When Hortense graduated from law school, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression and there were few job opportunities, particularly for a young female lawyer. She finally found a position at Stern & Rubens, a small firm that specialized in copyright law. She was fired after a few months on the job, however, when her poor eyesight made it impossible for her to work the switchboard while the telephone operator and the male lawyers were at lunch. She eventually ended up working at her father’s firm, where she remained until a friend suggested in 1941 that she interview for a job with the city as an assistant corporation counsel under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. “The situation was so bad with men going off to the war, maybe they might have to take a woman,” she recalled a friend telling her at the time.
The importance of politics in getting a city job was explained to her during her job interview. After impressing the corporation counsel with her credentials, she was told to return with an “endorsement” from a local political leader. She picked up her “endorsement” from her father’s good friend, Judge Al Cohn, and soon started work for the city. She remained with the office of the city’s corporation counsel, writing mostly appeals, until 1944.
It was then, at age thirty-two, that she married Dr. Milton Gabel, a gentle and soft-spoken army dentist who was thirty-seven years old. Throughout her marriage he would be supportive of her political ambitions and her career.
Soon after their wedding the Gabels left New York for Camp Hood in Texas. Not one to sit around as an army wife, Hortense got a $60-a-week job as a reporter on the local paper, only to end up getting fired, she later said, after revealing a tax scandal involving some prominent members of the community. She then took a position doing public relations work at the army base.
When they returned to New York after the war and moved into a modest apartment on the Upper East Side, Hortense once again found it difficult to persuade law firms to hire her. “Since I had a good record I thought I would have no trouble, [but] I was told, oh, no, only male veterans were allowed.…”
Instead she became a volunteer for the American Jewish Congress, and at a dinner party in 1948 she met the group’s founder, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who talked about having recently formed an organization called the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing. A liberal Democrat, she flung herself into the cause, ultimately becoming the housing organization’s executive director. “It was such a breathtaking thing that you could dream that some day Negroes might have the chance to live wherever they wanted to,” she later told Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses. Moses was the powerful city official whose controversial public works projects over the years helped change the face of New York.
Soon after she took over the organization, in 1949, she gave birth, at age thirty-seven, to her only child, a daughter the Gabels named Julie Bess—Julie after the character in Showboat and Bess after Hortense’s mother. Unlike most women during the early 1950s, Hortense continued to work outside the home as the executive director of the state Committee on Discrimination in Housing. As she became increasingly involved in local Democratic politics, she hired a full-time nanny and cook to help her care for her baby daughter and look after the apartment.
In 1955, when Julie was six years old, Hortense entered state government, working under former governor W. Averell Harriman as general counsel to the New York State Rent Commission—the highest legal post in state government then held by a woman. Later that year she was promoted to deputy state rent administrator.
Highly regarded as a housing expert, she was invited by Mayor Robert F. Wagner to join his administration in 1959 as an assistant to the deputy mayor on housing issues. When she was appointed, her daughter’s fourth-grade class wrote letters of congratulations, and Julie accompanied her mother and father to City Hall for the swearing-in ceremony. Julie Bess, who would later change her name to Sukhreet, was beginning to show signs of an independent nature. “She’s proud of me,” her mother said at the time, “but she also expresses her own individuality. I remember that during the Ives campaign for governor she came to me and said, ‘Mother, I have to tell you I’m a Republican.’”
It was during the Wagner administration that Judge Gabel became known for her efforts to expose abuses of the urban renewal plans under Moses’ direction. She helped to preserve city neighborhoods and improve the quality of existing housing. During her tenure she was credited with preserving more than two hundred city blocks in six neighborhoods and saving the homes of some 150,000 residents.
Robert Caro called Hortense Gabel the only city official who would listen to the poor at the time and said, “I also found that she herself, at a time when it was really dangerous to do so, went all alone to some of these urban renewal sites which were then called the worst slums in the world to investigate for herself the living conditions there.”
Her political instincts were strong. When it looked as if a split in the city’s Democratic party might cost Wagner reelection, she reached out to party “reformers” and set up a group known as the New York Forum, designed to bridge the gap between reformers and regulars and help provide Wagner with sufficient political support to be reelected in November 1961 despite a divisive Democratic primary.
A few months later, on April 2, 1962, Mayor Wagner appointed Gabel to a $22,500-a-year job as head of the city’s new Rent and Rehabilitation Administration, where she was responsible for regulating the city’s 1.7 million rent-controlled apartments. With a staff of seven thousand inspectors, she was supposed to keep the city’s five million tenants of rent-controlled housing and their landlords happy, an almost impossible task. “I don’t know why I’m looking forward to this job—I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” she said at the time. “It’s probably the most devilish job in the world.”
In a “Woman in the News” profile in the next day’s New York Times, she was described as a “many-sided woman, with a gentle, maternal concern for friends and associates; an almost wistful idealism that neatly balances the desirable with the possible, a shrewd, tough political sense, and a driving ambition.”
The article said she seldom left those who came in contact with her indifferent. Either people liked her or they did not. “She is accused by those who dislike her as being too ambitious, too much the behind-the-scenes operator, too concerned with publicity.”
Most of the newspaper stories in those years were flattering pieces, the most glowing account appearing in the New York Times Magazine on August 12, 1962, titled “Lady Against the Slums.” Writer Gertrude Samuels depicted Hortense Gabel as a tireless crusader who dreamed of a “slumless New York” and expected her staff to be equally committed. “No one who meets Horty … can long remain unmoved by her personality, humor and convictions,” Samuels wrote. “Her detractors (and they are, not unnaturally, legion) are outraged by her political maneuverings. Her supporters point to her devotion to ordinary folk and to her practical idealism.”
The article made mention of Gabel’s family: her supportive husband and “their precocious brown-haired daughter Julie, who, says Horty, ‘is 13 years old going on 20.’”
At the end of 1965, when Mayor Wagner left office, Gabel left city government, spending the next several years as a housing consultant, lecturer, and member of various civic organizations. She remained politically active, however, and worked in 1969 for Mayor John Lindsay’s reelection campaign. The following year she did consulting work for the Lindsay administration, and in August Lindsay appointed her to a vacancy on the civil court in Manhattan.
She remained on the civil court until 1975, when Governor Hugh Carey appointed her at the age of sixty-three to fill a vacancy on the state supreme court. Her sponsor with Governor Carey was none other than former mayor Wagner, who had headed an independent judicial screening panel that the governor had set up. She retained the seat in the next election.
On the supreme court Judge Gabel built a record marked by compassion
and progressivism. She also devoted much time to acting as a mentor for young female lawyers, encouraging them to climb the judicial ladder, and helped found the National Association of Women Judges.
In April 1982, at age sixty-nine, Judge Gabel was assigned to oversee matrimonial cases in the state supreme court in Manhattan, one of the busiest jobs in the courthouse but something of a step down for someone who had been so feared and revered in the past. She was a motion judge who ruled on matters—such as temporary alimony and child support—that needed to be resolved before a divorce case was settled or went to trial.
At about the same time that Judge Gabel began presiding over divorce matters, her daughter, Sukhreet, announced to her parents that she was returning home from the University of Chicago.
After three years in the prestigious university’s Ph.D. program in sociology, Sukhreet had decided to drop out and turn her attention to finding a job that might put her on the path toward a career. Having failed to find a job in the Midwest, she was returning to New York for the first time in seven years to start what she hoped would be a new life.
Before Sukhreet even arrived home, Judge Gabel had immersed herself in a job search for her daughter, drawing up a list of prominent people she knew in government and big business to contact on Sukhreet’s behalf. While Judge Gabel and Sukhreet had had a difficult relationship over the years, Judge Gabel had the highest respect for her daughter’s intelligence. She made phone calls and wrote letters to virtually everyone she knew in a position of power and influence in New York to introduce “my interesting daughter, Sukhreet.”
Sukhreet’s life stood in sharp contrast to her mother’s. While the judge had made her way through a man’s world with a combination of brains, pluck, and determination, Sukhreet seemed to run into difficulties at every turn. While she was articulate, exceptionally bright, and well read, she had led a troubled life, marred by chronic depression and a divorce, and never seemed able to finish what she had started.
An only child, Sukhreet had grown up in the care of nannies while her mother was off fighting her battles with the city bureaucracy and her father was tending his dentistry practice. It was a lonely childhood in which Sukhreet felt excluded from her parents’ busy lives, unloved and unwanted. She tried hard to be “a good little girl,” as she described it, “but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t feel lovable. It wasn’t that I wasn’t given love. It was just not in the form my mind could use.”
From the time she was five years old, she moved in the company of adults, and she learned how to attract their attention by being precocious. At her parents’ dinner parties she played the role of the “world’s littlest cocktail waitress” to the prominent politicians and public officials who were their guests. “There’s Carmine the Sap,” she piped up in her little-girl voice the first time she was introduced to Tammany Hall Democratic kingpin Carmine DeSapio. “I was considered a tiny adult rather than a child myself,” Sukhreet remembered.
“She was very precocious,” says a longtime family friend whose daughter was a close friend of Sukhreet’s. “Too smart, actually, for her own good. I think children should grow up gradually, and Julie grew up too fast. She did not have a proper childhood.”
Dinnertime was especially trying for her as she sat through her mother’s long monologues about the latest skirmishes in city government. “My mother would ask, ‘Julie, how was your day?’ I would reply, ‘Hmpf.’ Then she would ask my father, ‘How was your day?’ My father would say, ‘Oh well, so-and-so was in the office. It was nice.’ And then he would say, ‘Dear, how was your day?’ And that was an excuse for Mother to launch into an hour-long diatribe about her day. My mother was a real natural political animal. She loves a good fight. There’s nothing she likes better. ‘And I said to him, and he said to me, and I said to him.’ It was this pitch-battle war over the dinner table, this intolerable battle.… And he could listen to it for a steady hour.
“Now that I can look back at it, I felt like a kid in a custody battle. There was a battle raging around me at all times. She was fighting with Robert Moses. She believed that she was on the side of the angels. It was a nightly struggle. It was so upsetting to my poor stomach that I would eat two candy bars and gobble up cookies after school so I would not be hungry and have to sit at that goddamn table. It was very tough for me. I had a hard life, truthfully.”
Invariably Sukhreet’s memories of her growing-up years are dark ones. When she was eleven, for instance, her parents moved to her mother’s sister’s house in Scarsdale for more than a year. Sukhreet’s young cousin had recently drowned, and eleven days later her uncle had dropped dead of a heart attack. Her mother nursed her aunt through these tragedies, taking her husband and daughter in tow. Sukhreet would later remember her aunt’s house as “the house of death.”
“When my aunt and my mother would cry,” Sukhreet later recalled, “I thought maybe they were wishing it had been me instead.”
For Sukhreet, being Horty Gabel’s daughter was not easy. There were enormous pressures to succeed. “You couldn’t just do something well. You had to do it better than anyone else.” As a teenager, Sukhreet had once mentioned to her mother that she was thinking of becoming an occupational therapist. “Maybe you could be the president of the hospital,” her mother suggested instead.
In school, however, Sukhreet had trouble following rules and finishing her work. By her own description she was “exponentially bright.” But her fourth-grade teacher recalled that Sukhreet didn’t perform up to her potential: “She was always daydreaming, fooling around. She never did her homework. She would apple-polish, bring in small gifts for the teacher to make up for not doing her work.” The teacher said she once brought up her concerns about Sukhreet to Hortense and Milton Gabel at a parent-teacher conference. “I remember telling Judge Gabel that there was some imbalance, something was wrong.”
Sukhreet believes that she suffered from depression as a child and that by the time she reached early adolescence her parents knew something was wrong. “People thought I was crazy. That it was all in my head. Depression makes you sad, and I was always sad. And my parents agonized over it. They didn’t know what to do with me.”
They sent her to psychiatrists, but a talking cure did not help, Sukhreet said. Then her parents enrolled her in the private United Nations School, attended by the sons and daughters of diplomats, hoping that Sukhreet might find the international flavor of the school stimulating and exciting. Instead Sukhreet found that she was “bored to tears.” Concluding that she was sufficiently self-educated and a “rather gifted child,” she dropped out in the middle of the tenth grade at age fifteen.
It was a rebellious step for the daughter of ambitious professionals. She said, though, that her parents didn’t argue with her decision. “My father was great about it. This was the mid-sixties, when everyone was doing his own thing. He said he had no choice. My mother was even more understanding. I think she understood that when I was good and ready I would go back. They did not know how to react to this strange bird who was their daughter. I wasn’t this conventional American teenager. I am sure that it was kind of disconcerting.”
In the spring of 1965 Sukhreet took a full-time job at the World’s Fair, manning a booth at the Indian Pavilion. She happily exchanged her skirts and dresses for saris, dyed her long hair black, painted a red dot on her forehead, and changed her name to Sukhreet, which means “one with the tradition of happiness.”
For the next few years she immersed herself in Indian culture, wearing saris as a symbol of her rebellion against her parents. She later said her Indian costumes allowed her to express her independence and yet maintain a relationship with her parents at that time. “I was an unsure adolescent who had been raised with a mixture of too much independence and too much overinvolvement. I look back on that period, which lasted about seven or eight years, and it was a perfectly logical way to meet my particular needs as an adolescent female.”
When Sukhreet was seven
teen, with the World’s Fair over, she worked as a ward clerk in a hospital. The depressions she believed had troubled her periodically even as a child grew worse. She recalls being so deeply depressed at one point that she suffered what she called hallucinations. One image that repeatedly entered her mind was of falling on her face and breaking her teeth. After she told her parents that she was experiencing hallucinations, they once again sought professional help for her. “My parents wanted to commit me to a mental hospital,” she said. “But I thought that if I went in there, I would start screaming and never stop.”
The depression gradually lifted, and Sukhreet went on to take a high school equivalency exam and study nursing at Bronx Community College. She tried her hand as a nurse for a few years but found that she didn’t like the job and quit.
During this time she always seemed to have a boyfriend and dated a lot of men, including two older men who later rose to political prominence in New York—state attorney general Robert Abrams and Mayor David Dinkins, who was elected on November 7, 1989.
Sukhreet says that she dated Dinkins, who was forty years old and married at the time, once or twice. Dinkins behaved like a “perfect gentleman,” although she admitted that they “kissed passionately one night in a doorway.”
Uncertain of what she wanted to do with her life, Sukhreet decided that she would like to spend some time traveling around the world and set her mind on saving money. For several years she worked as a tour guide at the United Nations. She even worked for a time at a massage parlor on New York’s West 57th Street until, she said, her mother found out what she was doing and insisted that she quit.
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