Democratic mayoral candidates appeared in the darkened basement of the Anatomy Bar in the East Village last night to field questions from a group of former supporters of Howard Dean who call themselves the New Democratic Majority. In the case of two of the contenders, the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, and a former Bronx borough president, Fernando Ferrer, the group seemed determined to accentuate the negative.

One audience member asked Mr. Miller what his “essence” was in running for mayor. Another asked the speaker, 35, how he counters critics who say he is just too young to be mayor.(His standard answer is that they said he was too young to be speaker, too.)

In Mr. Ferrer’s case, the first question focused on Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was mistakenly shot by police in 1999. Mr. Ferrer told a gathering of police officers in March that there was a rush to indict the policemen involved. Last night he said the fatal shooting was “in no way justifiable or just,” but he reminded the group that a jury had acquitted the police officers.

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Claiming the Bloomberg administration may have illegally endangered children at the Soundview Educational Campus in the Bronx, Fernando Ferrer is calling on state and city authorities to close the high school unless it can be proven safe before the start of the next academic year.

At a press conference at the campus yesterday, the Democratic mayoral candidate said construction of the high school on land formerly occupied by Loral Electronics, a defense contractor, has exposed students at the school – which opened last September – to toxic substances. The Bloomberg administration, Mr. Ferrer said, may have violated the Public Authorities Law by failing to obtain sufficient community input before overriding zoning laws to build the school there. According to the Ferrer campaign, because the community affected is almost all African-American and Latino, the potential violation of the law had a disparate impact on minorities and could constitute a violation of federal civil-rights laws as well.

The Bloomberg campaign referred requests for comment to the Department of Education, whose deputy chancellor, Kathleen Grimm, said in a statement: “We would never expose any of our children, teachers, or staff to unsafe learning or working conditions.” The department maintained that the Soundview site had been thoroughly tested and deemed safe before the school was built, and that it had solicited input from the community and the relevant health and environmental authorities.

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Mayor Bloomberg landed the endorsement yesterday of three small unions of employees of the New York Fire Department, in an event in Lower Manhattan. The Uniformed EMTs & Paramedics, the Uniformed EMS Officers Union, and the Fire Alarm Dispatchers Benevolent Association have about 3,000 active members. When the 2001 Democratic nominee, Mark Green, ran against Mr. Bloomberg, they were part of Mr. Green’s field team.