“Teddy Atlas, Staten Island Superman: Boxer Comes to the Rescue After Hurricane Sandy” featured Staten Island commentary by Richard Flanagan in the Huffington Post.

EXCERPTS:

For the last 16 years, [Teddy] Atlas has run a non-profit community service organization that provides financial and legal support to people in need, usually children. The Dr. Theodore A. Atlas Foundation, named after Atlas’ father, a physician, does a little of everything, from running youth boxing gyms and providing college scholarships to taking kids with cancer to the dugout at Yankee Stadium. People on Staten Island know that if they have a problem, they call Teddy.

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If Atlas is New York’s Robin Hood, Staten Island is its Sherwood Forest, mistrustful of the Manhattan aristocrats and their political institutions. Richard Flanagan, a professor at the College of Staten Island and the co-author of “Staten Island Politics: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City,” referred to the island’s “go-it-alone quality.”

“It’s this sense of separateness from the rest of New York City,” Flanagan said. “You’re not dependent on the city to save the day, so you really have to pull on local communities, and this community is rich with non-profits and other types of advocacy groups. It’s also a community that thinks it’s underserved by the city on a number of different areas.”

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