an injunction barring a Brooklyn housing development, Bedford Gardens, from using a racial quota to favor Hasidic Jews over blacks and Puerto Ricans in the renting of apartments. More : query.nytimes.com |