The Social Democratic City

THE HABOR ECONOMY

Prince of the City

Bloomberg's Next Challenge

Bloomberg's Bedfellows

STUCK IN THE 60S or NEW YORK’S TOPSY-TURVY POLITICS 

THE PRINCE OF THE CITY

Rudy Awakening

Hold the Champagne

Reinventing Government

Harboring Greatness
 
 
 

The Social Democratic City

(from summer 2000 PUBLIC INTEREST)

-  Fred Siegel
 

Joshua Freeman,   Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II, New Press, New York

James Jacobs with Coleen Friel and Robert Radick, Gotham Unbound: How New York City was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime, New York University Press, New York

Evan Mandery,  The Campaign: Rudy Giuliani, Ruth Messinger, Al Sharpton, and the Race to Mayor of New York City, Westview, Boulder

Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, New York University Press, New York

Anthony King ed.,  Re-Presenting the City, New York University Press, New York

Janet Abu-Lughod, New York,  Chicago, Los Angeles: Americas Global Cities, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
 

-  Fred Siegel
 

        In 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson had broken in with the Dodgers and well before the rest of the country had begun to face up to the issue of racial integration, New York’s City College basketball team showed America the way to the future.  The team won game after game after game in Madison Square Garden, the same arena that was used for the city’s numerous political rallies on behalf  of  the CIO, the Communist Party, Negro freedom, freedom for the European colonies and numerous other left-wing causes. City College’s academic reputation as “the Harvard of the poor” suggested that egalitarianism and excellence need not always be at odds.  But it was the basketball squad  that made the school and  the Garden’s parquet arena the center of basketball in America much as the New York left hoped to take center stage in national politics. 
       The  team, which was compose of  the children of the city’s Jewish and Black working class, bested the all-white University of Kentucky squad  to win both the NCAA and NIT championships.  Coach Nat Holman and his players were local and national heroes.  In the neighborhoods of New York the victory was seen as a vindication of  the big city’s solidaristic social morality, a tale of how  the team ethic at CCNY overcame not only racial and ethnic barriers but class barriers as well.  This was surely New York at its best: the city, which like the country saw itself as representing an ideal, serving as a beacon for the entire nation.
       A year later college basketball and CCNY were rocked by a point shaving scandal.   At the behest of  bookies the players had not thrown games but they had altered the winning margins.   Here was the other side of New York, the city of hustlers, con men, mobsters and low lifes.  It was a time of shame and yet the response from the streets of New York was remarkably clear.  There was no psychologizing, rationalizing or special pleading about how the outlanders were out to get the city boys.  Instead the cry went up that  “they (the players)  betrayed us,”  “they had let us down.”
        The social solidarity of 1950s New York, complete with images of Willie Mays playing stickball in the streets of the Bronx, has exerted an extraordinary sway over the city’s imagination.   New York, at its finest, seemed to represent the best that a left wing political culture had to offer;  it was both egalitarian and, despite a substantial Communist presence, deeply democratic. 
      Almost all of the many new books on post war New York - there are so many as to be almost an avalanche- either explicitly or implicitly play off  the glory of  the post-war city.  None of them however do the two things that are essential for understanding the city’s political culture over the last half-century.   They neither  explain how and why New York came to represent an alternative ideal to much of the nation, nor do they show why that ideal broke down and what happened when it did. 
      Western European politics took a left turn at the end of World War II.   The political and economic failures which produced the war discredited traditional elites.  For the most part the  U.S. was different.   World War Two restored  America’s faith in big business and revived American exceptionalism, except in New York.  For most Americans, fears of big government limited the size and scope of New Deal programs.  In Gotham, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia planned for the post-war years on the basis of a permanent New Deal, policies  which largely continue down to this very day. 
       The broad support for La Guardia’s civic vision drew on the experience of several generations which because of immigration restriction hadn’t been roiled by the massive arrival of new  immigrants and had bonded together in the common struggle  against the Great Depression and fascism.  In the early 1940s while the US and USSR were allied in the war against fascism, a trade delegation from the Soviet Union, dressed in  its diplomatic finery, went to visit New York's  Mayor,  Fiorello La Guardia.  Something of a socialist himself, La Guardia looked at the Soviet diplomats and then at his own baggy paints and frayed shirt:  "Gentleman," he said, “I represent the proletariat." 
       In the 1930s it was joked that New York was the one part of the Soviet Union where open debate was possible.   At the war’s end that open discussion had produced an accommodation, if not with the whole of America, than at least with the left-wing version of the New Deal. "There's no need talking about Leninism, Trotskyism, and other theories and theoreticians,” explained Sidney Hillman, the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, confidante of FDR and a force in New York politics. "Organized labor,” he went on,  “represents the hard core around which all progressive action must be built. But it (labor) has no program and objectives which are not shared by the great majority of forward-looking Americans."

       Joshua Freeman’s Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since WWII, is probably the most important of the recent books on Gotham.  It barely mentions La Guardia and Hillman  but it picks up the story in 1945 as W.W. II ends and a wave of strikes began.
With London, Paris and Berlin left devastated by the war, New York,  stood at perhaps the peak of its power.  Yet it was still something of a 19th century city, frozen in time by the Depression and its aftermath.  Freeman describes a city where pot bellied stoves for home heating and ice blocks delivered daily for refrigeration were still common.  New York was  honeycombed with unions large and small like the Russian Bath Rubbers and the Wholesale Paint Salesman.  Three weeks after the war ended one of the smaller unions, the elevator operators, went out on strike.  And thanks to a show of solidarity by the city’s 250,000 garment workers who shut down their own industry, the elevator operators won highly favorable terms at a cost to the city economy of $100 million. 
       Fretting under the restraints of the war time price controls which were still in place, strikes by telegraph operators, truckers, bakers, motion picture projectionists, meat packers, dock workers and most devastating of all the tug boat operators followed.  At a time when there were no pipelines connecting New York to the Texas oil fields and large scale imports of oil had not begun, the tug boat operators,  who delivered 65% of the city’s coal and 95% of its fuel oil  controlled one of the city’s lifelines.  Mayor William O’Dwyer, a friend of both labor and elements of the mob, closed the public schools, ordered homes to be kept at 60 degrees, shut the restaurants and theaters and eventually brought the city through what the Times called “the most drastic disruption in the city’s life since the Civil War draft riots.” 
       O’Dwyer is a fascinating figure who Freeman unfortunately slights.  He was mayor from 1945 to 1950, the moment when both left wing politics and mob influence were at their peak.  A former Brooklyn D.A., O’Dwyer, as Jim Jacobs notes in Gotham Unbound: How New York was liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime,  played a hand in bringing down the Jewish mob.   O’Dwyer built on the case made by  crusading prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey to win  the conviction of  prominent labor racketeer Jacob “”Gurrah” Shapiro for murdering a truck driver in the garment district.  This open the door for the Lucchese crime family to gain control of trucking in the garment industry.
      A fervent left wing New Dealer,  O’Dwyer governed as if the return of the Depression was imminent.  “The country,” he warned, “is in the midst of a titanic struggle between those who believe in the people’s welfare and those who believe in big business and special privilege.”  He won reelection in 1949 by boasting that in his first term he had staved off the economic tides with a public works program that built a new school and a new housing project in every month of his first term.   A year later he suddenly resigned to become President Truman’s ambassador to Mexico.   He had  had been forced out of office as his connections with a variety of  Italian mob figures from Albert Anastasia to Frank Costello, (a kingpin in both Tammany and on the waterfront) came under scrutiny. 
         Like the New Dealers who were both loyal Americans and sympathetic to the Soviet union,  O’Dwyer was  a good leftist  and entangled with the mob.   Both as the almost simultaneous CCNY scandals suggested, were integral parts of  the city’s working class political culture.   And often there was little contradiction between the two. 
      In his classic essay “Crime as an American Way of Life” Daniel Bell notes that one reason that urban machines could take left wing stances is that they sometimes allowed the mob to finance their campaigns rather than becoming beholden to “moneyed interests.”   Both the mobs and the unions took advantage of  New York’s geography.   A fast-moving but congested city built on an island of narrow streets and tall buildings, Gotham’s innumerable bottlenecks were opportunities for the unions to apply economic pressure and for the mob to engage in shakedowns.   At the time it seemed not to matter all that much.  New York, said  author John Gunther in 1948, was with one million people employed in industry,  “incomparably the greatest manufacturing town on earth.”  O’Dwyer’s fears not withstanding, post-war  New York was on top of the world.
        Freeman  is better, though contradictory at times, in describing the city’s first left-wing civil war between the Communist and the anti-Communist left; the second civil war within the left would come in the 1960s.    Freeman, a man of the left himself, clearly admires the sheer militance of the Communists particularly when it came to their pathbreaking role in the struggle for black freedom.  But  Freeman takes a miniaturized  view of the fight between Communists and anti-Communists when he tells us that  “nominally the fight over Communism concerned ideology” but it was really about a “local struggle for jobs, political influence, and cultural hegemony.”  A few pages later he changes course and argues that “the CP and its allied groups - as liberals and socialists bitterly discovered - threatened at all times to hijack mass organizations and manipulate coalitions while remaining invulnerable to counter-measures short of all-out anti-democratic action.”
       The book breaks new ground  when it describes the relatively limited impact of the Communists defeat in New York’s civil war.   “Once ties to Stalinism became unacceptable,” he notes,  “many of the CP militants were quickly reintegrated back into the left-wing of the labor movement after only a perfunctory break with” Communism.  The upshot was that ”even at the height of the Cold War , the Communist party-left and the” anti-Communist-liberals “put forth similar positions on most domestic issues like national health insurance, rent control and federal aid to education,” black rights and cultural pluralism.  “The greatest threat of the Communist Party-left,” he concludes, “lay not in its program but in its structure, in its Leninism rather than its Marxism.”
      The city’s “Marxism” was based, not as Marx’s economism had assumed on the common experience of work in massive mills, mines and manufactories, but on an ideology, often ethnically inscribed, of politics as ceaseless struggle.   It expressed itself in  the belief as one union official put it that “our food bills are not a solely economic but also a political matter” subject to militant action.  In practical terms this asserted itself in the politicization of prices.  War time rent controls, which sometimes kept landlord incomes below the price needed to maintain their property, were made permanent.  Similarly, after the city took over the once private subway lines, fares were kept at a nickel even though that meant that as with housing, repairs were either delayed or ignored.
      With the civil war over, the largely reunited left went about creating social democracy in one city.   Gotham, says Freeman, had a “hybrid form of municipal social democracy . . . that included state action, an ever increasing range of services provided directly by unions, and huge labor linked (housing) co-operatives and service organizations.”   The achievements were impressive.  The ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) had pioneered in the development in workers co-operative housing built by the UHF (United Housing Foundation), just as NYCHA (the New York City Housing Authority) led the way in developing public housing nationally.   In health, the ILGWU was similarly in the forefront.  Its first health clinic was established in 1913, while the co-operative movement with which the ILGWU was associated established the first group health benefits plan GHI ( Group Health Insurance) in 1939.  For its part, the city , led by La Guardia offered the first pre-paid health insurance plan, HIP, in 1944.   HIP  practiced preventative medicine with a fixed fee plan that encouraged doctors visits.  If hospital stays were necessary  the city’s 22 municipal hospitals were available.   Between the collective or cooperative provision of housing and services and the rising wages  unions won for their workers, New York’s working class dramatically improved its lot during the 1950s; even if in  the midst of all the acronyms they sometimes lost sight of the private sector economic growth that made it all possible.
       If Freeman had stopped in the early 1960s, Working Class New York would have been a strong candidate for the short shelf of books on twentieth century New York.   But just as the city fell apart in the late 1960s, so does the book. 
       New York’s hybrid social democracy was based in large measure on a balance between mutuality and militance.  Mutuality meant more than the fact that people should stand up for another.  Mutuality was demanding, it required reciprocity so that people who took without giving were likely to be assailed as bums or free-loaders.  And since freedom was seen in part as a co-operative enterprise, the chislers who didn’t carry their weight, (an economist, would have described them as free-riders), were a threat to the entire social order.  Militance, on the other hand, was a one-way street.  It was what you were entitled to.  It abided by few rules and it was what you demanded of others, of bosses, or racial oppressors, not what you also asked of yourself. 
       What Freeman can not come to grips with is that  the mid-1960s and early 1970s in New York can be best described as a period when the institutions of mutuality created by the civic vision of La Guardia and the unions were torn apart by racial, union  and tenant militancy in what amounted to an ongoing series of  suicidal civil wars within the left.   The Co-Op City story is a case in point of the left’s relentless militance turning against its own institutions.  This vast housing complex in the Bronx begun by Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Moses was built by Abraham Kazan of the United Housing Foundation which had been building cooperative projects since the 1920s. The UHF built  40,000 units of housing from the 1940s into the 1960s.  The sense of solidarity fostered by depression and war was already weakening, Kazan noted, when he and others in the UHF found that Co-Op city residents had carried their sense of entitlement, their “rent control mentality” cultivated in years of battling with landlords into what was fated to be the last of the co-operative projects.   The tenants,  “philosophically attuned to the idea that rents are political,” extended the class struggle into the homes they owned in common.  Led by the Maoist Charles Rosen, a group of militants pulled the tenants into a prolonged rent strike.  When the UHF was forced to withdraw and hand the development over to New York State, Rosen celebrated the phyrric victory by announcing “we beat the bastards.”  It was the beginning of decades of financial struggles for the deluded tenants and the end of the city’s co-operative housing tradition. 
      The irony eludes Freeman, who is much enamored of militancy, and the notion  that “power could be found in the streets.”  Even in retrospect, Freeman is heartened by the Harlem riots of 1963, and 1964, which he sees as the signs of a “a rebirth of mass politics.”  They were also  a sign of the explosion in crime which would rend the city and push even those who didn’t want to leave to the suburbs. 
       Beginning in his chapters on the1960s Freeman ceases  writing history and begins what is at best reductionist pamphleteering.  Crucial elements in the decline of the social democratic city - the explosion in violent crime, the enormous expansion of the welfare rolls, and the collapse of the public school system are systematically ignored.   We get an account of how in 1965 the city social welfare workers went out on strike asking not only for higher salaries, but higher benefits for  the clients as well.  But there is literally not a word on how or why in a rapidly growing economy where New York unemployment ran at 4% or less, well below the national average, the welfare rolls roughly doubled to one million between 1965 and 1970.   Leaving aside the long term calamitous effects of the welfare expansion on those it was supposed to help, this is no  small matter.   The militancy, that is the threat of  renewed riots which lay behind the explosion of the welfare rolls in a time of labor shortages only intensified the widespread sense among the white working class that the city’s social contract was being violated. 
      The Lindsay administrations’ successful attempts to recruit new people on to welfare left many baffled.   While Mayor John Lindsay’s welfare commissioner Mitchell Ginsburg announced that  he had “always viewed the cost of welfare to be whatever it is,” taxes were rising rapidly not to meet the harshness of the business cycle but to pay for a planned disaster.  Much of white and black working class New York could not understand why the city’s elites would encourage welfare over work.   “Pulling ones own weight,” explained the residents of working class Canarsie to sociologist Jonathan Reider, “was a natural complement to a co-operative society in which all shouldered their burdens.”
       The black leaders of the early 1960s like the Reverend Milton Galamison were justifiably angered at what they saw as the white hypocrisy of proclaiming New York an open and egalitarian city when racial if not racist practices excluded blacks from positions in the fire department and the skilled construction trades. But such exclusion was more the exception  than the rule.   Freeman, like many historians of the period does not recognize that African-Americans, who had not been able to vote in the South and had limited experience in practical politics,  brought some of  the violent Southern traditions of  winner take all politics to New York.  New York, which had had a civil rights movement well in advance of the country,  was nonetheless described as “upsouth” by people like Galamison.
       The city’s broad and vigorous attempts to integrate the schools were defeated less by racism than by the concatenation of a  vast black in-migration and the movement of upwardly mobile whites, seeking greener pastures, into the suburbs.   Galamison, who sent his son to a private school, insisted that rather than back off from his vaguely stated demands for total integration, he "would rather see it (the public school system) destroyed."   He got his wish.   At a time when violence inside the schools was rising at a frightening rate, Galamison brought the threat of violence to demonstrations that were supposedly held to save the schools.   Galamison notwithstanding, few were prepared for the violence that accompanied  Mayor John Lindsay’s Ocean-Hill Brownsville experiment in what were essentially black nationalist schools. 
       The Ocean-Hill Brownsville controversy  began as a  Ford Foundation inspired  and  United Federation of Teachers supported effort to give black neighborhoods greater control over their schools.   But when the local Superintendent in the designated Brooklyn district, Rhody McCoy, a follower of both Malcom X and the Afro-fascist Marcus Garvey, peremptorily fired a group of white teachers, the experiment provoked a series of  strikes that left the city bitterly divided 
      The sin of the white teachers was not that they were racist in any conventional sense. The teachers union long a part of labor-left politics in New York had been an active supporter of both the civil rights movement in the South and black causes in New York.  Their failing according to the black nationalists of McCoy’s district was that they supported an integrationist and acculturative curriculum designed (with mixed success) to bring children a half generation removed from the backwoods of the American South into the New York economy.    The teachers were intimidated and beaten for their troubles by students inspired by the thugish Sonny Carson.  The mayhem was an inspiration for the young Al Sharpton.
       Neither the New York Times nor John Lindsay, who told teachers union president Al Shanker that he was afraid of a riot if the thugs were restrained, were at the time willing to acknowledge the violence.  Freeman has no such excuse, yet he too ignores it.  The upshot of the strikes and confrontations that followed is that what was probably the best big city public school system in the U.S. fell apart, never, tragically for the fate of New York’s school children black and white, to be repaired.   The fall of City College came close behind as the threats of violence brought an end to entrance requirements and flooded the college with ill-prepared students of all races.
       In the name of remedying racism, one by one the institutions which had allowed the white working class to rise in relation to the city’s economy, and might have worked decently for blacks as well, were torn apart.  Under the best of circumstances absorbing a vast population of new arrivals, even had they been white, would have been extremely difficult.  But in almost every case the militants cures for the city’s racism proved worse than the disease. 
       What black nationalists abetted by white liberals were doing to the schools, the public sector unions were doing to New York’s economy.  Beginning in 1958 when the city public employee unions were granted the right to unionize by Mayor Wagner - Chicago wouldn’t grant these rights until the 1980s  - the militance once aimed at private owners targeted the city treasury.
       New York, for all of its many social democratic institutions, had kept  costs and hence taxes in check.  But after Wagner came to depend on the municipal unions for re-election in 1961 caution was thrown to the winds.   Government employment, the vast bulk of which was local, grew from 347,000 in 1950 to 408,000 in 1960 on to 563,000 in 1970.   It grew by 92,000 just between 1966 and 1970 as 4/5th of all new jobs were in government.  By 1970, Freeman approvingly notes  that “there were more employees in city government than the garment, banking and longshore industries put together.”   As the number of workers grew, their militancy intensified.  Freeman proudly describes the late 60s and early 70s as the golden age of strikes.  In “strike city” transit workers, teachers, sanitation men, the performers at the Metropolitan Opera, and  postal workers all walked out, while the police and firemen engaged in systematic slowdowns.   The higher pay and shorter working hours won by the municipal workers compared favorably with private sector employment.  And when work rule changes and the superior health (fully paid for  by the city), pension, and vacation packages were added in, city expenditures jumped dramatically so that the city was paying more to get less.
       La Guardia, who pledged to make New York a “one hundred percent union” town, and was the first to project a civic vision of the worker’s city, nonetheless had doubts about public employee unions.   “I do not want any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold,” he exclaimed.  City workers, he hoped would be the peoples workers setting an example of dedicated service for everyone else.  Had he been alive, he no doubt would have been horrified in the June heat of 1971 when Barry Feinstein and Victor Gotbaum of AFSCME instructed their workers at city waste treatment facilities to walk off their job, allowing  raw sewage to pour into the city’s waterways. 
      "There is no question about it," Gotbaum boasted, we ( the municipal labor leaders) have the ability to elect our own boss." 
They did, and as they voted themselves more money and shorter hours they, along with the vast expansion of the welfare rolls, drove  taxes up and business out of New York.  In the aftermath of the militant 60s with its threat of riots and its  strike wave,  New York lost 35% of its manufacturing and 16% of its overall jobs, roughly 700,000 in all.
       New York’s precipitous collapse, borne by an unhinged militancy, both sped up and deepened the decline of manufacturing.   With a few exceptions like Los Angeles manufacturing has declined sharply in most  of America’s cities.  But no city did so much to actively drive manufacturing away. If Freeman had done a better job of class analysis, he would have observed that the city’s financial leaders had, without conscious coordination, been doing their share along with the municipal unions to drive manufacturing from the city.   In the 1950s while new highways and non-union low tax  states were luring away the city’s manufacturers, Gotham’s financial elites led by the Rockefellers and informed by the Regional Plan Association were doing everything they could to push manufacturing out of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn.  New York, it was argued was going to become a white collar services town and the sooner the better
      The 1970s were the end of New York’s white working class as more than a million fled the city during that decade.  What remained was the dual city much decried by standard-issue leftists like Freeman.  In the dual city there are two primary types of employment; first there are the high end businesses like financial services, which much to Freeman’s regret had avoided unionization, and were able to weather the city’s high costs; and then there was the vast array of government social services and health care jobs which employed the bulk of the black and Latino working class.  Manufacturing. which had been for so long the means to working class mobility,  was not just reduced but virtually eliminated under the heavy costs of  the city’s oversized public sector.
      If  Freeman’s view were merely those of an eccentric academic they would be of little import.   But his totemization of  struggle represents one of the few strong currents in New York’s often stagnant politics.  What has happened is that while  over time the objects of militance have changed, the lure of “activism” remains largely unabated.  Alex Rose of the Hatters Union was one of the first to see that the idea of struggle took on a new meaning when public sector "workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes."   Over time the idea of struggle became almost a reflex.  When Bella Abzug, then out of Congress, was attempting one of her political comebacks in the 1980s, she was asked what she would do about the need to raise subway fares to repair a system in near collapse.   She responded indignantly that she would fight the fare increase by leading a protest.  In fact, she suggested that despite her advanced age she might lead a mass movement to jump the turnstiles.  Actually there was no need since the system was already losing millions of dollars from fare jumpers.
        In a number of new books that deal with New York the object of  struggle becomes even more elusive.  In an essay on the global city in Re-Presenting the City, a collection of postmodern essays edited by Anthony King, Saskia Sassen transposes the now not-so-visible class struggle into contemporary “contestations” over space.  Displaying a remarkable ability to sniff out class conflict in the most unlikely places, she espies it in the clash between lower middle class and upper middle class shoppers on 14th street.  In Janet Abu-Lughod’s book America’s Global Cities,  the class struggle is similarly given a spatial interpretation.  This xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a Marxist argument which is, according to the author, organized around “landscapes of terrain” and “inherited armatures of passage,” not surprisingly gets the story exactly backward.   In this postmodern but heavily footnoted tale, New York’s welfare state has fallen victim to the new international geography of finance capital.  Actually it's the wealth of the financial services sector which indirectly funds the city’s vast array of social services. 
       Samuel Delany a native New Yorker and sometimes professor of English see a contemporary class war raging in “the structure of discourse.”  But Delany, a student of Marx and Foucault, sees gay casual sex in 42d street movie theaters as the source of interclass healing and as the quintessence of democracy.  In Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,  the Midnight Cowboy days were the areas finest moment and redevelopment is excoriated as a capitalist plot against homosexuals. 
       New York activists and academics are engaged in a relentless search for substitute proletarians and their anger generated energy.   They’ve never come to grips with what 60s militance wrought.  In the 1980s, the Coalition for the Homeless and its allies inspired by the “success” of the campaign to expand the welfare rolls in the 1960s, tried to duplicate that feat.  They presented drug and alcohol-addicted "homeless" New Yorkers as hard working average folks who had lost her apartment after being downsized by heartless corporations.  Their aim, as in the 60s, was to capsize the city’s budgets and social service agencies with a vast expansion of programs and housing.   If these needs were not met, warned advocate Jonathan Kozol, riots were imminent.  "This many poor families, mothers, fathers and children,” he intoned, “ are not going to remain silent and passive forever.  There is an enormous anger building up in these shelters and the streets." 
      The great difficulty of talking about class conflict in New York, other than the fact that it’s been largely absent in recent years, is that race has replaced class as the focus of political conflict.   After the relative social peace of the Koch years, the  sort of  anger Kozol referred to burst open again along racial lines with riots in Washington Heights and Crown Heights during the early 1990s when David Dinkins was mayor. 
      When young Evan Mandery signed on to be the research director of the Ruth Messinger campaign for Mayor against the incumbent Rudy Giuliani in 1997, the idealistic  suburbanite was surprised to discover that “the idea of addressing New Yorkers as citizens with potentially common public interests, rather than as members of various constituencies (blacks, gays, Latinos), seems to have been vacuumed out of today’s Democratic Party in the city.” In his book The Campaign: Rudy Giuliani, Ruth Messinger, Al Sharpton, and the Race to be Mayor of New York 
Mandery notes that while Messinger is nominally a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she is more of an  heir to the traditions of  the 1960s when  race became the “Rosetta Stone” of  city politics.   Mandery quotes Jim Andrews, the veteran political consultant who ran the Messinger campaign, on the real meaning of Giuliani’s effort to clear the bridge and tunnel approaches - the motorists bottlenecks - of aggressive panhandlers.
Do you know what Rudy Giuliani was saying back in 1993 when he said he was going to get rid of squeegeemen?  “He was telling every white person in NYC that he was going to close the sluice gates at 125th St.  Rudy was saying that he was going to make sure that they stay where they belong - up in Harlem and the Bronx.
      Race, Andrews concluded “isn’t just part of politics, it is politics.”  And to prove his point Mandery spends much of the book expressing his admiration, despite some doubts, for the Reverend Al Sharpton who nearly forced Messinger into a run-off for the Democratic nomination.  The basis of the doubts are clear enough. Sharpton is a racial demagogue who polarized the city over false accusation of rape in the Tawana Brawley hoax.  Later Sharpton and his aide Morris Powell an escaped mental patient, helped incite the murder of eight people on 125th Street in the name of driving “white interlopers” out of Harlem.  But like Messinger who reached out to Sharpton, Mandery is able to swallow his doubts about the Reverend, who, after he was defeated for the nomination tried to shake down the Messinger campaign for cash as the price of his endorsement. 
      What makes Sharpton so appealing and a central figure in New York politics, though most of the new books on New York fail to mention him, is that the Reverend carries on the tradition of militant protest. He “fights the power” however ill-defined and as such he is sacrosanct, independent of his deeds. 
      New York is today a city without a civic ideal except those occasionally imposed by the brute force of  Mayor Giuliani’s personality.   New York’s activists who like to talk, as does Freeman,  of the city’s “exceptionality”  were enraged when Giuliani spoke of the need to make New York  “more like the rest of America.”  For Giuliani this was a recognition of the city’s failed political tradition, for others  it was a betrayal of what Mario Cuomo called “the New York idea.” 
       In his darkest moments Mandery wonders if Giuliani hasn’t “changed the very nature of New York politics.”  He needn’t worry.   Some problems resolve themselves , containerization, for instance, reduced corruption on the docks.  Giuliani, first as D.A. and then as Mayor, Jacobs notes,  reduced the mob tax on the city economy.  But there is no solution in sight for the city’s long lived love affair with the idea of  struggle, be it class or racial.   In this post-modern version of the permanent revolution, Samuel Delany is on to something; achievements are secondary to periodic moments of political excitement ending in explosive catharsis.   Gotham’s dysfunctional political culture, the bastard heir of a once great tradition, shows no sign of resolving itself.   Or as Ruth Messinger put it quoting the Grateful Dead “what a long strange trip it has been.”

Fred Siegel is a Senior Fellow at The Progressive Policy Institute 
and the author of  The Future Once Happened Here: New 
York, D.C. L.A. and the Fate of America’s Big City, an Encounter 
Books paperback.
 
 
 
 

Joel – this was written for a Newman Inst Conference:  key point social spending crowded out infrastructure spending …this produced great hostility from some of the people  who will be in your audience

                                                   -  FS
 

THE HABOR ECONOMY

Rebuilding:
The Idea of the City: The Present Crisis in Perspective

Fred Siegel

The fate of Lower Manhattan has always been intimately intertwined with the well-being of Brooklyn and the New Jersey waterfront. Greater New York, “the Empire City,” created by the merger of Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1898, was a product of the harbor economy. Before there was a Times Square or a Grand Central Station, Lower Manhattan, then ringed with docks, was oriented to the railroads and factories of the Jersey coast to its west and the merchants and manufacturers of Brooklyn across the East River. The story of Lower Manhattan in the years since is, in large measure, a reflection of the fall of that harbor economy as first Manhattan and then its partners in Brooklyn and Jersey City deindustrialized. 

Still, there’s cause for optimism. In the last two decades, the old harbor economy of trade and industry, severed by the collapse of manufacturing, has been reknit on the basis of the service economy. By the middle of the 1970s, even as New York was at its nadir, the growth in service sector jobs began to exceed the decline in manufacturing jobs. In recent years, service sectors in which the city is strong have been growing and are likely to continue growing even faster than business activity is dispersing. And despite the impact of 9/11, New York continues to attract the key element of the modern economy, talented people; college applications are up for next year.

We forget that in the late 1990s there was a vigorous competition to be declared the sixth Borough of New York: Drawn by the dynamism of the New York City economy, Fairfield County, Connecticut, just to the northeast of the Big Apple, has now surpassed the Hartford area as the state’s largest county. And Fairfield’s fast growing city of Stamford, home to numerous Wall Street hedge funds, is now functioning as “the sixth borough of New York,” according to New Haven Mayor John DeStefano. To the west, across the Hudson, Fairfield has a competitor for sixth borough status in Jersey City, which grew by 12,000 to 240,000 in the 1990s. Even before 9/11, Jersey City’s waterfront was booming with Wall Street firms, including Chase Manhattan. And even seemingly far away Philly is in the hunt, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Hughes, who explains that the “connection is so good that the area around the 30th Street train station becomes a virtual Sixth Borough of New York.” 

In the midst of or current woes, it’s important to remember that for all the worries about office vacancies and the decentralization of economic activity since 9/11, other cities including Orlando and Las Vegas have been hit even harder. The entire country, notes the Wall Street Journal in early 2002, “experienced the sharpest jump in vacancies ever” in the last quarter of 2001. 

The dispersion of economic activity was well under way even as the five boroughs became part of “Greater New York” in 1898. Writing in 1902 H.G.Wells only slightly overstated that “`town’ and `city’ will be, in truth, terms as obsolete as ‘mail coach.’” “Cities,” he explained, “would of necessity become part of extended urban regions.” “The city,” Wells went on, “will diffuse itself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of the characteristics, the greenness, the fresh air of what is now country, leads us to suppose also that the country will take to itself many of the qualities of the city.” After noting how the electric grid, the telephone and an extensive rail network has dispersed economic activity, H.G. Wells saw that “Already for a great number of businesses it is no longer necessary that the office should be in London, and only habit, tradition and minor consideration keep them there... Still, he thought that “a new sort of downtown would be born. Though the center will probably still remain the center,” he wrote, “it will be essentially a bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, a pedestrian place... and altogether a very spacious, brilliant and entertaining agglomeration.”1 

While I think the tides are running with New York, my optimism is tempered by two questions and a frightening possibility:
First: Will the attempt to accommodate all of the interest groups involved in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan produce stasis? Between go-very-slow aesthetes, the grieving families of WTC victims and authority for reconstruction divided between the city, state and Port Authority, and the political terrain of an election year, will the economic vitality of Lower Manhattan be allowed to leach away?

Second: The Bloomberg administration has said that its top priorities are both the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan and developing the far west side of Manhattan. Can the city do both? Will money for the 7 line reduce money for, say, extending the LIRR from Atlantic Avenue into Manhattan? And what about the timing? How will the possibility of new office space on the far west side affect real estate prospects in Lower Manhattan? 

The Frightening Possibility: The chance of future terrorist attacks. The very idea of New York has long made it a tempting target for people who find its culture and values repellent. New Yorkers should never underestimate the capacity of their city to inspire murderous hatreds. Visitors––from H.G. Wells, who was repelled by polyglot places like New York where British stock was being diluted by what he saw as the barbarian yawp of America’s crude, materialist culture, to Sayyid  Qutb, the intellectual inspiration for the Al Queda network––have visited New York only to leave with hostility in their hearts. And in between there was Hermann Goering, the Nazi minister of Aviation (among other things). Goering responded to LaGuardia’s description of Hitler as a “perverted maniac” by having special maps of Lower Manhattan drawn up as part of plans to “shut up the arrogant people over there” with five-ton bombs.2

The question of terrorism aside, the harbor economy was first envisioned by ironmaster and former Manhattan mayor Abraham Hewitt, the son-in law of Peter Cooper, and the corporate lawyer and anti-Tammany reformer Andrew Haslett Green. Green feared that unless the harbor municipalities consolidated, Manhattan would fall behind rival Chicago in the race for urban leadership. To Green and Hewitt the logic of consolidation was compelling. By joining the largest and the fourth largest city in America the combined metropolis would have the ability to bypass Tammany, upgrade the harbor and finance the bridges and tunnels necessary for the island economies to grow. But for Hewitt, who had been elected in the famed election of 1886 when he defeated both the radical reformer Henry George and future president Theodore Roosevelt while the city was in the midst of a deep recession, there was an additional motivation. In the 1886 campaign he faced those he described as “anarchists, nihilists, communists, socialists,” who were “enemies of civilization and order.” The way to fend off these challenges, he argued, was to increase opportunity by building new bridges across the East River while rebuilding the city’s crumbling docks, streets and transit facilities. For Hewitt, infrastructure and opportunity were inextricably intertwined.

For rural Brooklyn, which as recently as the 1880s had been an agricultural powerhouse, undeveloped Queens, Bronx and Staten Island, consolidation was a good deal at a time when only the downtowns were wired for electricity and had the financial wherewithal to extend the electric grid outward. Brooklyn was an industrial dynamo. Two thousand ships a year docked in Brooklyn, bringing in raw materials and carrying away half the refined sugar in America as well as hats, clocks, shoes, cigars, beer and books. Two thousand ships a year docked there. But the downtowners were divided between those who feared Manhattan dominance and those who feared Brooklyn’s mounting debt even more. In the end the consolidationists prevailed in Brooklyn by a mere 277 votes. 

Protestant opponents of consolidation, led by the Brooklyn Eagle’s editorial page, warned that merger was really a takeover in which the “Manhattan Pattern,” meaning a corrupt Catholic Tammany (the three words were synonymous) would impose higher taxes and inferior services on the “borough of homes and churches.”3

Greater New York, explains historian David Hammack, became, in effect, a regional government “so that suburban development could, in effect, take place under the aegis of city.” Greater New York covered 322 square miles, making it far and away the largest city east of the Mississippi.  The upshot was extraordinary. New York became “the engineers’ city.” The harbor unified politically, New York City Bonds were issued to build bridges across the Harlem and East Rivers, and tunnels under the Hudson connecting New York to New Jersey as well as the subway system that became the city’s circulatory system for labor, weaving Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan into a single economic unit. With this New York became not only the largest city in the U.S. but its busiest port, a paradise for small manufacturers and a headquarters city for national corporations. It was, as George Francis Train had boasted, the “locomotive of these United States,” a city whose bank deposits were as great as all the rest of the country combined. But just as important is what Selma Berrol has described as the “symbiosis” between the immigrants flooding into the city and the city’s infrastructure projects. The subways linking Brooklyn and Manhattan were built by Italian immigrants who improved their social position as they upgraded the city’s infrastructure.4

New York’s City Hall faces south because when it was completed in 1896 it overlooked most of the city’s commercial and manufacturing activity as well as most of its retail and entertainment. At the time, the Lower East Side abutting the business district was the most densely settled piece of land in the world, with nearly a thousand people to an acre while (in 1906) more than half of all the city’s manufacturing was carried out in the fraction of the city located below 14th Street. This was also a moment when, with New York’s percentage of the national population rising due to immigration, the city had seven congressional districts south of 14th Street. 5

But even with consolidation, a time when centralization seemed to be in the saddle, the wildly crowded and extraordinarily expensive downtown began to shed some of its functions. First, housing began to move out of Lower Manhattan. Then, cultural institutions––the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of Natural History––left before 1900. They were followed by manufacturing, looking to flee from a “hotbed of trade unionism,” smoke and noise regulation as well as endless complaints from neighboring property owners. These first two functions are today returning to Lower Manhattan. For their part, lawyers and traders welcomed the exit of manufacturers, who could now stay in touch with their downtown bankers via the telephone. Given the extraordinary cost of land, those who stayed increasingly worked in skyscrapers like the Woolworth Building, which opened in 1913. 

In the 1920s, even as New York surpassed London as the world’s financial center, the functions of the downtown were narrowing. Trucks and telephones dispersed economic activity and Lower Manhattan was increasingly an office district, albeit offices surrounded by a very active waterfront. In 1930 an Atlanta editor saw the future: “When Mr. Henry Ford...put some kind of automobile within easy reach of almost everybody, they inadvertently created a monster that has caused more trouble in the larger cities than bootleggers, speakeasies, and alley bandits.”6 

The opening of Penn Station in 1910 gave Long Island and New Jersey easy access to midtown. It helped set off a real estate boom in Times Square, which was intensified three years later when Grand Central Station opened. The Holland Tunnel followed in 1927. Not surprisingly in the 1920s most new construction was in midtown, a trend that continued even into the depression years when Rockefeller Center was built, with midtown beginning to eclipse Lower Manhattan.

While midtown grew, the port thrived; in the 1920s half of U.S. export and import traffic moved through the harbor. Eighty-five percent of the traffic landed on the New York side and then had to be moved across the Hudson on “lighters.” This was the so-called “Manhattan Transfer.”The problems of cross-harbor traffic were magnified by the control exerted on both sides of the harbor by the local political machines. Extraordinary harbor congestion during World War I––at one point trains were literally backed up to Pittsburgh––provided an opportunity to break out of the grip of Tammany and led to the creation of the bi-state Port of New York Authority. It was from the start given the task of building a rail tunnel between Brooklyn and the mainland.  But frustrated by its inability to get the overbuilt and highly competitive railroads to cooperate, the Port Authority turned very effectively to constructing the Lincoln Tunnel and the Outerbridge, Goethals, George Washington and Verrazano bridges linking New York to New Jersey by car and truck. That left the freight tunnel across the harbor unbuilt and, over the long run, dealt a severe blow to Brooklyn. 

In 1948, twenty-seven years after the creation of the Port Authority, the fifty-year anniversary of consolidation was an occasion for celebration.

When Allan Nevins and John Krout put together a volume of essays, “The Greater City: New York, 1898-1948,” to commemorate the occasion, there was nary a negative word. New York, unscathed by a war that had ravaged London, Paris and Berlin, was at the top of its form. For half a century, the move to unification played out brilliantly as the city successfully absorbed generations of immigrants into an ever expanding and highly diversified economy. The complaints from Brooklyn Protestants about the “great mistake” and the warnings from the Brooklyn Eagle about the dangers of a “Manhattan pattern” imposed on the outer boroughs were largely forgotten. The expanded tax base had been used to build the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, as well as the subways, sewage and water systems necessary for a rapidly growing city. At that moment the Port Authority, which was about to begin a long period of decline, was still at the height of its powers. A Thomas Cochoran essay, “The City’s Business,” in The Greater City noted with satisfaction that “regardless of the trend toward the suburbs and the countryside, the pattern of New York industries has remained remarkably constant over the last fifty years….the same industries: clothing, printing and publishing, machine and foundry products, food products, chemicals and allied products––remained the leading five.” Tobacco manufacturing, formerly the sixth most important, was the only industry that had largely left New York. As late as 1961 Jane Jacobs, writing in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, spoke of Brooklyn as a great incubator of industry. She noted that each year more manufacturing were created in Brooklyn than left for other locations. A decade after Jacobs wrote so optimistically about Brooklyn, and after the economic boom of the 1960s,  Brooklyn and the harbor economy had come on very hard times.

What Went Wrong
In the early 1970s the harbor economy fell apart. But the seeds of the bitter fruit were planted earlier in the long-term shift from infrastructure to social service spending. The shift began in the 1940s, accelerated under Mayor Wagner and metastasized with the administration of John Lindsay.

In the 1960s economic boom, the real property base of Manhattan grew by about a third, local employment grew by a net of 279,000 jobs, even as the city lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs. It was hard to notice during the economic boom of the 1960s, but the single fastest growing sector of employment was in government workers engaged not in basic city services but rather in social services and make-work health care jobs.

An enormous shift was under way that made it financially and politically difficult to maintain the city’s infrastructure let alone build a Second Avenue subway or a cross-harbor tunnel to replace the outdated “lighters.”   Between 1960 and 1975 spending tripled in constant dollars, at the same time the city population was declining slightly. The money went to public assistance, health social services and housing. Redistribution rose from 26 percent of NYC expenditures in 1961 to 36  percent in 1969 and has stayed at about one-third. 

New York, like many other cities, was in the midst of a difficult dual transition. On the one hand, a manufacturing economy was being replaced by a service economy and, on the other, a vast new population of African-Americans from the South, who had be to incorporated into the economy, were transforming the city’s politics. 

During the 1957-58 and 1960-61 recessions New York suffered fewer job losses than the rest of the U.S. In the 1969 recession, Gotham lost jobs at three times the national average. In the severe recession that lasted from Nov. ‘73 to Sept. ‘75, NYC’s job loss, many in manufacturing, was six times the national average. In 1968 the city unemployment rate had been a question of a percentage point below the national average, placing it at the second lowest unemployment rate of the fourteen largest cities, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In September 1975 New York’s unemployment had reached 11.1 percent, 2.3 percent above the national average, the second highest of the fourteen largest cities. The city’s secular slide in manufacturing jobs turned into an avalanche. That’s, in part, because between 1960 and 1975 the city, already a high tax locale, added a vast array of new taxes, including a personal income tax, the commercial rent tax, a business income tax, and a sales tax while state government under Nelson Rockefeller was similarly boosting taxes.7

In the midst of this crisis the World Trade Center was opened. It had been built, in part, to hasten the shift from a freight/manufacturing economy in Lower Manhattan to a service economy. But by late 1973 the vacancy rate in Manhattan office buildings was 12 percent. When the 110-story World Trade Center opened in 1975, initially adding 9 million square feet, it pushed the vacancy rate to 21 percent, the worst since the Great Depression. 

But as bad as taxes were, the rise of crime was worse and the decline in subway service almost as bad. When a giant chemical manufacturer left the city for Danbury, Connecticut, it cited first of all the deterioration in New York’s quality of life. They weren’t alone. When the New York Times surveyed ninety-five top executives and asked what would be most helpful to your company, the most frequent answer was “develop new and better ways to reduce crime.” Crime was out of control on the subways where first the shift to social service spending and then the fiscal crisis produced delayed maintenance. The Port Authority, which generated huge surpluses, might have come to the rescue of the subways but, immune from accountability, it refused. The upshot was a system whose breakdowns were so frequent––I remember being stranded for three hours in the dark at rush hour under in an East River tunnel––that the economic ties between Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, already strained by the rise of crime and an underclass population in Brooklyn, were dramatically attenuated.

For more than thirty years the city had looked to Robert Moses to cut through the welter of interest groups and competing jurisdictions to build the infrastructure. But by the 1960s, Moses––who at one point held twelve city and state jobs controlling parks, sewers, highways and public housing––had more than worn out his welcome.  A man as arrogant as he was accomplished, he was more than willing to displace ordinary people who got in the way of his public-works projects. He proudly told an interviewer that “if you want to build public works in a metropolis, you have to swing the meat ax.” When questioned, he responded: “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” And when Moses was challenged by Jane Jacobs and her allies on his plans to build a Lower Manhattan expressway across her beloved west Greenwich Village, he responded commissar-like, asserting that one critic “doesn’t know what is in his own best interest, he’s not smart enough to visualize what you’re going to do.”

In the 1920s, when Moses began his rise to power with the aid of Governor Al Smith, he was a product of the progressive era faith in planning and expertise. That faith was shaken in the 1960s, which produced a vast social-service industry to compete for city, state and federal dollars. But by the 1960s there was a small cottage industry that ignored the city’s infrastructure problems by making Moses’ excesses the only issue.  Further, in the 1970s new construction was hemmed in by the generally salutary rise of the historical preservation and environmental movement that produced a drawn out Uniform Land Review Process. 

With Moses out of the way and with vastly increased social service, make-work spending, as well as rapidly expanding municipal labor costs taking a huge bite out of the budget, the city’s roads and bridges were subject to what was euphemistically called “deferred maintenance.” For four years during the 1970s fiscal crisis, the city had no capital budget for four years. Train service between Brooklyn was dramatically slowed or even halted at times because the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges were literally falling apart. The condition of the city’s infrastructure in the 1970s can be symbolized by two photos. One was of a repair truck that had fallen through the elevated West Side Highway, the other of a basketball hoop surrounded by debris that had been set up on the deserted highway. The West Side Highway south of 59th Street was eventually torn down, but the city was unable to build anything in its place. Three and a half billion dollars in federal funds for a Westway, a replacement road and waterfront parks went unused; eventually, Boston used the money to build the Big Dig, which is reshaping that city’s waterfront. 

Brooklyn, saddled by the high-energy costs, clogged roads and lack of rail access imposed by “the Manhattan arrangement,” was particularly hard hit by the changes which included the bankruptcies of the major freight carrying railroads. Manufacturing employment, which reached a peak of 235,000 in 1954 and was at 220,000 as late as 1967, dropped precipitously to 112,000 by 1976. The  breweries of Bushwick closed up while the Brooklyn Navy Yard shut down. Overall, between 1961 and 1976, 170 major manufacturers moved out of Brooklyn, with very few new companies created. Brooklyn, considered as a separate entity, had been hit by the quadruple whammy of Lindsay’s attempt to recruit the working poor onto the welfare rolls and the decline of manufacturing, accelerated by both the collapse of the rail freight lines and Lindsay’s tax and crime increases. By 1973 this once proud city of industry had, considered as a separate entity, the second lowest labor participation rate of the country’s large cities. Even as Manhattan began to recover jobs after 1977, Brooklyn’s job loss continued albeit at a slower pace. With Downtown Brooklyn handicapped by single-room occupancy hotels, prostitution and refuse-filed lots, it was “all but shut out of remarkable growth” in FIRE employment.

Brooklyn, once an enormous asset for Lower Manhattan, had turned into a liability. In the meantime, midtown, with its commuter rail links, was drawing in high-end workers from Westchester, Long Island and the North Jersey suburbs. Brooklyn had fallen victim to the paradox of a regional city. For all the talk of how the city and the region competed as a whole, a government dominated by Manhattan was willing to allow important assets like the Brooklyn waterfront to collapse. As the experience of Jersey City suggests, an independent Brooklyn dependent on the waterfront for its tax base would have looked at things differently. 

Across the Hudson on the other side of the harbor, the economy was falling apart as well
Alexander Hamilton, speaking of the site of what would become Jersey City, predicted that “Someday the great American city will rise on the west bank of the Hudson.” The Jersey City of the second quarter of the 20th century was dominated by a local version of Peronism. Frank “I am the Law” Hague rose in politics by attacking the railroads and championing the little guy.  He did indeed build a hospital for the poor but then he staffed it with so many no-show workers that the patient to staff ratio was one-to-one. These policies, applied citywide, produced the highest taxes in the country in return for relatively little in the way of services. No matter that business was fleeing, Hague and his machine prospered from the so-called “Horse Bourse,” a network of telephone and telegraph systems centered in Jersey City that were part of the largest illegal gambling operation in the country. Hague, who liked to speak of “justice at the end of a night stick,” assigned a cop from each precinct to collect from the local bookies.

Jersey City, with the slogan “Everything for Industry,” was a city dominated by local politics. In the intensely parochial and provincially Catholic Jersey City, Manhattan and Wall Street seemed very far away. As with Tammany the ties between the longshoremen, the local politicians and the mob defined the city’s economy and politics.

In Jersey City, explains political reporter Peter Weiss only half-jokingly, “it is considered a sin to be off the payroll.” “Politics, here, is a year-round contact sport played like half-court basketball where the winners get to keep playing and the losers get shut out.” In the postwar years many of Hague’s successors were hauled off to jail, while the city didn’t even try to cope with abandoned factories, contaminated land and property levies so high that owners stopped paying tax on land worth less than its assessed value. There were even academic predictions that Jersey City would become “the first totally slum city in the United States.” 

In the early 1980s the first bumbershoots of waterfront development and gentrification began under Mayor Gerald McCann, who would later be hauled off to jail.  When McCann’s opponent in the 1989 mayoral election Glen Cunningham suggested that the former mayor was up to no good, the audience at the mayoral debate applauded McCann and shouted “good for him.” Bret Schundler, Jersey City’s  reform mayor during its 1990s boom was one of the legions of Wall Street yuppies who arrived during the mid-1980s. When he pulled up in a cab in front of the apartment he had rented, the driver noticed the address and gestured to the front door, “My brother was shot to death right on your stoop.” 8

What went right: Recreation of 
the harbor economy on a new basis
After years of the city spending like a drunken sailor, Koch, with the help of the Financial Control Board, emerged as the mayor who could say no (at least temporarily) to the city’s interest groups. Even so, the city continued to totter on the edge of insolvency until the economic recovery rode to his rescue. From a high of 20 percent in late 1973, the midtown Manhattan office vacancy rate dropped to only 4 percent by the close of 1978. One of the city’s biggest developers crowed, “We’re at the beginning of one of the largest booms in real estate history. We’ve been in the starting gate for five years, now we’re off and running.” From 1981 through 1986 Manhattan, spurred by the President’s deregulation of financial markets, acquired approximately 45 million square feet of new commercial space, an area equal to the total of office space in Boston and San Francisco combined. Business Week reported that employment in business services like law and accounting grew 41 percent  between 1977 and 1983; at the same time financial sector employment was up 64 percent and real estate employment up 25 percent.

In part, the decline of manufacturing finally began to pay off for New York. Deindustrialization, a disaster for some sections of the city, had been an opportunity for others to upgrade their quality of life by turning manufacturing lofts into living spaces. Old manufacturing districts like SoHo became “funky.” First, they attracted artists in search of large spaces who pioneered the transformation, the artists were soon followed by Wall Street yuppies. New York became a magnet for twenty-somethings, a dating bar for young college graduates. 

Meanwhile, Jersey City was coming back to life. When the New York Times touted the consolidation in 1898 it mocked the “peril” Brooklyn faced. It depicted a future for consolidated Brooklyn with “well-paved and clean” streets bustling with business and shopping districts. Brooklyn, it promised, would soon be so “rich and noisy” it would rival Manhattan. But notes Times columnist John Tierney, “It was independent New Jersey that has ended up with the benefits that the Times promised Brooklyn a century ago.”

As part of the deal to build the World Trade Center, the site was moved from the East River side of Manhattan to the Hudson, and the Port Authority agreed to refurbish the decrepit, cob-webbed toonerville trolley of a rail line known as the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. The upgrading of what was renamed the PATH opened the way for a new postindustrial waterfront for Jersey City while providing a quick commute and sub-Manhattan rents for young professionals.

Jersey City also benefited from the way New York made it difficult to build almost anything. Samuel Lefrak, a major builder with long-standing ties in both Brooklyn and Manhattan, moved most of his operation to the decayed piers of the Jersey waterfront. Lefrak threw up his hands with New York back in 1983, when Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano draped his arm over Lefrak’s shoulders and informed him, “We’re going to be partners” in constructing Lefrak’s portion of Battery Park City. “I told Mayor Beame, ‘If this doesn’t stop, I’m moving across the river,’ “says Lefrak, sitting in his modest office trailer beneath Newport’s latest office-construction project. “Sammy told me he was going to take one-third interest. That’s what it would cost me to pour concrete. “But the mayor was too busy and didn’t pay any attention. So I moved on.” New York City’s concrete business, of course, has long been the province of organized crime, costing builders two to three times as much to pour as anywhere else in the country. 

“In Jersey City, we mix our own concrete,”says Lefrak. “That’s just one of the things that makes it so cheap to build over here.” Forsaking Manhattan, Lefrak bought 600 acres of abandoned railroad yards from Amtrak and Conrail on the Jersey City waterfront. “Absolutely nobody wanted the property,” he says. “There were packs of wild dogs living on it.” Eighteen years later, that same 600 acres houses the World Business Center: 5 million square feet of office space, 4,000 apartments, a shopping mall, parks, playgrounds, and a marina.9

Bret Schundler, a white Protestant in a Catholic, black Hispanic and immigrant city, won the Jersey City mayoralty in a 1991 special election held after McCann was forced to resign. Schundler, a financial analyst brought order to both the city’s streets and its finances. He positioned the city to take advantage of the great boom of the 1990s with a package of city and state tax incentives and a willingness developers’ prize to actively cooperate on new projects. Jersey City would have made some gains in the 1990s even with its traditionally criminal mayors. But thanks to Schundler, Jersey City accounted for nearly 90 percent of the jobs created in the 1990s by New Jersey’s six largest cities.

From the point of view of Jersey City’s tax base, any mayor, whether he be McCann or Schundler, has to make waterfront development a priority. But Brooklyn, only a lesser cog in the Greater City, lacked the leadership and independence to make the most of its assets.  Nonetheless, Brooklyn, largely shorn of its manufacturing, began to revive as an adjunct to the Manhattan office economy. 
 
 

In the late 1970s, a wave of gentrification began in brownstone neighborhoods of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Fort Greene. In 1983 some of the seeds of the downtown revival were planted when Borough President Howard Golden invited the Regional Plan Association to come in and explain how to revive nearly moribund Downtown Brooklyn. In the 1970s, as the private sector fled, government projects became the default choice for starting a revival. Golden and others returned to the old idea first floated by Robert Moses in 1944 of turning Downtown Brooklyn into a civic center for the courts and different government agencies. In the 1950s this approach had displaced struggling manufacturers. Revived by Golden, government offices took up the land that might have attracted private sector companies. The problem of attracting business to Brooklyn is not a matter of cost per se. New York incentive programs, the difficulties of the paperwork aside, make Brooklyn competitive with Jersey City on a per square foot basis. The difficulties are 1) with much of the best land taken up by government buildings, public housing and class B office space, it’s hard to assemble the land packages the financial companies are looking for, and 2) Downtown Brooklyn is stuck with the same zoning codes and building costs as midtown Manhattan. 

Still, there was progress. Golden and the city helped assemble the package of tax incentives and UDAG grants that led to the construction of the massive Metrotech complex as back office, middle management and computer processing space for Wall Street. Metrotech, built by Forest City Ratner––probably the final example of a tower in the park design––and opened in 1988, gave nearby Brooklyn Polytechnic University a shot in the arm and helped spark a new interest in Downtown Brooklyn. 

One important example of the revival was the creation of a whole new neighborhood, Dumbo (Down Under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge Overpass), that signaled new possibilities for the once moribund borough. Dumbo was largely the creation of one man, David Walentas, who bought up much of the property and developed it with the self-interest local mayors have in their limited assets. When Walentas began acquiring property in the 1970s the area was filled with abandoned buildings, but in the 1990s it became one of the prime sites along the Brooklyn littoral for  Silicon Valley companies that had crossed the river. Next to Dumbo the Brooklyn Navy Yard, led by Giuliani appointee Marc Rosenbaum, brought a variety of new companies, including movie production facilities, into the once all-but-mothballed Navy Yard.

In the 1980s it looked as if Fort Greene, which is adjacent to downtown, would become a thriving, integrated brownstone neighborhood. But its rebirth was short circuited by a high crime rate and a series of grisly murders. In the 1990s as crime receded, it blossomed as an integrated district defined, in part, by a number of independently opened African-themed boutiques, stores and restaurants. The adjacent BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) cultural district benefited from over-heated Manhattan rents that sent a stream of nonprofits, including the Mark Morris Dance Company, into the “outer” borough. Brooklyn has become hip. The trendsetting magazine Time Out, adverting to the tendency of the chic to dress all in black, recently declared the borough “the new Black.” Brooklyn, said urbanist Joel Kotkin, has “become the exciting urban experience people once went to Manhattan for before it became too expensive and too filled with chain-store retailers.” 

“The restoration of the brownstone belt,” explained Carl Weisbrod of the Downtown Alliance,”was a crucial  element in the revival of Lower Manhattan. Just as at the turn of the century Brooklyn’s toney neighborhoods were once again the neighborhood of choice for many “location decision-makers, senior managers in investment banks, partners in law firms, and bank executives.” 

The old ideal of independence still haunts some Brooklyn decision-makers. But once the Board of Estimate was eliminated in 1989 and the borough presidents were stripped of their power, it was time to give up the ghost. Jersey City markets itself as a part of the Lower Manhattan central business district, it is time for Brooklyn to do the same. And it is in that vein that private sector leaders, such as Keyspan’s Bob Catell, rather than elected officials, have taken the lead in promoting the borough.

With Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan intertwined by the best mass transit connections anywhere in the county, Brooklyn’s new waterfront park, its promenade, college and cultural institutions add an important dimension to a Lower Manhattan likely to continue on its pre-9/11 path and become more residential. “It’s not either or regarding residential and financial uses for Lower Manhattan,” explains Carl Weisbrod, “the two are linked, making it more residential is one of the key elements in preserving its importance as a financial center.”

For the last thirty years New York has largely turned its back on the harbor that created and sustained the city for centuries. The future of Lower Manhattan now lies, in part, in turning the waterfront into an asset. It’s beauty and recreational possibilities can make downtown into an attractive live-work location. And then there are the extraordinary possibilities presented by Governors Island. The island’s 172 acres are often forgotten when rebuilding is discussed. A five-minute ferry ride from either Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn’s Red Hook, Governors Island, with its golf course, playing fields and historic buildings can be a key part in the remaking of the harbor economy. With the reintroduction of a relatively inexpensive ferry service Governors Island revitalization promises to remake the Red Hook and Sunset Park waterfronts. 

Governor Island promises to provide not only recreation but also a site for the city’s many academic institutions to both gather cooperatively and perhaps even set up high-tech incubators. The Wall Street boom is over but the tech revolution continues. Despite the crash in dot.com stocks, only 10 to 20 percent of the software and graphic arts tech firms below 14th Street disappeared. Local tech companies like Brainstorm, which does 4-D imaging, have played a key role in speeding up the WTC cleanup. And tech companies will play a major role in a more diversified harbor economy. 

Jane Jacobs was relentlessly hostile to Los Angeles, a city with numerous downtowns spread over a region.  But Los Angeles, despite its traffic jams, has a dynamic, flexible, multidimensional economy. New York’s future will––gasp––probably become more similar to L.A.’s in the economic sphere. Decentralization to “six” boroughs and elsewhere will continue. Lower Manhattan will be far less central than it once was, but it will nonetheless retain the vitality and vibrance of its past. 

1  (H.G.Wells Anticipations of the Mechanical & Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought Harper Bros 1902 pps 62,65,67)

2   The anti-Semitic Wells, who at times called for the extermination of the unfit, took pleasure in describing the destruction of New York by a surprise attack of German zeppelins; “Lower Manhattan was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light lit the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the light of burning . . . Dust and black smoke came pouring into the street, and were presently shot with red flame.”  And then in the vein of those European leftists who think New York deserved 9/11, he went on: As the airships sailed along they smashed up the city, as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead: men, women and children mixed together as though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese. H.G Well War in the Air , 1907, pps 181-2, 211-212
 Sayyid Qutb inspired the enactment of what Wells has had anticipated.  He came to New York from Egypt in the late 1940s a moderate and left a radical Muslim who would inspire a Jihad against New York. Disgusted by a culture which embraced Marx, Freud and the Kinsey Report, angered by even mild displays of female sexuality, and what he described as “evil and fanatic racial discrimination” he came to insist that  “no one is more distant than the Americans from spirituality and piety.” When he returned to Egypt radicalized, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and developed a doctrine to explain why both the jahiliya, that is paganism of both America and the Moslem governments aligned with America have to be extirpated and replaced with a “just dictatorship.” Tortured by the tension between the certainty of the faith he acquired in an Egyptian village and the scientific skepticism and sensual temptation of America, he successfully courted martyrdom.  He was first imprisoned and later executed by the Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966.  His heirs, hostile to democracy and modernity were further inspired by German terrorist organization of the 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof gang.

3  From 1850-1910 suburban voters generally seemed to favor union with the central city.  In fact the rate of territorial expansion increased in most cities after the state legislatures gave local electorates a greater say in annexation. Large cities like Chicago, LA, Detroit, Cleveland and Boston with their impressive public improvements had something valuable to offer the suburbanite.   So long as consolidation was a bargain rather than a burden for the suburban resident, the city would have little difficulty in winning further conquests.. . . Suburban units could not yet compete as purveyors of water, sewage disposal, or fire and police protection; the central city provided superior services at a lower cost. Jon Teaford Post-Suburbia: Government and Politics in the Edge Cities, Johns Hopkins 1997

4   In 1900 NY was the most important copper and sugar refining area in the US; and no.1 in apparel, electrical and electronic goods, fabricated metal products(hardware), toys, jewelry and motion pictures.
 It is a matter of no small irony that the Silicon Valley was made possible because the San Francisco Bay Area did not follow New York’s course.  In the wake of Gotham’s consolidation there was an attempt to unite the Bay area in one great city led by San Francisco. But the effort failed and San Francisco was unable to impose its politics and costs on to the San Jose which nurtured the new economy.

5    Doug Haskell  “The modern city emerged in the 1880s . . . . with the electrified, steel-framed, high, bridged and tunneled architecturally urbane, civically conscious city.  The airbrake (Westinghouse 1868),the telephone 1876, the electric light 1879, the fountain pen 1884, the adding machine 1885, the linotype 1885 helped create the modern office – these offices could concentrate in central business districts thanks to the telephone, the trolley car and the electric elevator all dev in the 1880s. From Peter Hall Cities in Civilization, Pantheon, 1997

6     This is a matter of New York exceptionalism - after the 1920s mass transit ridership leveled off most everywhere but in Gotham 

7   1967 was a fateful year.  Within a ten-day period in February 1967 both American Can and Pepsi-Cola announced plans to leave for the suburbs; Olin Mathieson announced it was shifting its HQ for chemical operations to Connecticut and Bohn Office Machines announced it was looking to leave.  That same February, 14 other corporations with 11,500 employees in Manhattan began to plan their exit.

 In 1967 a leading expert on corporate relocation explained: “the commutation problem, the rising crime rate, swollen welfare rolls and subway strike.” Corporate executives were coming to the same conclusion as the middle class. It’s a matter of some irony that in  1967 NYC also created a municipally financed industrial renewal program that assembled land and made it available for developers. During its first 4/12 yrs it claimed to help create 10,000 new manufacturing jobs. But in those same years the city lost 130,000 mfg jobs. Jon Teaford The Rough Road to Renaissance, Johns Hopkins 1990

8   Helen Stapinski Five-Finger Discount, Random House, 2001

9  from Bill Tuckers interview with Samuel Lefrak, 11,15,01 New York Post
 
 
 
 

Prince of the City 
Rudy Giuliani explains how he did it. 
by Fred Siegel 
02/10/2003, Volume 008, Issue 21  Weekly Standard

Leadership 
by Rudolph W. Giuliani 
Miramax Books, 407 pp., $25.95 

SIR RUDY GIULIANI has become such a commanding figure that the reviewers of his book "Leadership" have spent far more space on his persona than his policies. The reviews almost invariably buy into the line about 9/11 bringing forth "a new Rudy." The "new Rudy" idea was originally a creation of his critics, who were having a hard time reconciling their distaste for both the style and substance of his mayoralty with Giuliani's heroic leadership in the face of an enemy attack. 
The "new Rudy" talk takes two, somewhat unrelated, forms. One, drawing on his marital and medical troubles, insists, with some small justice, that he had become kinder and gentler. The other claims that 9/11 rescued his mayoralty from obscurity. In the words of BusinessWeek, "If not for his actions in the days after the attacks, the former New York mayor might have been remembered as much for his extramarital behavior and battle with cancer as for his performance in office." Here, as the latest murder statistics testify, there's barely a grain of truth. While murder is on the rise again around big-city America, it continues to decline in New York. 
The Giuliani mayoralty was defined by continuity of vision and managerial style. It was framed by the two attacks on the World Trade Center. "Leadership" doesn't mention it, but in Giuliani's first inaugural speech given in January 1994, pride of place went to the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The newly installed mayor praised the police, fire, and nursing rescuers, and described the city's response to the terror attack as a model for the city's self-reliant future. It was a moment, he said, when "50,000 New Yorkers took charge of themselves and each other, showing on their own even before any city worker could help them . . . the New York spirit that brought us through the World Trade Center crisis." The response was "a demonstration of the courage and ingenuity we must apply to: restoring public safety, saving our schools, creating jobs, controlling our budget deficit and improving the quality of our lives." Only after these comments did he turn to another emergency, crime. 
If the city's response to crises was on his mind from the very start, so were his methods in tackling emergencies. The reviews have largely overlooked what is both the most obvious and most striking thing about "Leadership." How is it that a mayor--cities have long been synonymous with mismanagement--was presuming to give management advice to America's world-leading business magnates? 
The easy answer, noted by Newsweek, is that "Leadership" was written as "a calling card" for his consulting business "Giuliani Partners." True enough, but it misses the open secret of his book. Giuliani has been a keen student of management. The ex-mayor is not an intellectual, but he is, like former President Clinton, a formidable intellect, a natural student of whatever subject he tackles who is capable of quickly absorbing and organizing a vast array of material. 
STUDY IS THE LEITMOTIF of both "Leadership" and Giuliani's career. He went to Washington as an associate deputy attorney general in 1975, and has described it as "a terrific opportunity. I thought it would be a seminar on how government works." When his mentor Judge Lloyd MacMahon handed him the receivership of a bituminous coal mine in Kentucky, he used his quickly acquired knowledge of mining to win over hostile miners who had begun by asking, "Are you a Jew?" 
After his narrow defeat in the 1989 mayoral election, he spent two years studying city government in preparation for taking office. He had begun "Leadership" months before the 9/11 attack. He writes that "it had become almost a seminar for me, a self-imposed program on how to run an organization. It was as if God had provided an opportunity to design a course in leadership just when I needed it most." 
"A leader," insists Giuliani, "should have independently acquired understanding of the areas he oversees. Anybody who's going to take on a large organization must put time aside for deep study." He also contends that leaders have to know enough to fit all the specialized advice they receive into a coherent whole. This is true, but hardly earthshaking, even if its wisdom seems to have eluded Giuliani's successor Michael Bloomberg. 
The book doesn't begin to capture the fiery intensity of Giuliani's leadership that served as a beacon for the people who worked for him. Nor, aside from the numerous references to the morally ambiguous management techniques illustrated by "The Godfather" movies, does the reader get a sense of Giuliani's intuitive grasp of the underside of urban life. 
LIKE ALL MANAGEMENT BOOKS, "Leadership" has a good deal of hindsight and common sense dressed up as foresight. Public officials and business executives all over the country have turned the book into a bestseller because, the padding and self-flattery aside, it gives the reader a good sense of how Giuliani operated. He writes, "I've begun every single morning since 1981," when he was appointed the youngest associate attorney general ever, "with a meeting of my top staff." The importance of the "morning meeting cannot be overstated." With the chief executive and his top staff all gathered, "everyone is entitled to air concerns, that meant my staff knew they could get a yes or no from the boss . . . the access worked both ways." And with the different department heads gathered together around the table, it was hard, if not impossible, to engage in blame-shifting. 
"The entire 9/11 response and recovery," says Giuliani, who was expecting a second attack, "was planned at the morning meetings expanded to include Governor Pataki's staff, representatives from utilities and the Federal Emergency Management Agency." Baltimore's innovative mayor, Democrat Martin O'Malley, has taken this lesson to heart. He has been similarly drawing together his top staff, so that, guided by timely statistics, he can impose accountability on his commissioners. 
The book does little to account for the mix of instinct and intelligence that makes for a natural leader. Whether the subject has been corporate corruption, as when he zealously prosecuted Wall Street malfeasance in the 1980s, his decision to shun Arafat at a time when the Palestinian leader had been accorded a measure of respectability, or his crucial decision in the mid-1990s to emphasize emergency management when most of the country was on "a vacation from history," Giuliani has been ahead of the curve. 
But his Office of Emergency Management, which pioneered urban crisis management and made possible the extraordinary success in evacuating 25,000 people on 9/11, is not even mentioned in the two books written on Giuliani to date. The mayor's decision to establish an emergency command center was roundly mocked at the time as overkill. The New York Times derided it as Rudy's "bunker," former mayor Koch called the idea "nuts," and the Rudyphobes (and even some admirers) were derisive. The city council tried to eliminate it. 
The location of the emergency operations command post in the World Trade Center was a mistake, but the Office of Emergency Management that built the center proved an enormous success. Designed to prepare for "hybrid emergencies" (such as the possibility of biological or chemical attack), the Emergency Office's sole purpose, since copied by other cities, is to coordinate the city's numerous agencies in responding to a crisis. It got in its practice runs reacting to the West Nile virus, Y2K, and the Millennium Celebration. "For months," Giuliani says, "we had in place an exercise in which we'd drilled on our response to a biochemical attack, specifically practicing for the distribution of medication--that planned date Wed. 9/12." The location was Pier 92 in the Hudson River, which was then turned into the emergency command post when the Towers went down. 
"LEADERSHIP" isn't always a good read. It's disjointed. The book jumps from one, often disconnected anecdote, to another organized under the loose rubric of topics like "Loyalty," "Prepare Relentlessly," or "Be Your Own Man." But for those interested in the thinking behind the success of the most effective mayor of the last half century, a mayor whose thinking remained remarkably constant through his eight years, "Leadership" is well worth the effort. 

Fred Siegel is a professor at the Cooper Union for Science and Art in New York. 

© Copyright 2002, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
 
 
 
 
 

ELECTION 2001    (Wall Street Journal)
Bloomberg's Next Challenge
Oh God, not another John Lindsay!

BY FRED SIEGEL
Thursday November 8, 2001 
 

"It's a darn shame only one of these guys will lose." 
-- David Letterman

I should be smiling. Michael Bloomberg, a pro-business candidate who's promised not to raise taxes while continuing Rudolph Giuliani's crime-fighting legacy, and who seems to owe no debts to the public-sector unions, has defeated Mark Green, a longtime left-liberal who fought each and every Giuliani reform. 
But I'm more worried than happy, because the silent partners in Mr. Bloomberg's victory were the anti-Giuliani coalition of Bronx Democratic Party boss Roberto Ramirez; the city's leading racial demagogue, Al Sharpton; the city's most powerful union leader, Dennis Rivera; and Fernando Ferrer, the man who had been their candidate for the Democratic nomination. These are the four men who nearly won the Democratic Party primary for Mr. Ferrer on an identity-politics platform of rolling back the Giuliani reforms. 
During the campaign, Rep. Charles Rangel, a skilled politician, compared Mr. Bloomberg to John Lindsay, the Upper East Side Republican who was first elected mayor in 1965 on a law-and-order, low-tax platform, but who governed to the left of the Democrats. Mr. Bloomberg, who describes himself as a "liberal," was a Democrat until a year ago. Some of Mr. Bloomberg's advisers, like Alan Gartner--a former Lindsay supporter who was one of the architects of welfare expansion in the 1970s--are well to the left of the people alongside Mr. Green. So before I begin to smile, I want to see just how much John Lindsay there is in Mike Bloomberg. 
It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that on Election Day, the offices of the Bronx Democratic Party headquarters were closed, the phones turned off. And on the morning after his victory, the first man Mayor-elect Bloomberg met with was not Rudy Giuliani, but Freddy Ferrer. 
In America's war against terrorism, the partners President Bush chooses will have a considerable impact on how we pursue the conflict. In New York politics, Mr. Bloomberg's choice of partners will affect the kinds of policies he's able to pursue. 

How did Mr. Bloomberg win the election? The answer is that the unprecedented events of Sept. 11 made it possible for Mr. Bloomberg to put together an unprecedented coalition that broke all the "rules" of local politics. 
Rule One: If Rudy Giuliani supports something, minority voters will come out against it. So when Mr. Giuliani came out in support of school choice, it dropped 20 points among black voters. But this time when Mr. Giuliani, "America's mayor," endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, he galvanized white Catholic voters without producing a black and Hispanic backlash. That's because Mr. Bloomberg's silent partners worked effectively to demonize Mr. Green. 
Rule Two: In New York the power of the free media means you can't win an election with paid advertising; this isn't New Jersey. But the concatenation of Sept. 11, the war in Afghanistan, the anthrax scare, the World Series, Mr. Bloomberg's unprecedented spending, and Mark Green's rigid adherence to dysfunctional campaign-finance laws that limited his spending, combined to allow Mr. Bloomberg to win largely on the basis of paid advertising. 
Rule Three: Republicans in New York are only elected once every 30 years, and only after Democrats have bungled things badly. Mr. Giuliani changed that. Ever since he first ran in 1989, moderate white Catholic and Jewish voters have been deserting the Democratic Party primary in droves, preferring to wait and vote for Mr. Giuliani in the general election. 
This produced Democratic Party mayoral nominees who, chosen by the remaining rump of the Democratic Party, were well to the left of even New York's electorate. White liberal candidates for the Democratic nomination have been whipsawed by the Giuliani factor. If they fail to gain sufficient minority support they lose the primary, as Ed Koch lost to David Dinkins in 1989. But if they defeat a minority candidate, as Ruth Messinger did in 1997 and Mr. Green did this year, they generate resentments that come back to haunt them in the general election. 

Mr. Bloomberg has broken the rules to win. Can he break the rules to govern? He clearly knows less about the city and its government than any mayor of at least the last 100 years. When businessman Richard Riordan was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1993, he had long been involved in the civic life of his city. Mr. Bloomberg is a stranger to much of New York. He has talked about how New York brought down crime with "community policing." It didn't; it used "broken windows" policing, which is quite different (and more aggressive). When asked about New York's ongoing deficit in what it pays to Washington and what it gets back, he said he would "serve as our third senator," as if that would help. The doubters, such as New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, describe Mr. Bloomberg as a man with an "elemental misunderstanding about how New York is governed." 
Mr. Bloomberg was almost as off target when talking about Sept. 11 as Freddy Ferrer. He spoke of our problems in terms of the national recession, but it's lower Manhattan, not the national economy, that lies devastated. His proposed solution to the city's problems changed little after the attacks. He wanted to refinance our enormous debt at reduced rates. This is a good idea, but of little immediate help for those businesses destroyed or displaced on Sept. 11. He insists that the city alone should handle the reconstruction, but the World Trade Center stood on state land, and Mr. Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki have gone ahead and named a state-city commission to oversee the rebuilding. 
Mr. Bloomberg will no doubt lean heavily on those Giuliani staffers who stay on to help organize his administration. But it's not clear how much help he will get from Mr. Giuliani himself, nor does it seem likely that two men of such gargantuan egos will be able to cooperate for very long. 
In the rough waters ahead Mr. Bloomberg, who has never had to deal with unionized workers at his company, will have to negotiate labor contracts with policemen, firemen, teachers and sanitation workers, among others. In the words of one veteran journalist with conservative leanings, Mr. Bloomberg, "who thinks he can hire and fire as he pleases, doesn't have a clue as to what these negotiations are like." Mr. Bloomberg wants to bargain for "shared savings" plans, in which the unions get more money in return for greater efficiencies. A good idea, but will he have the skill to pull it off? This is where Lindsay failed famously. He didn't know how to negotiate with the unions--they resented him as a representative of the rich and powerful--and the city paid dearly as a result. 

There were two winners on Tuesday: a nominal Republican with no experience in government, and identity politics. Mr. Bloomberg is going to have to cut back the size of government to meet the city's looming budget deficits. Those cutbacks will no doubt disproportionately affect the minority workers who depend on city jobs. It's at that point that Mayor Bloomberg, who won by telling black and Latino New Yorkers that Mark Green had run a racist campaign for criticizing Freddy Ferrer's nonresponse to Sept. 11, will be haunted by what candidate Bloomberg said. In New York, no matter who wins, the city seems unable to overcome the toxic mix of racial and class resentments that define our dysfunctional politics. 
Mr. Siegel is a professor at The Cooper Union in New York and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington.
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Bloomberg's Bedfellows 
As the mayoral election shows, racial politics are alive and well in New York. 
by Fred Siegel 

NEW YORK 
Call it the New York Paradox: Politically, it's always 1968. Racial tensions, though far lower than they were thirty, or even ten, years ago, still define city elections. In Gotham, explains Jim Andrews, the campaign manager for Ruth Messinger's failed 1997 mayoral bid, "race isn't just part of politics, it is politics." Mike Bloomberg is New York's mayor-elect because he did a brilliant job of using the race card against Mark Green, who himself had won the Democratic nomination precisely because of his skill at playing racial politics. 

Other cities have moved on. In the urban revival of the 1990s, race receded as a political factor elsewhere. Seattle, Houston, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, and Minneapolis, all of which are less than a third black, elected African-American mayors. In the words of former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, "race continues to be an issue in our elections, but not the issue." This year, city elections pitted black candidates against white in Cincinnati (which recently experienced racial rioting), Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Houston (where there was also a Latino candidate). And all of these elections were remarkable for their absence of racial rancor. 

New York was different. The "fun" began this year when Bronx borough president and Democratic mayoral candidate Freddy Ferrer created a black-Latino alliance with Al Sharpton, the city's leading racial demagogue. Ferrer's campaign theme of "the other New York" was designed to mobilize the Latino and black voters who were supposed to have been left out of the Giuliani boom of the 1990s. The numbers show they weren't. But Ferrer understood the first rule of New York's racialized politics: The best way to mobilize voters is to stoke the resentments that have long been cultivated by the press and the city's ethnic leaders. 

Ferrer's Democratic rival Mark Green capitalized on the fact that white voters heard Ferrer's "other New York" rhetoric as "We're owed and you're going to pay for it." In their closely contested runoff election for the Democratic nod, Green jumped on Ferrer's non-response to September 11. Ferrer voters were little interested in the issue; rebuilding lower Manhattan was, according to the exit polls, dead last on their list of priorities. What they wanted was more public-sector spending on education and social services. Seeing an opening, Green ran a TV ad quoting the New York Times saying that Ferrer's reaction to September 11 was "borderline irresponsible." Ferrer and his allies, including Bronx political boss Roberto Ramirez and Sharpton, reacted with howls of outrage. There were cries of "racism," and the ad was compared to a "lynching." 

When Ferrer went on to lose narrowly, media magnate Mike Bloomberg used his deep pockets to play off Latino and black anger at the supposedly racist Green. He ran a blitzkreig of ads in the Spanish-language media denouncing Green, who had devoted most of his adult life to left-liberal causes like attacking Giuliani's police department. According to the rules of New York politics, any criticism of a non-white candidate is ipso facto racist. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, agrees. He's invited Sharpton's critics to leave the Democratic party. 

Spreading his wealth, Bloomberg won the backing of the city's race hustlers, not to mention anti-Semites Lenora Fulani and Wilbert Tatum. By Election Day, November 6, Bloomberg was in a de facto alliance with Sharpton and Ferrer to suppress the black and Latino vote for Green. They succeeded and Bloomberg won with the 59,000 votes provided by Marxist Fulani's Independence party line. 
 
 

STRANGELY ENOUGH, Green, the victim of his own newfound scruples, wasn't willing to cut deals with the race hustlers; Bloomberg was. Green, who never openly criticized the race game, feared being indebted to the likes of Al Sharpton, lest it undermine his ability to govern effectively. Bloomberg looked at it differently and got elected, like former governor Nelson Rockefeller and former mayor John Lindsay, with an incongruous collection of conservative voters--in this case Giuliani backers and Giuliani haters. On the morning after he won, Bloomberg met with Ferrer, and the next day he made a point of shaking hands publicly with Sharpton, the man Giuliani had refused even to meet, let alone bargain with, for eight years. 

New York's racialized political culture has been shaped by two distinctive features. First there is the sheer size of the political prize. The vast public sector, paid for with a $40 billion budget, employs directly or indirectly about a third of the work force. In the Bronx that portion rises to nearly half. Second, in other cities--like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Seattle, where elections are nonpartisan--candidates have to appeal to a broad swath of the electorate. In New York, which is five-to-one Democratic, you can usually win the prize simply by winning the Democratic primary. That means that an operator like Sharpton who can deliver about 25,000 votes becomes a force to be feared. 

Rudy called the race hustlers' bluff and delivered eight years of success. Bloomberg, who like Rockefeller is politically promiscuous, has begun his reign by embracing the people Giuliani shunned. But can he govern with the coalition that helped him win? The Giuliani voters who backed Bloomberg are only now waking up to the fact that Rudy's heir is already reversing Rudy's policies. The two halves of the Bloomberg coalition are a bit like drunk swingers who barely remember the night before and wake up asking, "What have I gotten myself into?" Bloomberg is betting that, like Rockefeller, he can use his personal fortune to smooth over the differences. He may be right, but then again he may find that it's a lot easier to cut a deal than to get his new partners to keep it. 
 
 

Fred Siegel is a professor at the Cooper Union for Science and Art in New York and the author of "The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America's Big Cities" (Encounter Press). 
 

November 19, 2001 - Volume 7, Number 10 
© Copyright 2001, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
 
 
 
 

STUCK IN THE 60S or NEW YORK’S TOPSY-TURVY POLITICS 
 

 -   Fred Siegel
 

       The best preparation for entering the barely believable world of New York city politics is an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan.  In the topsy-turvy plot of  the Pirates of Penzance, Frederic, the pirate’s apprentice, finds that because he was born in a leap year on February 29, he won’t be eligible to marry until he’s 84.  In the comic opera logic of New York city elections;  Mark Green,  quintessential Manhattan left-liberal and long-time critic of the New York police, becomes an Upper-East-Side version of George Wallace even as racial demagogue Al Sharpton, who helped instigate the murder of seven people on 125th Street in Harlem, is defined in the press as a civil rights activist; while the eventual winner businessman Michael Bloomberg was able to pull off an upset victory as the candidate of both the law and order Giuliani voters as well as  Sharpton and his allies.
        In the wake of 9/11, Gotham’s topsy-turvy politics were invisible to the rest of the country.  New York had become “the hero city” and the seemingly deep divisions between the interior of America which voted for Bush and the bi-coastal states which voted for Gore all but disappeared.  New Yorkers,  traditionally reviled by much of the country, became America’s darlings while Rudy Giuliani was “America’s mayor.”   In Boston’s Fenway Park where the fans are still smarting from the trade that sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1923 and where the usual chant is “Yankees Suck, Yankees Suck” the crowd broke into a spontaneous rendition of “New York , New York.”  As one Bosox fan put it “we’re all New Yorkers now.”  But that feeling of harmony and common purpose was not shared within  New York city’s Democratic primary electorate which was in the midst of a bitter battle for the party’s mayoral nomination. 
       Most cities have non-partisan elections open to all voters regardless of their affiliations. This tends to produce relatively moderate mayors. New York is different.  Its closed Democratic primary in a city where winning the Democratic nomination was once tantamount to election gives disproportionate weight to the party’s left wing and to people like Al Sharpton who can mobilize a small but swingable block of voters. Any Democrat who wants to run for higher office now has to kiss Sharpton’s ring. 
      This year’s Democratic primary started off with four candidates, all of whom were long time office holders forced out of the jobs they had once held by the city’s term-limits law. There was no African-American candidate for mayor and so much of the contest was driven by the scramble to secure black votes.  Alan Hevesi, the city’s chief financial officer, who was backed by the teachers union and the social service industry, initially enjoyed considerable Jewish and outer-boro support.  He was considered the front runner at the outset.  Hevesi had distinguished himself by keeping a distance from Sharpton.  But in an election year Hevesi quickly reversed course.  He went before Sharpton’s core supporters at the National Action Network to announce that he had belatedly seen the light and yes police brutality was the city’s preeminent  problem.  Hevesi, once seen as the all but inevitable nominee never recovered from his abrupt u-turn and Mark Green took over as the front runner. 
      Green, a reform Democrat who had been the Consumer Affairs commissioner in the David Dinkins mayoralty of the early 1990s, had been a elected to the post of Public Advocate in 1993.  It was job that carried few duties and he had spent eight years appealing  to African-American voters through his frequent church appearances and even more frequent criticism of Mayor Giuliani. Greens African-American support made him look all but unbeatable. Bronx boro President Ferrer who had flopped as a candidate in 1997 when he couldn’t decide whether to run as an outer-boro Catholic Democratic regular with a strong Latino base or as the third world revolutionary candidate settled rhetorically at least on the latter strategy for 2001.  The fourth candidate, the well-liked Council Speaker Peter Vallone, was unable to attract significant black support.  Despite hints of support from Mayor Giuliani, he was never in the hunt.
       The big surprise of the campaign was Ferrer's late success in cobbling together an alliance with Sharpton.  Ferrer’s winning coalition was based on a deal with Sharpton and an “us versus them” theme that mobilized the resentments that are never far from the surface in New York.  In the past, attempts at forming a Black-Latino coalition had foundered on mutual distrust, but Ferrer and his closest ally Bronx County Democratic chairman Roberto Ramirez saw that if they could secure their Latino base things might be different.  Over the past few elections Ramirez and the Bronx regular organization had lost almost as many elections as they had won.  In the Bronx which has a very large public sector and a very small private sector economy --  it’s the only boro without a chamber of commerce -- rebellious candidates who controlled their own Medicaid  and social service empires could often defeat Ramirez.  In 2000 Ramirez, at the urging of Sharpton, backed a corrupt black state legislator for the Congressional seat held by a non-descript incumbent who was Jewish and thus began the racial politics of 2001.   Ramirez had delivered on the first part of the bargain.  But still, Sharpton courted by all of the candidates was reluctant to commit himself to Ferrer even after the Reverend was jailed along with a number of Ferrer allies to protest the Navy’s test bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.   But Ferrer’s brilliantly executed strategy forced Sharpton’s hand.  Ferrer, defying the conventional wisdom that saw the Giuliani years as the best of times, solidified the often fractious Latino vote by campaigning as the candidate of the “other new York” the blacks and Latinos who, he insisted contrary to the evidence, had been left out of the boom of the 1990s.
       Ferrer mocked  his rivals as “candidates of continuity” who said, in effect, “that they'll be Rudy-lite; or Rudy with a smile; or a kinder, gentler Rudy.” Instead, he promised that despite record levels of employment and an unprecedented drop in crime, he would govern as the anti-Giuliani.  The country may have been rooting for Manhattan to be rebuilt but Ferrer’s backers were not. More money for education and social spending were their top priorities; rebuilding lower Manhattan came in dead last.
      Ferrer made a particular point of separating himself from Giuliani and attaching himself to Sharpton in opposition to Giuliani’s policing successes. 
Sharpton, aided by Gotham’s all news television station, New York 1  -- sometimes known as the Sharpton news network for his frequent performances there  --  played brilliantly off high profile police killings like the tragic death of immigrant Amadou Diallo killed by panicked cops in a hale of 41 bullets.  The police were acquitted of murder but the Diallo killing was used by Sharpton and his allies as tool to prepare for the 2000 senatorial campaign which, before he contracted prostate cancer included Giuliani 
       In another example of topsy-turvy, Giuliani’s policies which had reduced police killings even more rapidly than crime – police killings went from 41 under Dinkins in 1990 to 11 in 2000 – became a rich source of resentment.  Ferrer used both legitimate concerns and a press ever eager to give Sharpton’s anti- police outburst credibility.  The legitimate concern involved the police stop and frisk tactics initiated by Giuliani’s first, and enormously effective Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.  The stop and frisks tactics were part of a police strategy that reduced murder almost 60 per cent by  getting guns off the street.  But as crime declined, and frisks didn’t an increasing number of innocent people were stopped and not always politely, a problem that Giuliani’s second Police Commissioner Howard Safir refused to deal with.  But the problem had been largely rectified when Giuliani’s final police commissioner Bernard Kerik made cops explain to the innocent the reasons that had been stopped and searched. 
      Ferrer’s hostility to Giuliani and even more importantly his solid Latino support brought Congressman Charles Rangel and then Sharpton into the Bronx pol’s camp.   Rangel, who before Giuliani made sure that new businesses couldn’t enter Harlem  unless the Congressman and his friends were given an entry fee, quickly played the race card.  “ How do you feel our hurt,” if you’re a white candidate he asked African-Americans “when you go to apply for a job and you see three whites there and you know before the interview that you’re not going to get it.”  The same kind of tactics had earned Jessie Helms widespread criticism, but for much of the New York press racism can only come from whites.
       Rangel’s comments would have been a cause for public outrage in most of the country.  But in New York not even 9/11 could displace racial politics as usual.  This year’s Mayoral elections in Cincinnati and Cleveland pitted black against white candidates and yet were remarkably free of racial rancor.   But  New York is  frozen in the political tropes of 1968.   Even after Giuliani 
Restored much of the city’s luster lost in the Lindsay years, New York’s chattering classes have never been able to come to grips with the damage done to the city in the late 1960s.  Many the key players in the city politics, like Richard Aurelio, the former Lindsay aid behind the racial politics of NY1,  came of age in that era and have never left it.   Congressman Rangel, for instance, played a role in the demoralization of the NYPD under Lindsay.  When two policeman were murdered after they were set up by a false emergency call from Louis Farrakhan’s Harlem Mosque, it was Charles Rangel who along with Farrakhan warned the police that came to the slain officers aid that they had better leave because if they didn‘t “There’ll be rioting and people will be killed.”
 

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       From the mid-1960s on violence or the threat of violence became an integral part of New York politics and its also at the center of one of the two competing schools of history that tries to make sense of New York’s recent past.   One school of which Cannato’s book and my own The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C. and the Fate of America’s Big Cities are examples sees the social breakdown, rising tide of crime and rioting of the 1960s as central to New York’s story.  It’s competitor “the Robert Moses and the automobile are to blame” school was  represented first by Robert Caro biography about Moses “The Power Broker” and more recently by the final two episodes of  Rick Burns New York: A Documentary Film. Burn’s New York, shown repeatedly on public television in the weeks following 9/1l, is essentially a précis of the Caro book. 
       Burn’s closing episodes begin in 1929 with a picture of a traffic jam  followed by the voice of PBS’s Ray Suarez talking of  how “the hungry demanding car…the car” he goes on “ is the whole story.”  And lest any subtly be introduced he is soon followed by Caro explaining that master builder Robert Moses who constructed many of the regions highways is the man who “shaped New York…. when you talk about New York in the 20th cent, the story of NY is inseparable from the story of Robert Moses, to an astonishing extent they are one and the same.”  New York and all its neighborhoods it turns out were victims, this time not of the usual  capitalists and racist villains but of the demon auto and its deputy for destruction, Robert Moses.
      Moses  gave New York hundred of parks including Riverside Park, Jones Beach, and the Tri-Boro Bridge among almost innumerable accomplishments.  Burns’ film does a good job of hanging Moses, a man as arrogant as he was accomplished, with his own words.  Moses who held twelve jobs at once  controlling parks, sewers, highways, public housing and who was more than willing to displace ordinary people who got in the way of his highway projects proudly tells an interviewer that  “if you want to build public works in a metropolis, you have to swing the meat ax” and when challenged he responds “if the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” And when Moses was challenged by Jane Jacobs and her allies on his plans to build a lower Manhattan expressway across her beloved west Greenwich Village, Moses  responded commissar-like asserting that “he (referring to his critics)  doesn’t know what is in his own best interest, he isn’t smart enough to visualize what you’re going to do”
     The film is right to see the auto  and the decentralization it brought as a great challenge to the supremacy of the city, it’s also on target in noting that as he gained more and more power Moses became increasingly abusive and destructive.  But where the film goes haywire is in attributing virtually all of New York’s ills to one man, Moses, and one factor, the coming of the automobile.  Burns not only reduces imposing mayors like LaGuardia, Wagner, Lindsay, Koch and Giuliani to little more than cameo roles, it rides roughshod over the evidence.  In Burns’ world everything was downhill after 1945, there was no economic boom in the 1960s;  instead one of the film’s historians, Craig Wilder, tells the audience –to a backdrop of elegiac music -  that by  the 1960s the city was “spiraling into ever deeper trouble.”  In fact the 1960s were an era when black male unemployment was four percent.  Only Dallas, with its oil boom, enjoyed a lower big city unemployment rate and the papers were filled with help wanted listings yet  Wilder adds “there were very few economic opportunities” in the Lindsay years. 
      Burns’ demonization of Moses drives out both evidence and common sense in what descends into a visual and verbal diatribe.  By 1965, the documentary tells us, the worst rampages of Moses were past, “but (solemn almost sepulchral voice over) nothing could stop the onslaught of forces that would break over New York as the bill for nearly a half century of social change finished coming due.”  Moses, Wilder tells us was responsible for both the breakdown of the black family and the 1975 fiscal crisis, while others blame him for rising crime rates, declining services, neighborhood dissolution and lost jobs. 
      The documentary is nostalgic for the social solidarity of a city of crowded slums and rugged work on the docks and in the factories.   Those who left the danger and the density of New York to give their children a better life in the suburbs are portrayed, like Moses, as traitors to the urban ideal.  Nor do the filmmakers’ talking heads ever ask what it was about New York’s interest group politics that made a Moses necessary to get anything built in the first place.  In the documentary’s Manichean scheme Moses and the modernity are source of  the city’s sorrows while the neighborhoods are the city’s sole salvation. You might have thought that Reagan’s deregulation of  financial markets or Giuliani criminal justice achievements played  important roles in bringing New York back from the nadir of its bout with near bankruptcy in 1975 and again in 1993.  These go unmentioned.  Instead in the closing minutes,  Marshall Berman of the City University is brought forth to attribute the cities revival to the innovative spirit of rap music which arose from the devastation of the South Bronx.  It’s a fitting end to this publicly funded embarrassment.
       For some, like historian Mike Wallace, one of Burns most talkative  heads, the demonization of Moses is designed to deny that John Lindsay or any of his policies played an important role in undermining Gotham.  Wallace has argued in public forums that it’s absurd to blame Lindsay for the massive job loses that led to the 1975 fiscal crisis.  Lindsay, he insists was a victim of  “the onslaught of forces” the Burns documentary referred to.  But at the same time Wallace insists that it’s Lindsay who deserves credit for preventing rioting in New York at a time when violence was sweeping other cities
      Like most people who resort to structural explanations to explain away the failures of the policies they support, the Lindsay apologists quickly shift ground when they want to attribute credit.  But as Vince Cannato’s book shows Wallace and the other Lindsayites are wrong on both counts.  Cannato doesn’t demonize  Lindsay in his account of the city’s fall from grace between 1969 and 1975.  But he does show how Lindsay’s policies  in favor letting rioter vent while swelling both city taxes and the welfare rolls contributed mightily to the city’s social and fiscal downfall.   More importantly while the Caro/Burns approach has little to say to the city of 2001, the issues  Cannato’s lays out bears directly on our current ills.
      Moses was driven from power by Governor Nelson Rockefeller during Lindsay’s first term and the city has had trouble maintaining its infrastructure much less building anything new  since.  The monies once spent on infrastructure that  served the city’s economy were poured into social services by Lindsay who, in an act of racial contrition, intentionally doubled the welfare rolls in the midst of roaring prosperity.    Lindsay’s policies, by trapping an additional half-million people in the dead end of welfare at a time when jobs were available, intensified the very poverty he had sought to alleviate.   Faced with the charge that his administration was responsible for intentionally expanding welfare rolls, Lindsay responded: "It is not right to say that the city encourage people to go on welfare. Community action groups did that." But of course the Lindsay administration funded the community action groups. 
      While private sector jobs increased rapidly during Lindsay’s first term, government jobs, the welfare rolls and the taxes and debt needed to pay for them increased even more rapidly. Lindsay’s policies helped create the public sector politics and economy  of  Freddy Ferrer’s Bronx.  Political operators like Raymond Velez took advantage of Great Society health programs and Lindsay social service grants to create the Hunts-Point Multi-service Center that in the early 1970s had a $4 million budget and a payroll of almost 300.  Between Great Society programs and Lindsay’s breakneck spending, a new figure the “povertycrat” emerged in a town that had once been run by Tammany.  The “povertycrat" explained sociologist Andrew Hacker "combined the functions of trade union organizer, association lobbyist and party worker with a patronage job."
       Lindsay’s policy of much higher taxes to pay for many more social spending had dire consequences.  During earlier recessions New York had suffered job losses at a rate less than the rest of  the country, but under the impact of Lindsay’s spending and social policies New York lost jobs at three times the national rate during the 1969 recession.  In the wake of Lindsay’s policies New York lost jobs at six times the national average in the 1973-75 recession. But by that time Lindsay was out of office and the roof had fallen in on the head of his successor, the hapless Abe Beame. 
       In the anti-Moses mythology the auto and the sirens of suburbia led  traitors to desert the city.  Some people were pulled to the suburbs but many were pushed out of the city by the lawlessness of the Lindsay years.  When asked why so many big corporations like American Can, Pepsi-Cola and Olin Mathieson  were fleeing form New York a location consultant explained that they had been repelled not only by the high cost of doing business in the city but by  "the commutation problem, the rising crime rate, swollen welfare rolls and the subway strike"  Corporate executives were coming to the same conclusion as much of the middle class.
      John Lindsay’s  greatest boast was that New York never suffered a riot on his watch.  It’s true that rioting in New York never reached the level of Los Angeles or Detroit.   But as Cannato shows,  there were race riots in East New York, East Harlem and the East Village, Flatbush, Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant, not to mention smaller riots at city hall by landlords and the city’s very own Neighborhood Youth Corp.  As mayoral aide Ted Mastroianni noted: “We had some major problems. We always called them disturbances [not riots]. Molotov cocktails were always designated as unidentified objects . . . and the press would go along with it.” And even if there wasn’t Los Angeles level destruction violence was soaring.  Murder  rose 137 percent in the Lindsay years, second only to hapless Detroit.
       In the famous phrase of Tom Wolfe, the administration’s governing principle was “steam control.” When parks commissioner August Heckscher, a counter-cultural aristocrat was asked about torn up meadows,  he responded  that “parks ought to be the safety valve for all this protest.”  “Vandalism,” he explained  “. . . was simply a way in which certain elements of my constituency used the parks.  . . Some people liked to sit on the benches; others like to tear them up.”    When key Lindsay aide Barry Gottehrer  put the Yippies’ Abby Hoffman on the payroll as a community liaison, Hoffman and friends repaid him by writing giant “Fuck You(s)” on the walls of Grand Central Station.  But the city kept paying him and Hoffman used the money to subsidize his book “Fuck the System.”  “Gottehrer was pleased with the book, which he called ‘everything I expected and more,’ though he bemoaned the inclusion of information on panhandling and cheating the telephone company and transit authority.” 
       No confrontation of the Lindsay years cost the city more than the Ocean-Hill Brownsville school decentralization fight.  The ferociously fought conflict pitted the largely Jewish teachers union against  Black nationalists, backed by  Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, who created city funded but separatist schools.  In the strikes the followed the firing of union members by Black nationalist administrators, teachers were threatened and beaten by one of Al Sharpton’s mentors, Sonny Carson.   The New York public schools, once the finest big city system in the country, have never recovered.  Since then the demoralized schools have gone through a new superintendent in an average of 18 months and even vast new monies – the budget went from $8 billion  in 1997 to $12 billion in 2001 – have had little effect..  The embers of the anger that the Ocean-Hill Brownsville evoked still glow today. “What I learned from the Ocean-Hill Brownsville” conflict, explained Al Sharpton, a far slicker version of Sonny Carson, “was that confrontation works”

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       The Giuliani years excepted, confrontation works.  Confrontation brought down the mayoralty of Ed Koch (1978-1989) and made David  Dinkins mayor and then unmade Dinkins (1990-1993) who lost to Giuliani after four riot-torn years.  The  fiercely  fought Democratic primary in this years election was decided by the confrontation between Freddy Ferrer and Mark Green over Green’s allegedly racist campaign.   Green who lost narrowly to Ferrer in the first round of voting for the Democratic Primary looked like he would win an easy victory in the run-off because exit polls indicated that the  most of the Hevesi and Vallone voters would switch to Green.  But then came 9/11 and the 90 day flap.  In the wake of the catastrophe, Giuliani, whose popularity had soared,  talked of either staying on for a third term or perhaps staying on for an additional 90 days to get the city back on its feet.  Giuliani had over-reached; a third term was prohibited by the city’s term limits law and in the process he generated a whirlwind  that would capsize the Green campaign. Third term possibilities rebuffed, Giuliani turned more sensibly to a 90-day extension of his administration.  The state’s constitution made ample provision for just such an extension and as New York’s subsequent difficulties in receiving all the federal aid it was promised suggest, keeping Giuliani on would have been the right thing to do for the city.  Green and Bloomberg agreed to the extension, but Ferrer, in a what the press assumed to be a great show of principal, rejected it.
       Ferrer’s rejection of a 90-day extension was couched in terms of “Democracy” and a willingness to “stand up” to Giuliani’s bullying.  But Ferrer’s posture was an extension of his argument that 9/11 hadn’t changed much of anything. Ferrer, who had compared the destruction of  lower Manhattan to the tragic Happy Land nightclub fire in the Bronx that had claimed over a hundred lives, explained that  “the towers have crumbled but our priorities have not.” The issue for Ferrer, Roberto Ramirez and their allies in the Bronx Democratic organization was the fear that the Democratic  regulars around a mayor Ferrer would be denied control of the reconstruction contracts bid out during Giuliani’s  90 day extension.  They weren’t about to let the biggest pot of gold since Medicaid slip through their fingers.
      Green, by contrast rose to the occasion after 9/11. He emphasized the importance of quickly restoring both lower Manhattan and the private sector economy.  Green was in the midst of a long transition from the standard issue left-liberal who had served the disastrous Dinkins administration to the man who hoped to Clinton-like modernize New York’s public sector party. 
Like Clinton he asserted that “the era of big government is over” and in a reversal of his long held stand against welfare reform, he announced that “those who can work should work.”  More generally, he insisted that the new  mayor “should not strive to be the `New Giuliani’ or the `Anti-Giuliani’, but should instead build on this Mayor’s proven successes.”   The best approach, he went on, would be to follow the path of  noted third-way reformers President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair,  “neither of whom simply reversed the policies of their conservative predecessors but kept the good and tossed out the bad.” 
       Mark Green, once a Lindsayite, spent a year reaching out to the police whom he had long criticized and his efforts won him the support of  Giuliani’s first police Commissioner and the architect of the city’s crime reduction, Bill Bratton.  Almost alone Green saw the importance of Silicon Alley, the software and graphic arts companies that had given New York’s its first new economic sector in 50 years.  Recognizing the importance of the new economy, he argued for an end to the gross receipts tax on utilities which the new economy firms rightly consider an enormous drag on their businesses.   But Green, by doing the right thing for New York by supporting a 90 day extension for Giuliani ended up getting badly battered by Ferrer,  Sharpton and the hard liners in his own party who saw his support for the extension as a betrayal. 
      Green, once a sure winner, squeaked to a victory over Ferrer.  He won, in part, with ad that ran in the closing days of the campaign quoting the New York Times to the effect that Ferrer's non-response to 9/11 was “Borderline Irresponsible.” This mild attack in response to what had been a divisive Ferrer campaign produced a faux firestorm.  Even before the votes were counted, the ineffable Hazel Dukes, former head of the New York NAACP,  saw a “lynching” in a Green campaign add.  “It was, she said, “the height of racism ….I woke up and thought I was in Mississippi."  And so it went with the entire Ferrer team playing variations on Dukes’ theme.  Sharpton who was humiliated by the widespread understanding that it was his support for Ferrer that generated Greens margin of victory has warned that "there will not be silence and consent to the insult that we've been dealt in this race."   Union leader Dennis Rivera, a key part of Ferrer's “two cities” campaign, complained that  "Mark tried to divide this city by using code words.  He has a lot of work to do. All is not well in the Democratic Party."  This was all part of the usual racial bargaining in the city.  If Green wanted the support of  Rivera, Ferrer, Sharpton and company, he would have to pay for it in  the way of patronage appointments and policy.  Green like Giuliani refused.
        Congressman Rangel, asked if he might endorse Bloomberg, replied “Wasn’t John Lindsay a Republican?” Suggesting that yes, he could back Bloomberg if Green didn’t make amends.     And that is in effect what happened.   Bloomberg, who had become a billionaire by selling information services to Wall Street,  was a lifelong liberal Democrat who had contributed to Mark Green’s 1997 campaign.  He had switched to the Republican Party a year before for the sole purpose of running for mayor.  His victory was so unexpected, that not even his brilliant ad man David Garth, who’s represented the winner in seven of the last nine mayoral elections, thought Bloomberg had a chance.  But then thanks to a ringing endorsement from Giuliani that the former mayor may live to regret and to a well spent seventy million in campaign expenditures everything fell into place. President  Bush had spent $200 million to win the White House, but if he had spent as much per voter as Bloomberg who laid out $70 million the total would have come to $4 billion. 
      Bloomberg, once a long shot overcame Green’s lead with the aid of Rangel, Ferrer, Sharpton, Ramirez and company as unspoken partners. On election day Ramirez closed Bronx Democratic Party headquarters while most of the union leaders who had endorsed Green either made token efforts or sent mixed messages to their members after meeting with Bloomberg who indicated that he, unlike Green was willing to do business.
       Almost no one and perhaps not even Bloomberg has a strong idea of what the mayoralty will be like at a time when Gotham is hemorrhaging jobs and revenue from 9/11.  Bloomberg, nothing if not over-confident from his razor thin victory, has gone out of his way to distance himself from Giuliani.  He quickly met with Al Sharpton while telling New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that Rudy wasn’t all that important to his victory, the former mayor’s endorsement he argued was only “worth two or three points”  Bloomberg’s first two appointments were to name former Dinkins police commissioner Ray Kelly to his old post and former Lindsay aid and Dinkins transition chief Nathan Leventhal to head the new transition. 
      Bloomberg, elected with an incoherent coalition, inherits a city headed into a steep recession. Some of his coalition members will no doubt be kept on board through the generosity of Bloomberg’s one-hundred million dollars a year of charitable contributions to different organization.  Others, like the unions, will be more difficult to satisfy.  But Bloomberg so far has demonstrated the salesmanship that made him such an effective leader of a non-union company by establishing a friendly relationship with union leaders. Maintaining the support of both the Giuliani and the Ferrer/ Sharpton voters in the face of the inevitable police incident, however, may be a task beyond the power of any salesman.
       Businessman Bloomberg won by topsy-turvy but can he govern that way?  The problem ahead for Bloomberg, handling the city’s recession aside,  is that a man elected by a Lindsay-like coalition is going to have to govern as if he were a new Robert Moses.   9/11 means that for the first time in forty years the city’s infrastructure is center stage.   Lower Manhattan’s power, telecommunication and transportation systems have to be rebuilt before new construction can take place in the area around ground zero.  This is an enormous task for a city that, even under Giuliani, was unable to build public pay toilets. 
       The rebuilding effort will be complicated by joint state and city control over a Lower Manhattan Reconstruction Corporation while the Port Authority of New Jersey as well as  New York along with the federal government will have a role in the rebuilding.  This is a recipe for endless delay and before the rebuilding is over people may look more kindly on Robert Moses' mixed legacy.  At least he got things done.
 
 
 

 THE PRINCE OF THE CITY

- Fred Siegel
 

RUDY GIULIANI Emperor of the City By Andrew Kirtzman.
Illustrated. 333 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $25.

RUDY! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani.
By Wayne Barrett.Assisted by Adam Fifield. Illustrated. 498 pp. New York:Basic Books. $26.

NYPD: A City & Its Police. by James Lardner & Thomas Reppetto. Illustrated. 358 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company
 
 

Seven years ago New York under Mayor David Dinkins stood on the edge of social and economic breakdown.  Elected in 1989 as a symbol of racial healing, Dinkins conducted a largely symbolic mayoralty.  Put in power by liberals whose exhausted policy program had been replaced by identity politics, he had no agenda, no idea of how to govern.  Dinkins carried himself with such dignity that it was hard for his supporters to believe things could go bad under such a self-evidently decent man.  He was like the ruler described by Machiavelli who “never preaches anything except peace and good faith; and he is an enemy of both.”  While Dinkins dedicated his days to projecting his nobility at ceremonial events, the city was losing 330,000 jobs and  sixty percent of the population was looking to the exits.  No one then could have anticipated  that the late 1990s would be the best of times for Gotham. 
  The best way to understand New York’s recent rebirth is to think of Rudy Giuliani as a Renaissance Prince who’s revived his “republic” with  more than a touch of Machiavelli’s “corrupt wisdom.”  This is not merely a matter of Giuliani’s famously Florentine looks, though his rectangular head and features look as though they had been copied from a tapestry.
      The problem Machiavelli sets out to solve in The Prince is how to resuscitate his beloved Florence which has been laid low by a feckless leadership, a cowed populace, and a military made up of mercenaries who like the NYPD of yore were unwilling to act in the defense of the city’s interests. Machiavelli turns to the forgotten virtues of  the classical world - discipline, courage, and fortitude in adversity to revive Florence.  Giuliani derided by the New York Times as “A Wonder Bread Son of the 50s” has been New York’s Prince. He has recalled the city to an older set of virtues such as enterprise, individual obligation, and self-discipline that had been lost since the 1960s mayoralty of  John Lindsay.  Even his favorite aphorism “I’d rather be respected than loved is a play on Machiavelli’s “it is better to be feared than loved.” 
      Giuliani is not much of a politician, if he’s a politician at all.  In three tries he’s yet to run a passably good campaign.   Giuliani came to power in 1993 only because of an emergency of the sort that faced Machiavelli’s Florence.  Crime didn’t rise much in the Dinkins years, it just stayed unbearably high; what was on the rise was a pervasive sense of menace.   Lars Erik-Nelson a liberal columnist for The Daily News explained that  "When you take your children to a public playground and find that a mental patient has been using the sandbox as a toilet, it is normal to say, Enough! I'm leaving."  When Marcia Kramer a TV reporter confronted Dinkins with the fact that aggressive panhandlers had driven her to the suburbs, Dinkins’ response was "Sorry you left us.  Sorrier still that we can't raise your personal  income tax."   Dennis Rivera  the leader of the hospital workers concurred.  He insisted that taxes had to go even higher since "What's going to happen to New York is a repeat of Detroit those who can escape will."
       Dinkins wasn’t joking about taxes.  Like an earlier one term mayoral hack, Abe Beame, his response to the national recession was to raise taxes on slow moving targets in order to shield his public sector constituency from the effects of the downturn. While sanitation issued a blizzard of fines against small businessmen, the Consumer Affairs,  Buildings and the Sheriff offices  initiated a ticket blitzkrieg against small businesses and delivery trucks.   But Dinkins’ finest shakedown came when gun toting sheriffs made Rambo like raids on supermarkets. They grabbed money from the cash registers to pay for dubious littering fines.   The bureaucracy was literally feeding off the city.   By 1992 New York was collecting 25% of the personal income taxes collected by city governments; and 80% of all business income taxes collected by all the local governments in the US.  This came at a cost of  25%  of all jobs lost in the early `90s recession nationally that had been deepened by Dinkins’ insistence on higher taxes in the teeth of the downturn. 
      When billion dollar tax increases produced declining revenues, the city looked as if it were again teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  Then Governor Mario Cuomo talked of reactivating the Financial Control Board which had been created during New York City’s  near bankruptcy of the 1970s.  But Dinkins warned that if Cuomo invoked the FCB to straighten things out he Dinkins would "bring in Jesse Jackson and make this a real black-white thing."
      When a a drug runners riot broke out in heavily Dominican Washington Heights after a dealer was killed in a scrape with an undercover cop, Dinkins didn’t just express sympathy to the dead man’s family, he arranged for the city to pay for the funeral and fly the family back to the Dominican Republic.  Dinkins, note James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto in their very readable “NYPD: A City & Its Police” became “the mayor who paid for a drug dealers funeral.”  With the rule of law collapsing as in the Crown Heights riot where Dinkins refused to intervene for three days as angry mobs targeted the neighborhood’s Jews, the city’s traditional liberal politics based on the question of how New Yorkers could save the world was being replaced by a new question: How could New York be saved?
      New York as Andrew Kirtzman describes it in his new book “Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of New York” very nearly didn’t make it.   In a campaign which Dinkins and the New York Times set up as a referendum on race, “the Giuliani camp,” says Kirtzman “was trying to change the subject from race.”   They  couldn’t and Giuliani, a stiff and unconvincing candidate, won by a mere 45,000 votes.  Race is at the center of  another new book on  Giuliani, Wayne Barrett’s “Rudy: An Investigative Biography.”  Barrett is an extraordinary sleuth,  he has uncovered material that eluded even the FBI.  His revelations about Giuliani’s father’s criminal record have made headlines across the country. But what stands at heart of Barrett’s book is his accusation that “Rudy’s government by and large, has been a government of, for and by white people.”  Harlem is enjoying a second renaissance, but pay no mind.  In New York liberal fashion what Barrett is getting at, and what elected Dinkins in the first place is not the issue of the  overall well being of the minority population but rather the level of minority representation in city hall and public employment. And here Barret has a  point of sorts;  the number of blacks in  government jobs haves gone down under Giuliani even if black private sector employment has soared. Where New York liberalism once had a broad and even pioneering agenda on crime, welfare and equality, it has now reached a Brezhnevite phase where race is almost its only energizing issue.  Jim Andrews, Ruth Messinger’s campaign manager in her failed 1997 race against an incumbent Mayor Giuliani  anticipated Barrett when he insisted that “Race isn’t just part of politics, it is politics.” 
      The most interesting part of Barrett’s book is not what he has dug up about Giuliani’s past,  but what he has buried.  He has in a feat of revisionism simply excised the Dinkin’s mayoralty so that he has no need to deal with the breakdown that left many New Yorkers in despair.  He mentions the Dinkins years only in regard to the 1993 election.  This is like writing a history of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 without dealing with the Hoover presidency.  But this is not really a book it’s more like a nearly 500 page dossier of petty intrigue in which dozens of detailed pages are devoted to the squabbles between Giuliani and  former Senator D’Amato while omitting the larger life of the city. 
      Barrett accuses Giuliani of  hypocrisy, exaggeration, self-serving rhetoric, inconsistency, having it both ways, and claiming more credit than was due.  He is of course right on all these counts, but how does that distinguish Giuliani from most other major politicians?  Obviously written as an attempt to influence the Senate campaign  when it seemed certain  that Giuliani would be the Republican nominee, the book parachutes the reader into an at times fascinating but essentially trackless jungle of facts, assertions, counter-assertions, personal revelations and innuendo with  Barrett’s hostility to Giuliani as the only compass. 
     In Les Miserables, the implacable Javert is searching through the streets of Paris on his hunt for Jean Valjean, a good and even great man who had lied about his past misdeeds.  Javert is so intent on ruining Jean Valjean that he doesn’t  notice that the barricades are going up all around him as the Revolution of 1832 is about to begin.  Barrett is a modern day Javert, a great sleuth who is so focused on Giuliani’s failings, and there are plenty of them,  that he never notices the dramatic transformation of New York over the past seven years. 
       Kirtzman does notice, and he has written a balanced and informative, although misnamed book, that’s likely to become the standard account of the Giuliani years.  Kirtzman sees that you have to take Giuliani whole.  The very qualities that allowed him to bull his way through the city’s tangle of dysfunctional interest groups, also made him quick to dismiss any and all criticism.  Kirtzman describes Giuliani as “a great man and a mean spirited one, a visionary and an opportunist.”  This tension is exactly what Machiavelli had in mind when he explained that in public life vice can be a virtue and virtue a vice.
      The best sections in Kirtzman deal with  Giuliani’s estranged relationship with the black leadership, although he generally misses the underlying source of the tension.  Giuliani’s victory over an African-American incumbent along with his efforts to restore fiscal stability were bound to produce a fracture.  Even as the city slid, Dinkins still stood tall among voters who saw him not only as a symbol of ethnic achievement but as a defender of the public sector programs that were a central source of both minority employment and the city’s enormous deficits. 
        During the ugly campaign marred by an over the top Giuliani shouting “bullshit” before a crowd of crazed cops, Dinkins supporters repeatedly attacked Giuliani as a “fascist” and attacked his running mate Herman Badillo for marrying a white wife.  One Dinkins aide told me “don’t you know that if Rudy wins there will be a reign of terror in New York.”  More immediately the mood produced by the campaign led one third of those polled to predict a riot if Giuliani were elected .
       When defeated - though he had won 95 per cent of the black vote - Dinkins delivered an  unprecedented Mayoral farewell address.  He told a city council which was taking time out from an interminable debate over whether regulating horse drawn carriages was actually ethnic discrimination directed against the Irish drivers, to warn that Giuliani was a menace to the city traditions  so that  "Now more than ever New Yorkers will look to their Council to protect The MOST PROUDLY PROGRESSIVE GOVERNMENT ON GOD'S EARTH."
      Once in office Giuliani’s restorationist regime took down the both the deficit and its twin the  “riot ideology” that had driven NewYork politics since the Lindsay years  He refused to meet with Al Sharpton who in turn worked effectively to cut Giuliani off from access to black churches. African- Americans, as Kirtzman describes it, supported Giuliani at their own peril. At Harlem’s Convent Baptist church he was barred from attending MLK day ceremonies as the pastor welcomed David Dinkins announcing “He’s still our Mayor. The notoriously thin skinned Giuliani “felt spurned by the black community.” Kirtzman goes on to acknowledge that “Giuliani was on the attack against a lot of Democratic politicians, black and white alike, using the same amount of vitriol.  But he then argues that nonetheless “Giuliani was his own worst enemy when it came to race relations.” 
      For all of Kirtzman’s virtues, he is less than forthright in describing his own television station’s role - he’s an anchor  at New York 1, an all news cable stations sometimes know as the Sharpton News Network - and the role of the press more generally in promoting Sharpton.  For many liberal journalists dressed down by Giuliani - and there’s no doubt that the mayor and his press secretary Christine “I’d take a bullet for Rudy” Lategano went out of the way to make life difficult for the press - Sharpton became the agent of their anger.  For liberals more generally, the reverend’s gestural radicalism served as the substitute for an issues agenda.
      In an episode Kirtzman doesn’t mention, Sharpton came before reporters to announce his 1997 mayoral campaign so sure of a free ride from the press that he himself brought up the damning episode of  Freddy Fire.  This was a 1995 incident in which Sharpton’s organization and sometimes Sharpton himself picketed a Jewish owned store on 125th Street in Harlem.  The protesters led by a Sharpton lieutenant who was an escaped mental patient with a long history of violence shouted  about “bloodsuckers” and about how “we’re going to burn and loot the Jews.”   In the end they got their wish as one of their number goosed by the rhetoric went in guns blazing and set fire to the store killing himself and 7 other.  In a touch of bravado Sharpton in announcing his campaign blamed the deaths on Giuliani.  “Only the city administration,” he claimed, “knew  of the hatred that was brewing outside” Freddy’s Fashion Mart. The press said nothing.  The Rev was right he was to going to get free a free ride even if he was running for mayor. 
      Giuliani sailed to re-election against a weak opponent Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger who barely averted a runoff against Reverend Al.   It was hard for voters to argue with the success of the police department.  Police Commissioner Bill Bratton thrilled much of the city with his Churchillian rhetoric: “I’ll end the fear . . . . we will fight for every house in the city”  He did, Bratton “an avid reader of books on corporate motivation,” say Lardner and Reppetto in “NYPD “ understood that most police departments “were punishment centered bureaucracies” prone to issue rules and regulations heavy on the don’ts.  When under intense pressure Dinkins expanded the police force A Harlem cop who asked to remain anonymous said: "What's the difference if you've got 25,000 people sitting around doing nothing or 30,000.    In the borough of Queens note Lardner and Reppetto, “ 28% of the force hadn’t made an arrest in the first 6 months of 1994.”   Bratton reversed the natural bureaucratic process and created incentives for active but not violent policing.  In Machiavelli’s terms, he motivated the mercenaries.  Nationally crime dropped 5% between 93 and 96, in NY it fell 35%.  NY’s numbers  accounted for 1/3d of the drop nationally.  These achievements were all the more notable because they began even before the economy recovered from recession and  in the midst of a massive immigration which as in the past brought a burst of criminality to the big city. 
      In 1992 a Harlem resident noted that "Nobody ever got in trouble in that department for doing nothing. Sometimes I've seen something happen, and cops just turn their head and go by."  By 1995, noted the Boston Globe’s Fred Kaplan, on a 105th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem where there had been a funeral a week, people were sitting out on the stoops once again.  And 18 year old Presley Navarete noticed that “I hardly hear gunshots anymore. . .It’s all because of the cops, the cops are everywhere.”  The director of the  neighborhood youth center, reported Kaplan, saw a new day in Harlem in which “the sun even seemed brighter; the air seemed lighter.”
       But in March of 1996 Bratton, caught up in a battle with Giuliani over who deserved the credit, was pushed out of office.  It was Giuliani’s second major mistake.  Bratton had given  Giuliani a degree of insulation. Brattons’s  dismissal along with the earlier decision to replace Ken Frydman, a press secretary with good ties to journalists, with the heartily disliked Lategano,  would cost Giuliani much of his second term popularity.
       Giuliani went into his final four years with more than adequate confidence and his eyes elsewhere.   There was even talk of a run for the presidency.  In the absence of a full scale agenda, he began to press too hard on quality of life issues.  His campaigns against jaywalkers, peddlars and taxi drivers brought derision as did the  opening of a new high tech police bunker.  Giuliani was at his best in emergencies but in his second term, he seemed to like them too much. His enemies saw an opening and mocked his bunker mentality at a time when his success in containing crime seemed to suggest that the emergency was over.  It was and it wasn’t.  The underside of the active, stop and frisk policing that took thousands of guns off the streets is that as the crime rate dropped an increasing number of innocents in minority neighborhoods were being accosted by cops.  This is a genuine issue,  because if the cops back off too much crime comes back up, but the mayor handled it badly. 
      When a series of high profile police incidents came along the old guard of New York politics saw their opening.  They began a campaign to drive Giuliani from office, much as Koch and Dinkins had been driven out earlier by racial incidents - it’s the New York way.  Racially charged incidents beginning with the police torture of Abner Louima and the tragic police killings of  Amadou Diallo  and Patrick Dorismond gave Sharpton and his allies the chance to seize the political agenda.  What followed was nothing short of a full scale political hysteria.  The fact that panicked cops tragically shot 41 times at Diallo - essentially firing at their own ricochets and flashes - was repeated literally thousands of times a week as if malevolent intent could be deduced from the number of shots fired.  When the Diallo cops were acquitted of criminal charges the Reverend Calvin Buts, a Pataki ally spoke of the “evil that permeates City Hall,” and even the usually cautious Reverend Floyd Flake, a one time Giuliani ally denounced the mayor as a “megalomaniac and a paranoid schizophrenic.”   Others weren’t so kind. 
      The TV  stations covered these and other incidents through the mind of  the mob.   After Malcom Ferguson, a long time drug dealer was killed in a hand to hand struggle with a cop, the television coverage depicted him as  a martyr slain by an out of control police force. After listening the to the Reverend Al rant for nights on end, TV viewers were treated to “testimony”  from  middle class white liberals describing their terror of the police.   The climax of the hysteria may have been an April lst (no joke) front page piece in the Times by David Barstow which depicted a low level Brooklyn heroin dealer and a group of young thugs as  victims of police harassment.   Barstow accused Giuliani and the police of imposing  “the mores of Mayberry” on a  rough and tumble neighborhood, my own.  The gullible Barstow referred to one alleged victim of police harassment as a “gregarious youth;” he was in fact a notorious thug wanted on a warrant for slashing a mans throat on the subway. 
      In a paradox Machiavelli would have appreciated Giuliani suffered from the failure of success.   In Philadelphia and Chicago where the murder rate has barely dropped at all in black neighborhoods, the white mayors retained their popularity among African-American voters.  Chicago with one third the population has had roughly the same number of murders as New York over the past few years.  If Giuliani were a racist, or even merely a cynic, he could have backed off in black Bedford-Stuyvesant while continuing  vigilant patrols in the BoBo-land of Brooklyn Heights.  But Giuliani’s real sin wasn’t police brutality, it was that he had proved that the black and liberal establishment were wrong about almost all the major issues that faced New York.  They had insisted that crime couldn’t be cut without a reign of terror, and when crime was cut even as police violence declined they invented just such a reign. They had insisted that welfare couldn’t be reformed without massive suffering.  When Giuliani cut the rolls in half, with at worst only minimal signs of increased suffering, they were outraged, shown up once again.  First and foremost Giuliani was hated for being right, for embarrassing the city’s old line liberal leaders who either stood by or actively abetted Sharpton’s demagoguery which equated the NYPD with the KKK. 
      While there was both a stop and frisk problem and an over -reliance on specialized units at the expense of neighborhood patrols,  the reign of terror depicted by Sharpton and his flaks in the press  never happened.  In fact not only had crime dropped to record levels, so had the police use of force. The press had created a mounting panic out of a declining use of police force.  A few numbers:  in the last year of the Dinkins administration the cops fired 212 times, they fired 71 times in 1999 and that includes the 41 directed at Diallo. Police killings dropped from a high of 41 under Dinkins to 11 in 1999 an historic low.  Under “Bull Giuliani” the police were half as likely to use their guns as they were under Dinkins.  These readily available numbers were either buried or  rarely mentioned. The press frenzy slowed only after  the city’s African and Haitian livery cab drivers were subject to a wave of murders followed by the vicious mass murder of minority workers at a Wendy’s.  This  reminded  the city that while the emergency might be over, there was no such thing as a  tipping point, a natural process which produced a self-sustaining collapse in crime.   The right metaphor for a city in which there are 650,000 single-parent households, generally fatherless families with at least one child under 18, is a pressure cooker in which the police are crucial for keeping the lid on. But it was only with the recent Puerto Rican Parade that many  grasped what they stood to loose if the lid were removed. 
      On the Sunday of the Puerto Rican parade this past June what began as 
friendly flirty boy-girl rough-housing  in Central Park near the parade route turned into a wave of 50 or more sexual assaults. "This is better than Disneyland," shouted a “youth” caught on one of the  amateur videotapes that brought the situation home. There visible on the videos of women being harassed were the “gregarious youth(s)”  the police had been accused of harassing , i.e.  young street kids who’ve been marinated in gansta rap.  The same “youths” Barstow was so sympathetic to were now bad because they hadn’t just preyed on locals in Brooklyn, they had in a most un-PC manner harassed upper middle class women in Central Park, and right accross from the Plaza!  There are limits to multiculturalism.   The wilding was part of weekend of murder and mayhem in Mayberry in which 3 were killed, 59 assaulted with knives or guns and there was a bias attack against Orthodox kids on the Coney Island Boardwalk.  The police it seems had gotten the message; they were backing off for a while.
       Newsday which had been flaying the police for months captured the change of mood.  “Has Giuliani given up on keeping order?  It's over. Suddenly Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sounds like a tired and defensive guy forced to wrestle with a city of ingrates. Let us note that the city's age of reform appears to have ended and Giuliani's early retirement to have begun”
Newsday may be right.  Giuliani, who has preached strength and self-discipline has been humbled by disease, he has a serious case of prostate cancer, and his own personal disorder.   He’s a lame duck who has flaunted his affair with his paramour and publicly humiliated his wife. The man who needs only four hours sleep and whose enormous energy and intelligence have kept the city’s enemies at bay for nearly seven years is now understandably more preoccupied with personal than  public issues. 
      Machiavelli’s hope in the Prince is that a ruthless man can in reviving the republic restore the public virtue of the citizenry.  That is a task beyond 
even Giuliani’s capacities. If he had been a bit more of a politician  Giuliani would have understood the wisdom of Machiavelli’s warning  that “men in general judge by their eyes rather than their hands.”  He has been successful because he’s not a politician, but his failures are similarly situated.  If Dinkins was all gesture and form, Giuliani was all outcomes at a time when ceremonial gestures of inclusion might have softened the hostility of a black population ill-served by a dysfunctional leadership. 
       What Giuliani leaves behind is a city in which, because crime has been curbed, the citizens can enjoy the best of times. In the 1980s, during an earlier Wall Street boom, much of  the middle class was still looking to leave. Today New York’s problem is that so many talented people are beating down its doors that rents are rising out of control.  Employment is at the highest level for thirty years and poverty is declining, largely because for the first time on record the rate of economic growth in New York has bested the national rate in a non-recessionary period.  The summer streets are filled well into the evening and with the city enjoying surpluses there’s even talk for the first time in forty years of major and much needed infrastructure investments. 
       Neither of the Giuliani books notice the way in which the dot.coms are remaking the economic landscape of the city.  For the first time since the 1950s New York has a new industry.  The new media, web, software and graphic design companies, explains Steve Malanga writing in the City Journal account for most of the city’s job growth.  And the techies having run out of affordable space in Manhattan are starting to move out of lower Manhattan and into Harlem, Brooklyn and Queens.  These companies have revived the city’s pre-New Deal entrepreneurial spirit and given time they may renew or at least reshape its politics as well.  Some of the patronage pols looking to succeed Giuliani have already tried to install Dinkins budget director as head of the Independent Budget Office.  But at a time when the city’s economy depends on maintaining the improved  quality of life that has attracted so many dot.com 20-somethings, there may be a limit to how much damage The Prince’s successors can do. 
 
 

Giuliani fights his enemies--and himself.
Rudy Awakening

By FRED SIEGEL
THE NEW REPUBLIC 04.19.99
 

It's 11:30 in the morning in New York--time for the daily demo at One Police Plaza. It goes off like clockwork. Michael Hardy, the lawyer who defended the Reverend Al Sharpton when he was sued along with Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason in the recent Tawana Brawley defamation case, hands the police the list of those asking to be arrested. The demonstrators, there to protest the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by four policemen, chant Sharpton's trademark slogan "no justice, no peace" or sing "We Shall Overcome." The initial arrestees were an honor roll of failed urban politicians. They include former Mayor David Dinkins, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel, and Kweisi Mfume, who, as a congressman, once agreed to a "sacred covenant" with Louis Farrakhan. 
The leader of the protests, Sharpton, looks on, joking that it "looks like my shadow Cabinet just got bigger." Sharpton has reason to smile. For him and the rest of New York's Rudolph Giuliani-haters, the Diallo tragedy is a political godsend--the first big break since Giuliani was elected mayor more than six years ago. Even former Mayor Ed Koch and Giuliani's Republican rival Governor George Pataki--hardly Sharpton acolytes--have been piling on the mayor. The New York police are now the subject of three major investigations, one state and two federal. The Sharpton-Dinkins crowd has never forgiven Giuliani for ousting Dinkins, who was not just a black mayor but the city's first black mayor. Yet, until now, Giuliani has been invincible, thanks to the simple fact that New York has thrived during his mayoralty. 
Consider: Last year, for the first time in a decade, the city's economy grew faster than the national economy. Giuliani has lowered the city's welfare rolls by more than the population of Buffalo, which, in the mayor's words, means "this city has really caught up with the rest of America." It's helped that private sector jobs have been growing at a record pace. And, now that the city has finally recovered all the jobs it lost under Dinkins, lower-skilled workers are being drawn back into the economy so that 54 percent of adults are employed--a new city record. 
Harlem, undergoing a "second renaissance," is bustling with new developments, including "HarlemUSA"--a $65 million, 275,000-square-foot retail and entertainment complex on 125th Street. The South Bronx is enjoying a similar revival. A major reason for all the good news is that the crime rate has hit a 30-year low. Last year, New York actually had fewer murders than Chicago, a city that is three times smaller in population. The sharpest drops have come in minority areas like central Harlem, where overall crime has dropped 61 percent since 1994, and East New York, which went from 110 murders in 1993 (Dinkins's last year as mayor) to 37 in 1998 and had none through the first three months of this year. 
Now, the shooting of Diallo and Giuliani's politically tone-deaf response to it have pierced the mayor's political invincibility. At a time when mayors like Chicago's Richard Daley Jr. and Philadelphia's Ed Rendell are basking in unprecedented African American support and overall popularity, Giuliani, who has done much more than either of those two mayors to tackle crime, finds himself under siege. Clearly, a lot of this has to do with the willingness of Giuliani's political enemies to exploit the Diallo killing, and the timely availability of Hillary Clinton as a possible Senate candidate, for their own ends. But much of Giuliani's problem is of his own making--a result both of his personality and of his misreading of the past few years as a vindication of the way he leads rather than the policies he's championed. 
Flash back to the 1993 election contest between Dinkins and Giuliani. It would be difficult to exaggerate what was at stake. Although the Dow was at a then-record high, the city was losing 7,000 jobs per month--all told, 330,000 during the Dinkins years. The country was just coming out of a recession at the time. But Dinkins had made matters worse with billion-dollar tax increases. These kept his core constituencies in the social services industries funded but also sent business--already reeling from crime--fleeing. 
The murder rate was at a record high, and there was a widespread sense that the rule of law was collapsing. "Homeless activists," explained Democratic Councilman John Sabini, "treated the city like it was an urban theme park--experience a man pissing near you." When city council candidate Andrew Eristoff asked a man not to ride his bicycle on a crowded sidewalk, the cyclist shouted, "I could hit you, and that would be illegal, too, and nobody would do anything about that, either." He then punched the candidate, which produced a pool of blood and resulted in 22 stitches. 
When convicted kidnapper and self-confessed "anti-white" activist Sonny Carson led a group of thugs to protest alleged racism at a Flatbush grocery, shouting "slant eyes" at the Korean owner and threatening would-be customers, the Dinkins administration stood by and did nothing for six months. When a wrestling match between a cop and a drug dealer named Kiko Garcia, who had proclaimed Washington Heights "a liberated zone," led to the latter's death, Dinkins sided with Garcia. Then there were the three days of anti-Jewish rioting in Crown Heights, where a young scholar was killed. The Dinkins administration lay back and let things vent. 
Not surprisingly, the Dinkins-Giuliani race was particularly nasty. Giuliani's worst moment came at an over-the-top, obscenity-laced speech before a rally of out-of-control cops. The Dinkins campaign enlisted black nationalists and celebrities alike to warn of Giuliani's alleged "racism" and "fascism." President Clinton lent a hand, saying that only racial prejudice could explain a vote against Dinkins. All along, the Dinkins camp warned that a Giuliani election would set off riots. It didn't. 
The success story that followed is well known. Giuliani and then-Police Chief Bill Bratton applied George Kelling's "broken windows" theory of policing, which had already succeed in the subways, to the city as a whole. The distinction between broken-windows policing and community policing is often blurred, but the former was one of the keys to both Giuliani's early successes and later difficulties. Community policing takes cops out of patrol cars and places them on foot patrol in neighborhoods. It reduces public hostility to the police, but not crime. Broken-windows policing--the name refers to the idea that permitting one broken window to remain unmended invites vandals to break more-- concentrates on preventing small problems from turning into big ones by, for example, quickly targeting open-air drug markets before they invite even more criminal activity. Broken-windows policing is the single most important urban public policy success of the past 30 years, but its forcefulness carries the danger of increasing police-community tensions. 
The success of Giuliani's first term did not satisfy everyone, of course. When Giuliani reduced the increases in the school budget and drove the popular and personable but ineffective schools chancellor, Raymond Cortines, out of town, his support plunged. But even then Giuliani's adversaries were unable to take advantage. Smarting from Giuliani's refusal to deal with them, Reverends Sharpton and Jesse Jackson marched on Albany in 1995 to protest newly elected Republican Governor Pataki's budget cuts. But the episode produced only yawns. Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, was treading water, despite some successful shakedowns of "bloodsucking" Korean businessmen. 
But, eight months later, Sharpton, one of whose businesses is to keep business or, as he put it, "white interloper[s]," out of Harlem, showed he was still a force. Picketers from the National Action Network, led by an escaped mental patient and part-time street vendor, Morris Powell, turned a landlord-tenant dispute into a deadly incident. Egged on by the daily racial rantings about "Jew bastards," one of Powell's picketers, Abugunde Mulocko, ne Roland Smith, walked into Freddy's Fashion Mart, having previously promised to "burn down the Jew store." Armed with a .38, he shot three whites and a Pakistani in cold blood. Then he set the fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese, and one black--the security guard whom the protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover." 
Remarkably, the 125th Street massacre only strengthened Sharpton, who by then had much of the black political class thoroughly intimidated. When the 1997 mayoral campaign began, Sharpton, a perennial candidate, taunted the press, daring them to bring up the Freddy's fire murders. When they declined, he blamed the incident on Giuliani, to the silence of his fellow candidates in the Democratic primary. His immunity from accountability intact, Sharpton went on to very nearly force Ruth Messinger, Dinkins's designated heir at the time, into a runoff. 
By the time of the general election, Giuliani was so strong that not even the notorious police torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima could derail the outcome. Giuliani handled the incident so deftly in expressing his clear and immediate outrage that the aclu's Norman Siegel, usually a full-time Giuliani critic, declared that "he's had his best forty-eight hours as mayor of this city." African American Congressman Floyd Flake summed up the situation: "I would say that the level of racial tension is the lowest now that it's been in the twenty-one years that I've lived in the city." 
In January 1998, Giuliani, who could increasingly see a national role for himself in the Republican Party, exuded both confidence and conservatism in a colloquially delivered "state of the city" speech. Not only did he describe fathers who don't support their kids as "bums"; he called for an end to open admissions at the City University of New York and an experiment in vouchers for the public schools. He called, in effect, for a repeal of much of the 1960s. 
Giuliani's speech was a full-scale assault on the city's sclerotic bureaucracy--the vast public sector workforce in the schools and welfare organizations that lived off their own failures. (The remedial programs at cuny, for instance, designed to make up for the city's failing high schools, are a profit center for the community colleges that hire inexpensive adjuncts to teach courses.) Yet, if the speech quite literally left many of his critics speechless, it also betrayed an overconfidence that led Giuliani to push his agenda beyond what the public consensus would bear. 
Institutional change in the mayor's office was partly responsible for this. Giuliani was the first mayor to take full advantage of a new city charter foisted on the city by civil rights advocates in 1989. The old city government included a Board of Estimate, in which the borough presidents had a voice along with the mayor and other citywide officials in approving major capital projects. With the board eliminated on the grounds that it violated the Voting Rights Act because the smallest and whitest borough, Staten Island, had equal representation with the others, the only thing left to check the mayor's power was a fractious city council. 
Giuliani, in other words, had a rather free hand. And he used it, first, to push for an ill-considered plan by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to build a new stadium in midtown Manhattan. The very idea of moving what amounts to a city shrine and economic anchor for the Bronx dismayed even Giuliani's strongest supporters. 
On crime, the mayor's second-term agenda angered New Yorkers who have a strong sense of their God-given right not to obey the laws too thoroughly. His cops moved from drug dealers to jaywalkers and other assorted "miscreants," including street vendors, zigzagging cab drivers, and unleashed dogs. All the initiatives had some merit (pedestrian deaths, for instance, have gone down sharply). But each one peeled off some of his political support. 
At the same time, the mayor raised eyebrows by further expanding the role of the 40,000-member NYPD. It was given responsibility for school safety, traffic enforcement, and the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Again, some of these ideas made sense. But, by turning the cops into his primary instrument of public policy, Giuliani increasingly inserted the cops into minor, but unpleasant, encounters with ordinary citizens. This, in turn, eroded goodwill toward the mayor--particularly across racial lines. 
Increasingly, the mayor's outsized political personality seemed to dwarf the issues on his second-term agenda. The mayor's relentless energy was out of sync with the new mood he had helped create. New Yorkers wanted to relax a bit and enjoy the good times. The mayor, like a good prosecutor, wanted to press ahead, with or without allies. 
Even before the Diallo tragedy, Giuliani's Margaret Thatcher-like political personality separated him from the others. The same convictions that allowed both politicians to take on entrenched social democratic hacks also insured that they'd largely fight alone. Giuliani even has a tough time recognizing that other officials, such as city council Speaker Peter Vallone, who agrees with him on most issues, can represent legitimate interests when they differ. When the mayor and the city council were locked in a fight over Yankee Stadium, Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro told Bruce Bender, a centrist representing Vallone, "We will bring you to your knees." One moderate Democrat on the council who's sympathetic to Giuliani's policies complains that "the mayor won't let me be his ally." In part, that's because Giuliani really doesn't like other politicians. Daley and Rendell were prosecutors on their way up the career ladder, but Giuliani is a prosecutor to the bone, a guy who often sees his rivals as little better than the corrupt Bronx boss Stanley Friedman, whom he sent to jail. 
Black Democrats complain that he treats them badly. That's true, but he treats all pols badly. Probably his nastiest feud has come with councilman and fellow Italian-American Stephen DiBrienza. Rather than govern through alliances with other politicians, Giuliani, a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic New York, runs the entire city out of the mayor's office. 
For all this, the mayor might have cruised along on his way to the U.S. Senate in 2000--if not for Hillary Clinton's incipient campaign for the Senate and the police killing of Diallo. Together, these have exposed the Achilles' heel of the Giuliani mayoralty, the hyper-centralization of power in city hall. The sure touch the mayor had exhibited in the Louima affair has deserted him in the Diallo case. Rather than expressing horror at how the police could have pumped 41 bullets into an innocent man, Giuliani, perhaps looking beyond city hall to a statewide run, responded with inappropriate equanimity, saying that he wouldn't prejudge the case. Two of the four cops involved from the special Street Crime Unit, however, had already made it clear by crying after Diallo's death that they had made a hideous mistake. No matter; the damage was done, and it was payback time. 
When the Louima affair broke, there were claims that the cops involved shouted out, "It's Giuliani time." That proved a hoax, and the brutality could be written off to rogue cops in a bad precinct. But the Diallo case seemed to implicate the broken-windows policing Giuliani has used to build his reputation. This was the opportunity Giuliani's enemies, deserved and undeserved, had been waiting for. And none exploited the situation more effectively than the city's leading racial demagogue, Al Sharpton. Sharpton emerged from a guilty verdict in the defamation case stemming from the Tawana Brawley hoax stronger than ever and became the primary spokesman for the Diallo family. Walking hand in hand with a city press that saw the enemy of its enemy as its friend, Sharpton announced, "Amadou Diallo will be the end of Giuliani's burgeoning political career." 
In the month that followed the killing, Giuliani's approval rating in the city dropped by 20 points as the local papers ran more than 600 stories on the shooting, all based on the same paltry set of facts. The cops thought they were pursuing a serial-rape suspect who resembled Diallo; they fired all 41 bullets in just seven seconds. It seems likely that after the first shots were fired the cops kept firing at flashes reflected on a glass pane and their own ricochets, but it's hard to know, since the four cops, who have reportedly been indicted for second-degree murder, refused to testify before the grand jury. Nonetheless, a contest quickly emerged to express the greatest outrage with the fewest facts. 
Time and again, accusations of racism have been hurled at Giuliani on the grounds that racist intent could be inferred from the outcome of the incident. The left-wing civil libertarians who had been terribly unhappy about the simultaneous decline in crime and social spending, since it undermined their argument that social conditions such as poverty are the "root causes" of crime, are glowing with vindication. Sharpton's flacks in the press, like Jim Dwyer of the Daily News, insisted that the cops had set out to "prey" on black people--no evidence required--while Art Spiegelman did a New Yorker cover in which a smiling cop takes target practice at cutouts of civilians. 
Giuliani responded with evidence showing that, while the Street Crime Unit of 400 men makes up one percent of the police force, it was responsible for seizing 40 percent of the guns pulled off the streets and saving countless lives, and that the unit had a slightly lower level of civilian complaints than the NYPD as a whole to boot. He further noted that New York's crime reduction has been accompanied by a nearly 50 percent reduction in police use of deadly force since the Dinkins years. 
The numbers were all but ignored as the Dinkins Democrats looked to define the New York party's post-Giuliani future. More recently, their allies from out of state have gotten into the game. John Conyers, the Democratic congressman from Detroit, has been bashing Giuliani for some time. Last year, for example, Conyers convened an informal anti-Giuliani hearing, in which one "witness" was a man who went on an anti-Semitic rant; Conyers claimed he didn't hear it. Another witness was none other than Sonny Carson, of Korean-grocery-boycott fame. Conyers said he was "privileged" to call Carson to testify. Carson, for his part, went on to explain of the police, "Once a pig, always a pig." 
After the Diallo killing, Conyers implied to a New York cable news station that Giuliani is a racist--and called New York cops the most brutal in the country. This from a man who represents a city with much higher rates of both crime and police brutality and who serves in Washington, D.C., a city where the largely resident black police department is four times more likely to use deadly force than in New York. 
But the protests, particularly from individuals, go far beyond the politicians. For many they are a genuine expression of outrage on the part of innocent African Americans humiliated by the expansion of police stop-and-frisk efforts. Filmmaker Majora Carter, a resident of the South Bronx, explained that, while she liked "the message the cops were sending to criminals," she "disliked some of the messengers," particularly the special unit cops unfamiliar with her neighborhood, who had hassled her. 
There is a problem with New York policing--a reason for concern--but it's a matter of policy, not racism. "There is no racism or tolerance of brutality in the NYPD," argues former Police Chief Bratton. "The racism comes from Sharpton." Bratton, author of the administration's early anti-crimes successes, was forced out of the Giuliani administration in 1996 not only because there was a clash of egos but also because the mayor's desire to run the entire show from city hall was incompatible with Bratton's plans for the police department. Bratton argued that, after street crime had been reduced through broken-windows policing, community policing should be given a bigger role. 
The problem, Bratton realized, is that you can't drive crime below the level a community has set for itself without incurring considerable resentment. The only way to keep pushing it down is to establish a better rapport between police and the citizens in order to minimize understandable black ambivalence about anti-crime efforts. Most African Americans are conservative on crime until their 15-year-old nephew gets unfairly arrested. The dilemma is that, while 15- to 25-year-old minority toughs live in fear of the police, much of the rest of the city lives in fear of those same toughs. 
The key to black middle-class anger about New York policing is found in what sociologist Jan Rosenberg describes as "the failure of success model." The more the objective conditions for African Americans improve as they move up the social ladder into integrated situations, she notes, the more opportunities there are for slights, real and perceived. A similar situation is set in motion when broken-windows policing radically cuts crime. The more Giuliani's police department tried to reduce crime, the more cops came into contact with innocent people. So, as crime goes down, fruitless frisks go up and resentments multiply. Or, as Bill Stephney, a hip-hop record producer put it, "As fear from knuckleheads declines, fear from police pursuing knuckleheads has been rising." 
A less isolated administration, one with a wider range of allies and more willing to listen to friendly dissent, might have picked up on the complaints and modified its tactics. But, when Bratton left, so did the primary channel for such feedback. Giuliani and his top staff are far more energetic and talented than the usual city-hall hacks. But it's impossible to run a city of 7.4 million with a small cadre of reformers operating out of the mayor's executive offices. 
To be sure, Giuliani labors under a great burden. In other cities, the black politicians of the civil rights era such as Coleman Young in Detroit and Marion Barry in D.C. have given way to a new generation of black leaders, like Dennis Archer and Anthony Williams, who have replaced racial symbolism with a concern for concrete achievement. There is no such second generation in New York. One aim of the celebrity acts of scripted "civil disobedience" outside One Police Plaza is to reenact the old struggles while preserving the power of patronage politicians like Harlem's Charles Rangel. 
It's not too late for Giuliani to save himself and his program for the city. He's belatedly begun to meet with black leaders, and he seems now to recognize that even good policies can be taken too far. Similarly, under the pressure of the protests, anti-crime policy seems to be moving toward Bratton's vision of community policing. 
In 1989, Sharpton helped convert a genuine grievance, the killing of young black teen Yussef Hawkins by a group of white thugs, into a mayoral victory for Dinkins. Sharpton now hopes that a similar campaign of polarization can define the city's postGiuliani future. And he may succeed. Sharpton has become the instrument of revenge for all the public sector pols and interest-group activists, who are angered as much by Giuliani's achievements as by his failings. 
For all its flaws, Rudy Giuliani's crusade to make New York more like the rest of America, by reducing crime and welfare while giving the private sector economy the opportunity to do its work, has been an enormous success. The tragedy of Amadou Diallo's death would be compounded only if the racial hysteria produced by the ongoing war between Giuliani and a Sharptonized Democratic Party unraveled those accomplishments. 

FRED SIEGEL is a professor of history at The Cooper Union, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and author of The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Fate of America's Big Cities (Free Press)
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hold the Champagne

(this is a slightly longer version of a piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on November 6,1997)

-   Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin

      “Irrational exuberance” isn’t confined to Wall Street. 
The mere prospect of a Giuliani landslide victory has  made many an analyst giddy.   Even before the first ballots in the mayoral election were cast,  New York magazine was talking about the possibilities  of  a Giuliani presidency, while an exuberant  New Republic wrote earlier about New York and Giuliani  leading the nation’s cities into a new era of  “Progressive reform.” 
        Rudy’s landslide win over liberal Ruth Messinger, in tandem with Los Angeles Mayor Riordan’s earlier thundering  defeat of  another lingering leftist, Tom Hayden, has led some to talk of these men as the “messiahs of a new urban pragmatism.”   In these overwrought accounts this year’s re-election victories of Giuliani and Riordan  as well as Detroit’s Dennis Archer and Cleveland’s Mike White, two other new wave mayors, were seen as harbingers of nothing less than an urban renaissance. 
        There is no doubt that Giuliani and the other new wave mayors have changed the dialogue, their accomplishments  have generated a new mood of urban optimism.  But before we break out the champagne, it’s important to note that the successes of  these mayors notwithstanding, the cities have a long way to go before they fully recover from both the long term secular decline, and the devastating impact of the social policies imposed by 1960s liberalism. 
      In New York, for instance there is despite the dramatic decline in crime - the greatest urban public policy success of the past thirty years - less to  both the city’s comeback and Giuliani’s massive  victory than meets the eye.   The city’s 24 percent reduction of the welfare rolls, for instance,  only puts it back to where it was in 1990.   Fortune magazine may have seen fit to name  New York ‘the best city for business,” but Gotham notes  Mark Zandi of Regional Financial Associates of West Chester, Pennsylvania “is unique,” because in the midst of a national economic boom, it “is the only large area with a significant slack in its labor market.” 
        As David Dinkins’ heir, Ruth Messinger was never a credible  candidate, but nonetheless some of her concerns about an economy with double the national rate of unemployment were on the mark.   The high unemployment is particularly troubling in an city which has the lowest rate of labor force participation in the nation, lower even than retirement areas such as  Tampa-St. Petersberg.  Gotham’s Latino labor force participation rate is more than ten points below L.A., San Jose or Houston. 
        Job growth in New York has been running at  1.1 percent annually  during the recovery.  That  is less than half the 2.7 percent national average so that the city, according to Comptroller Alan Hevesi, has on net recovered only 44 percent of the 360,000 jobs it lost during the recession.   We are at the peak of the national business cycle, but the gap, notes  Hevesi  between “the city unemployment rate and the national unemployment is the highest in recorded history.”   Despite New York’s newly recovered  almost 1980 like sense of   wealth and well-being, two million New Yorkers live in poverty and the average household has a cost of living adjusted income of about 16 percent below the national average. 
       Far more than during the “era of greed” under Reagan,  New York in the 1990s has become dangerously dependent on its financial sector.   Although the number of people working on Wall Street has actually fallen from 163,000 in 1987 to 150,000 today, they now account for 17 percent of all city income up from 12 percent a decade ago.
       None of this was visible in an election where the incumbent was able to use the budget surplus generated by Wall Street profits  to rent many of the Democratic regulars in order to pad his victory margin.   All the talk, all the election articles about the decline of Upper West Side liberalism miss half of the story.  Ideological liberalism is on the wane, but operational liberalism, the politics of big government did very well in this election.  Rather than slaying the dragon of New York’s notoriously destructive interest group politics, Rudy the some time reformer,  has harnessed it to his own political aims. 
       First Giuliani handed the liberal interest groups an enormous victory when he helped undermined the campaign to reform the rent control laws  with hysterical warning about the need for the police to  protect old people from their landlords.   Having secured his left flank,  Giuliani then undermined Messinger by winning  endorsement from people in the social services industry like the famed “poverty pimp,” Raymon Velez, a man he once tried to prosecute.   More broadly, Giuliani courted the support of poverty entrepreneurs all across the city in a quid pro quo that mortgages part of his second term.  By bringing the poverty industry under his tent, the mayor misses a critical opportunity to cut the cost of programs which perpetuate  a politics based on peddling pathology to the federal government.   Any serious effort to address the city’s out of whack cost structure - 29 per cent above the national average for large cities due largely to sky high taxes - seem to have fallen victim to the re-election effort.
       This record of economic underachievement is not confined to New York.   In L.A. where Riordan also brought his city back from the depths of despair following a period of riots and runaway jobs, the city’s overall economic performance, although better than New York’s, remains weak when compared to the adjacent cities like Glendale and Burbank and Culver City which are booming.
      The problem, in part, is that Riordan’s cost cutting measures have been sabotaged by a city council  that keeps moving  leftward.  In fact four years after Riordan took office, Los Angeles business taxes per employee are three times those of Long Beach and more than six times those of  nearby Burbank. 
       Right now, says David Abel, who publishes an influential L.A. public policy newsletter, “its the public employees who are the dominant force in town, they are the ones who are motivated and organized. “ Under L.A.s weak mayor system the real power broker in the city has often seemed to be Hollywood’s left wing Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, a proponent of the public employee unions  “living wage legislation” and opponent of crackdowns on aggressive panhandling.  “Jackie’s started to scare people,”  observes liberal Democrat Linda Griego, the outgoing CEO of Rebuild Los Angeles.  Business people among others are “terrified about where the council might be going.” 
         Riordan’s failure to rein in the council and thus costs has only served to sustain the San Fernando Valley secession movement which is winning support from other sections of the city like the Westside, Venice and San Pedro which would also like to secede.  Elected as the Mayor to “turn L.A. around,” Riordan could end up presiding over the dismemberment of L.A. into a gaggle of smaller, feuding constituencies.
        Despite the best efforts of Giuliani and Riordan and the other new wave mayors, the national pace of urban decline has only been slowed, not reversed.  In the 1990s, non-metropolitan job growth outpaced that of major urban areas by almost two to one, something unprecedented in recent American history.  Since 1990 according to corporate demographer David Birch, economic growth nationally has continued to occur in an inverse relationship to distance from the big cities. 
         Last summer in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, President Clinton insisted that “our cities are back, we’ve got the biggest economic resurgence in cities since WWII.” He’s right yet cities are continuing to fall behind their suburbs.  According to a HUD State of the Cities report, between 1990 and 1993 ( the last year for which numbers were available) 97 percent of the new businesses and 87 percent of the new entry level jobs in 77 large metro areas were created in the suburbs.
        Amidst an increasingly dispersed economy, even in the Sunbelt, places  like Los Angeles and Dallas, have become “donut cities ”  with high downtown vacancy rates and high poverty rates surrounded by suburban growth.    The thirty percent vacancy rates in downtown Dallas are three times the suburban average.  Atlanta the booming center of the new South” which reelected Mayor Bill Campbell on Tuesday by  despite a weak first term was recently scolded in an Atlanta Constitution editorial .  “Campbell,” they wrote “gratuitously insults business leaders and suburban politicians who are in a position to help the city.  He refuses to acknowledge that Atlanta has become a small and rather powerless municipality in a sprawling, prosperous region.” 
        New York is neither small nor powerless, but even in its resurgence it is, Wall Street and tourism  aside, a declining factor in an increasingly suburbanized national economy.    When asked about his second term agenda, Mayor Giuliani insisted that he would “keep on doing what (he’s) been doing.”  “The one big bold thing we could do,” he went on,  “is to work to make the city virtually drug-free.”  It’s a worthy goal but inadequate to the needs of a city whose Wall Street  dependent economy gives off a tubercular glow.   The fault here lies not primarily with Mayor Giuliani, whose extraordinary leadership has brought New York back from the brink of a social meltdown, but in the lack of a supporting cast.  Progressivism, the great urban reform movement at the beginning of this century had a broad base of support to put behind the leaders it pushed into office.  There is no such broad movement afoot today.   Without a movement behind them even innovative mayors are just lone brokers who have to make peace with the political powers that produced urban decline in the first place.
      Until our cities have not only bold mayors but broad backing for reform of the tax and regulatory structures of the cities not to mention dysfunctional school and social service systems, the current euphoria about an urban renaissance will remain premature. 

Fred Siegel is the author of the recently published The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (Free Press)  Joel Kotkin is a Senior with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy.
 
 
 

February 2, 1992, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS 

SECTION: FANFARE; Pg. 36 

LENGTH: 942 words 

HEADLINE: More Bang for New York's Buck 

BYLINE: BY FRED SIEGEL. Fred Siegel is a professor of history at The Cooper Union. 

BODY: 
 

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector, by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler. Addison-Wesley, 416 pp., $ 22.95. 

THE PUGNACIOUS pride that New Yorkers once felt for their city was based, in part, on a not so carefully concealed sense of superiority. "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere," sings Sinatra. But recently, and even before the current recession, those sharp-edged sentiments were redirected inward as New York's all-too-apparent social decay turned pride into shame. A December 1991 poll reports that 60 percent of adult New Yorkers would like to leave the city and 51 percent actually plan to leave. As much as anything else it is probably the decline in housing prices and the national recession that accounts for the fact that there isn't already a stampede for the exits. But why leave "the greatest city in the world"? More than anything else New Yorkers seem to fear that even with a recovery, they'll never receive effective basic services for the tax dollars they pay to a gargantuan government whose insatiable budgets grew from $ 10 billion at the start of the 1980s to $ 29 billion by decade's end. For many, a government whose energies are directed toward raising revenue for itself through quotas on parking tickets even as it us unable to clear the streets of garbage and traffic suggests a hopeless situation. That feeling of hopelessness is akin to the passivity of those who insist that short of a federal white knight riding in with a financial bailout - a highly unlikely occurrence - nothing can be done. 

David Osborne disagrees; there is, he argues, a great deal that New York and other cities can do for themselves. In his new book, "Reinventing Government," written with Ted Gaebler, a former city manager, he describes the inventive means by which other cities have forged far ahead of New York in learning how to deliver more bang for the municipal buck. New Yorkers may be chagrined to learn that "backwaters" such as Newark have used competition between the public and private sectors to collect garbage more efficiently than New York. Similarly, "benighted" Chicago - which is in far better financial shape than New York - learned how to turn its towing operations over to competing private companies. Now, instead of the city paying to have cars towed away, the companies pay the city - so that Chicago turned $ 2 million dollars in annual costs into $ 2 million in revenue. 

The authors' thesis is that the bureaucratic and centralized structure of backward city governments like New York's, once a creative response to the problems of 19th-Century industrialization, are obsolete in the information age. Their master metaphor for describing the changes needed comes from the distinction between what they call "rowing" (directly providing government services) and "steering" (overseeing the delivery of those services by nonprofit agencies and private companies as well as by government). It's the same point that Mario Cuomo makes, verbally at least, when he talks of why "it is not government's obligation to provide services, but [rather] to see that they are sometimes provided." 

Osborne and Gaebler push not the privatization of services per se but competition between public and private providers - a sort of Tennessee Valley Authority approach in reverse - to reintroduce a measure of accountability into government operations. Merely contracting out services, as New York's famous Parking Violations Bureau scandal makes clear, simply opens up new opportunities for corruption. But the most serious corruption in government, the authors insist, is not the petty kickbacks so common among, say, building inspectors but the ongoing scandal of a municipality so straight-jacketed by formal rules and regulations, so self-serving, that it fails - as New Yorkers are all too aware - to perform no matter how much money is poured into its coffers. 

The way New York's government is now structured is that, Soviet style, it rewards failure. The more poorly institutions - such as the schools - perform, the greater the claim they have on the treasury. Real spending on the schools by the city and state increased by more than 50 percent in the 1980s, while test scores stagnated. Meanwhile the Parks Department, whose productivity has actually been improved by way of a borough-based and even park-based decentralization, has had that improvement rewarded with continuous budget cuts. 

More hortatory than explanatory at times, "Reinventing Government" is not without its problems. Part expose, part analysis, part self-described "road-map" into the future, it too often moves along at a breathless pace, substituting ready made "recipes" and catch-phrases for sustained insight. Decentralization, one of the book's buzzwords, is generally a good thing, but as a glance at the version imposed on the New York city schools in the late 1960s suggests, it is by no means a sure shot. It would have been useful for the authors to have focused on a few examples of failed reform to better grasp the dificulties involved in making even decentralized government effective and accountable. 

Osborne himself has become somewhat of a guru. He is the intellectual force behind Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles' plans to scrap the great reform of the 19th Century - civil service - and an advisor to presidential candidate Bill Clinton. But Osborne's attempts to circumvent the sterile left-right squabbles of the past decades have yet to gain a real hearing in New York. The publication of "Reinventing Government" may begin to change that.
 
 
 
 
 

                   
                  HARBORING GREATNESS

Edwin Burrows & Mike Wallace Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford,1383 pp., $49.95

George Lankevitch: American Metropolis: A History of New York City, NYU, 271pp, price? paper

Selma Berrol: The Empire City: New York and its People 1624-1996,   Greenwood, 184pp, $49.95
 

-   Fred Siegel
 

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs. . . . Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. . . . But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. . . . Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land
                    - Herman Melville, Moby Dick

      
      New York, the open city, the city created by its great harbor, has always been both invigorated and imperiled by its disorder.   The offspring of the Dutch Republic, which was the most advanced economy of its age, the great port drew not only commerce in 18 languages but  “servants, slaves, sailors and soldiers”  whose brawls made the burghers anxious and a police force a necessity.   Long before Rudy Giuliani preached civility to the unbelieving,  Peter Stuyvesant described his city by the sea as a “slovenly, drunken, disobedient community.”  Determined to restore discipline in New Amsterdam, Mayor Stuyvesant imposed fines on townsfolk who allowed pigs, goats and sheep to wander.  He also, George Lankevich tells us in his compact American Metropolis: A History of New York, ordered taverns to close at nine, and forbade residents from throwing “rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animals or anything like it” into the street.  New Amsterdam became “Gotham” - Anglo-Saxon for “goat town” -the legendary city of wise fools whose people, noted an 18th century observer  “infatuated with trade” energized the economy even as they left the streets, as always, strewn with litter. 
       When the Dutch, defeated by the English, passed on the torch of economic leadership, New Amsterdam became New York, a prominent port in the British global economy.  It was and is an extraordinary harbor, a “divine gift,” wrote Roger Starr,  protected against the winds from all direction, it’s free of fog or frozen water or sharply shifting tides.  The commerce from the East was funneled into the great harbor from Long Island Sound to the East River, from the North by the Hudson,  from the west  by New Jersey’s Raritan River which empties into lower New York bay. 
       New Yorkers  had the ingenuity to shape the port to their commercial advantage and the port in turn reshaped them.  The city’s adventurous Whig entrepreneurs, well aware of their competition from Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, operated with an energy and acumen unknown to the dynastic firms of their rivals.  Even before the Erie Canal had opened, they pioneered the auction system for selling arriving good.  “The truth,” explained Abraham Thompson one of the auctioneers, “was that in Boston and Philadelphia, the free and absolute sale of goods not encouraged,” in fact not even “understood.”  In 1817 New York established the first regularly scheduled packet ship service with England,  thus enhancing the city’s position as a source of financial information which was put to use in the financial markets underwritten with the profits from trade.   This virtuous circle reinforced by the success of the Erie canal, would carry the city to greatness.
       Gotham, a readable 1,383 page account of the city from its origins to 1898 when the five boroughs were consolidated into “Greater New York”, is one version of that great story.   While the authors tell us that  “there is no overarching thesis,” there is an ongoing theme than runs through this witty, well written narrative. Drawing, as  the authors readily acknowledge on the last thirty years of scholarship in the  new labor and social history, Gotham, particularly when it reaches the late 18th century, is at its core the story of working class and immigrant struggles with commercial capitalism. 
        Even the creation of the modern Christmas holiday fits into  the framework of  a city defined by the attempts to impose order on its near anarchic energy.   Historians have long known that the modern child-centered  celebration of Christmas originates with Clement Moore’s  “A Visit from St. Nicholas” identified by Washington Irving as the Dutch patron saint of New Amsterdam. What Gotham shows, drawing on the writing of  Stephen Nissenbaum  is that the development of Christmas was driven, in part, by Protestant attempts to curb the “wild plebeian bacchanals” celebrated on December 25, the start of the winter solstice. Genteel New Yorkers seized upon the Moore poem as a way to civilize the  unwashed with a festival devoted,  as one newspaper put  it, to “the domestic hearth, the virtuous wife, smiling-merry hearted children and the blessed mother.” 
       George Lankevich’s American Metropolis, ideal for classroom use, is a political history that moves from one mayoral administration to the next.  The far more ambitious Gotham, is a history of confrontations in which the star actors are  the conflicts and crisis that shaped the social landscape. New York had already contended with numerous riots well before the French stormed the largely empty Bastille.  Gotham is particularly good at showing how the example of  French and their revolutionary example cast a giant shadow over New York for the next century by deepening the class cleavages in the city’s  politics. 
       In 1788, as Federalists and anti-Federalists were fighting the political battle over whether to adopt the Constitution, some young boys peered through a window and discovered Columbia College Physicians ( Columbia was then located in lower Manhattan) holding up the arm of a dissected cadaver.  The boys fled screaming and a mob returned  outraged that graves had been violated.  Rumors  flew and there were threats to kill every doctor in town.  When the surgeons were taken to jail a mob 5,000 strong  was dispersed only after the militia killed three of the rioters.  The people were heard, legislation was passed to protect their graves, thereafter only the bodies of  dead criminals were available to the surgeons.  This was the backdrop to the news of a revolution in France.
        The city was nearly unanimous in supporting the onset of the French Revolution as a blow against monarchical tyranny.   But with the regicide of Louis XVI, well-to-do Federalists like Rufus King decided that the revolution was  being “conducted with so much barbarity & ignorance” as to have become an enemy of liberty.  But not even news of the terror turned most of the mechanics and small merchants of the city against the Jacobins.  The newly founded Tammany Society, soon to be a bulwark of the Democratic party  (party) turned the “`Glorious Fourth’ into a celebration of international revolution singing choruses of “La Marseilles.”  “The lower class of citizens,” noted Peter Livingston approvingly, still so supported the revolution that they were “almost to a Man . . .Frenchmen.”  
     At a time when one man in seven was jailed for debt in the course of a year but only one in ten had the property qualification to vote, the toast at a mechanics’ dinner struck a dangerous chord: “A cobweb pair of breeches, a porcupine saddle . . .to all the enemies of freedom.”  The divisions deepened when France declared war on England producing a wave of Francophilia from French sympathizers, some of whom adopted “the bloused shirts, linen cravats and baggy pantaloons that were the uniform of the continental revolutionaries.”
      A product of the 1960s, Mike Wallace, the principal author of  the chapters on, the 19th century, is torn between his identification with the French revolutionary socialist tradition on the one hand and his considerable abilities as an historian on the other.  In describing the marked influence of  the revolutions of  1789 ,1848  and 1870 in Paris on New York, the reader can feels his hopes rise only to be replaced by sobering sentences on why even New York, the most European of American cities, was different.   The tension is part of what makes the narrative intriguing but it also allows the book to leave unanswered the question of why New York, for all its violence, was never ripe for revolution. 
        When the news of the revolution of 1848 deposing Louis-Phillipe, “the bourgeois monarch,” reached America there was again widespread support for the revolutionaries.  The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spoke for most Americans when he said that “So long as a King is left upon the his throne there will be no justice on earth.” But when  socialists or “red republicans” like
Louis Blanc called on the French government to establish a “right to work” in government organized  “cooperative” workshops American attitudes changed.   Americans found it hard to identify with  neo-Jacobin calls for a more governed society.  The sometimes radical  New York Tribune which would later employ Karl Marx as a correspondent, mocked the merchants’ fear of socialism but ceased to support the Parisian revolutionaries.  The Tribune  would even go so far as to support the “ferocious” suppression of the June revolt when thousands of Parisian workers were killed or injured.
      What made  New York different was not the absence of  intense class conflict but rather the assumptions behind it.    There was a fundamentally different character to American radicalism because many radicals shared the same free market  ideology as their class enemies, but put it to very different use.     
Consider the thoughts of William Leggett the leader of the so-called LocoFocos, the Jacksonian radicals representing the working men of New York who broke with the  Tammany regulars.  “The sole reliance of the labouring classes,” Leggett argued is the great principle of Equal Rights , ,, (and) a system of legislation which leaves all to the free exercise of their talents and industry.”  One of  the primary objects of Legget’s ire were government granted monopolies in everything  from meat and vegetables to  fuel and ferries.   It was the working people of New York, he argued quite correctly, who paid for the privileges of the politically connected Whig elite in the coin of higher prices and reduced opportunities.
        Writing in the New York Post, Leggett made such a strong case for hard money, free trade and limited government, arguing that society was “too much governed,” that some have gone so far as to  seen him as a precursor of none other than Freidrich Hayek.  “Goverments,”  Leggett insisted in speaking on behalf of the producing classes “have no right to interfere with the pursuits of individuals . . . .(or) to tamper with individual industry a hair’s breadth beyond what is essential to protect the right of person and property.”      This sounds like Hayek but it isn’t.  We shouldn’t decontextualize him.  His attacks were  part of  a general  assault not only on  Whig cronyism and corruption but the workings of  an expanding  economy that turned independent citizen-artisans  into wage laborers.   
        There were other  radicals like the German immigrant William Weitling who had fought on the Parisian barricades in 1848,  more fully in the European mold.  In Europe Weitling, who was one of the early proponents of terror, spoke of  “founding the kingdom of heaven by unleashing the furies of hell.”  He wanted, shades of the 60s, to mobilize “smart and courageous murderers and thieves.”  He had little success in that regard.   In America his proposals to establish workers’ cooperatives resonated in New York’s German community whose Pianomakers union carried the flag that their fellow  Parisian pianomakers had planted “upon the barricades during the stormy days” of 1848.  But unlike Leggett, Weitling’s ideas remained marginal.
      Then as now New York was cleft  by an often bewildering set of cross cutting antagonisms.   Wallace notes the numerous clashes  where workers crossed ethnic though not racial lines in  shared solidarity, but most labor and fraternal organizations had a distinctly ethnic caste as different groups operated in distinct niches of the economy.    It is difficult, in fact almost impossible, to  sort out the ethnic and religious as opposed to the class strands of radicalism since, for instance, it was often an unskilled Irish Catholic worker who found himself in conflict with a native born Protestant boss.  Similarly it’s never entirely clear whether ethnic conflict served as a surrogate for class conflict, or if  reverse. 
        The Irish immigrants 20 per cent of the population represented 70 percent of the people on relief and more than half of the men in jail were  despised  as “simian” and “brutes” by Protestants of all stripes.   The Irish alliance with Tammany politicians was already enough to anger Protestants, and the Catholic Church didn’t help matters when Bishop Hughes preached at St. Patricks Cathedral on “The Decline of Protestantism and Its  Causes.”  Hughes “announced the coming triumph of Rome over Protestants”   Yet the 1849 Astor Place Riots were to demonstrate that  given the right provocation nativists and Irish Catholics, so often at each others’ throats, could unite in the shared Anglophobia of the “dangerous classes.”  
        The Astor Place Riot, set off  not by a rap concert but by dueling Shakespeare performances, revealed a class conflict so intense as to temporarily shake the city’s social order.   William Macready a symbol of British aristocracy culture and the Philadelphia born  Edwin Forest,  a hero of the “common man” were the greatest Shakespearean actors of the day and bitter rivals.  When Macready, much admired by Herman Melville, was to perform for the white gloved Whigs at the Astor Place Opera House  “de  spot of de eliteet”  in May of 1849, his rival was playing at a Broadway theater not far away.   The penny press stoked the feud between the actors while Irish radicals hostile to Macready and the native born Bowery B’hoys, allied for this occasion, revved up their respective followers.  A large crowd gathered outside during the performance and when Macready came out for the third act of Macbeth, Isaiah Rynders, a knife toting gambler,  saloonkeep and Tammany pol led his gang members to their feet  shouting curses.  Outside a mob of more than 8,000 egged on by nativist Ned Buntline swinging a sword and screaming “Workingmen! Shall Americans or Englishman rule?” were throwing stones at the theater windows. The crowd shouting  “burn the damned den of the aristocracy” refused to be intimidated by the arrival of the militia which was reluctant to fire.  But fire they eventually did and when it was over  22 were dead.  
      In the wake of 1848 in Europe, it seemed as if class warfare had come to the New World.   Some of  the Whig grandees were delighted by the outcome.  One of them James Watson Webb saw the deaths as “an excellent advertisement to the Capitalists of the old world that they might send their property to New York and rely upon the certainty that it would be safe from the clutches of red republicanism, or chartists, or communionists (sic) of any description.”   But, notes The Cooper Union’s Peter Buckley, the historian of the Astor Place Riots, the class solidarity of late 40s was soon replaced by the ethnic antagonism of the 1850s  when working class nativists saw cheap Irish labor and not Anglophile bosses as their primary foe.    
    The nativist riots of the 1850s were the last time that the Protestants dominated the streets of New York.  During the the Civil War it took a regiment of Union soldiers to beat back the Irish rioters protesting both the draft and the competion of black labor in what was the bloodiest disturbance in American history  By 1871, while wealthy New Yorkers looked with horror as the Paris commune took control of the French capital, Catholics took complete control of the streets.   With the police force closely aligned to Tammany, Irish Catholic rioters made that years Protestant Orangemen’s parade, the city’s last. 
      It’s hard not to admire Gotham’s encyclopedic breadth there are discussions of the arts, entertainment, popular recreation, and architecture as well as a range of political and economic topics.  But it’s also hard to be satisfied with its implicit thesis of a world definitively divided between rich and poor.  For what’s striking about New York is that so much of the conflict, religion aside,took place within the context of a consenus about values.  Wallace’s Gotham is like a  bucket where agitation threatened to tip over the entire social order.  But for all the violence of 19th century New York it was more like an ocean which settles back roughly where it was after a great storm has passed.  The historian Jim Chapin argues that “if by chance the elite ten percent of New York had been wiped out by a plague, the remaining population would have recreated something to similar to what already existed.”  What most New Yorkers rich and poor wanted was a chance to better themselves and sometimes they tried to do that by violent means.   This is the missing element in Gotham  which says next to nothing about mobility. There  is no recognition, even in passing, that the great grandchildren of the nineteenth century Irish Catholic would go on to  create the New York Conservative party in the 1960s. 
      Selma Berrol’s brief, 184 page  The Empire City  lays out the more compelling case of a city defined for the most part by upward mobility.  Her thesis is that there was a “symbiosis” between the rise of  new immigrants and the city itself.   She notes, for example that in the case of  the 19th century Croton Water system and the turn of the century subways built by Irish and Italian immigrants respectively, the city infrastructure was improved physically as the new arrivals improved their social position. 
       Berroll doesn’t gloss over the desperate poverty of new immigrants, particularly during the down cycles of  New York’s boom and bust economy.  But she notes that those, like the Germans who arrived with skills  - they were 15 percent of the population in 1855 but half the bakers, confectioners, cabinet makers, tobacconists, tailors and woodworkers -were likely, then as now, to do better even when times got hard.  Why was there so much suffering in a city whose economy was growing rapidly? “The basic reason,” she answers, “was that the population was expanding” even more rapidly than the economy, “creating a gap that led to low wages and unemployment particularly in the winter “when the canals froze and commerce dwindled.”
          Henry George, the most influential social critic of late 19th century New York, gave a different answer.   George, an extraordinary mix of conservative and radical instincts wanted to know why more wealth seemed to produce more poverty: “as liveried carriages, appear, so do barefoot children.”  Seven years before Frederick Jackson Turner penned  his famous thesis explaining why American democracy depended on the opportunity offered by the frontier, George anticipated his argument.  The United States, George said, had been a land of promise because its vast expanses of territory meant that landlords couldn’t extort monopoly rents from the workingman.  But that day had ended, and  the New World, he warned was about to become as class-bound as the old as landlords squeezed the workers wages.  The solution for George, also an ardent free trader, was a single tax on land which replace all other taxes.  The single-tax, he told his father, would, restore religious faith, by reviving economic opportunity.
     In 1886,  Henry George was one of the three extraordinary candidates for mayor in a defining election fought out against a backdrop of rising unemployment, the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and a wave of violent strikes. George’s opponents were a future president, the 28 year old Theodore Roosevelt, who would run third in the race and the victor, Abram Hewitt, the son-in-law of Peter Cooper, the founder The Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences where the bright children of mechanics could receive a free education.   Speaking on behalf of “Honest Labor Against Thieving Landlords and Politicians,”  George’s campaign for mayor drew the support of the city’s newly aroused labor movement.  His supporters, Irish laborers and German coopers alike, sought to restore the traditional virtues. Their placards read “No Charity We Want Fair and Square Justice,” and “The Spirit of ’76 Still Lives.”   On the stage of Cooper’s Great Hall where Lincoln had denounced slavery, George denounced “ industrial slavery.”   Adverting to the city’s densely packed slums he told the crowd, “we are toiling perhaps for Mrs. Astor,” or “the heirs of some dead Dutchman.”
      Hewitt, by nature a reformer,  reluctantly accepted the backing of Tammany.  His family ties gave him some credibility with the city’s workers and he  insisted that he was not the rich man’s candidate. “These rich Republicans and these rich millionaires  - nay, have they not at the Union League Club indorsed (sic) Mr. Roosevelt?” Hewitt criticized the Astors for not devoting their “unearned increment” to the public good and agreed that the city should tax the wealthy to create more institutions like the tuition-free Cooper Union.  But he also spoke to the fears of  middle class property owners , noting that the  single-tax would  hit them hard.    And he insisted  that the United Labor Party which was backing Henry George consisted of “anarchists, nihilists, communists, socialists, who were “enemies of civilization and order.”  Yes, he agreed, restore opportunity but not at the risk of practices that would recall “the horrors of the French Revolution and the atrocities of the Commune.”
       Hewitt proposed to increase opportunity by rebuilding  the city’s crumbling docks, streets and transit facilities.  New Yorkers looked with envy at the way Baron Haussman used the authoritarian powers granted him by emperor Louis-Napoleon to modernize Paris.  Haussman  tore down the jumbles of working class streets that had so often incubated riot and even revolution and replaced them with broad boulevards.  Haussman transformed revolutionary Paris into a right wing city by pushing the working class out of the central city into what became the “red belts” of the periphery.   But this model was unavailabe and unappealing to New York with its manufacturing centered in the very heart of the city and a vibrant democratic politics. 
      The jumble that worried the New York’s business class lay in the Tammany strongholds along the chaotic, densely packed, sometimes violent  Manhattan docks.   The corporate lawyer and anti-Tammany reformer Andrew H. Green was the first to argue that the city and the port could modernize themselves if the five boroughs were consolidated into a greater New York.  Mayor Hewitt, who was also an iron importer looking to reduce the costs of goods moving through New York harbor, agreed that only a unified city could dredge the harbor, upgrade the docks and rebuild the warehouses.  If a single authority controlled the waterfront, he argued  it could control the abuses   from those  “who by encroachment, appropriation, and misuses, deplete the general system through niggard schemes of individual profit.”  He even suggested the construction of a rail bridge across the Hudson to connect manufacturers to the mainland.  And if that wasn’t good enough, an alliance with Protestant Brooklyn promised to dilute Tammany’s strength.  But neither the anti-consolidationists of Tammany nor the Protestant unifiers anticipated that  the vast new immigration from Southern and eastern Europe would transform the city.
     Hewitt and Green warned that if New York did not consolidate its five counties in order to pay for the new infrastructure it would inevitably fall behind its rival Chicago.  Striking a Leggett-George- like note himself,  Hewitt warned that only a consolidated New York could “carry on more than a “desultory and futile war against the organized forces of relentless and absentee capitalism, resident in Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, London, Paris or Frankurt.”
      Green and Hewitt succeeded.  New York surpassed Chicago in population and has never looked back.  In 1898 with consolidation,  Greater NY, explains historian David Hammack, became in effect a regional government “so that suburban development could in effect take place under the aegis of city”  The upshot was extraordinary.  New York became “the engineers city.”  The Harbor unified, the city went on to build bridges across the Harlem and East Rivers, and tunnels under the Hudson connecting New York to New Jersey as well as the subway system that created what became the city’s circulatory system for labor.     New York became not only the largest city in the US, but its busiest port, a paradise for small manufacturers and headquarters city for national corporations.   It was as George Francis Train had boasted the “locomotive of these United States,” a city  whose bank deposits were as great as all the rest of the country combined.
       Burrows and Wallace mourn George’s defeat but lose the larger picture in which Hewitt became an architect of the city’s 20th century successes.  Hewitt’s farsighted emphasis on infrastructure helped create the economy that gave the mass of newly arriving immigrants (as well as earlier arrivals) the opportunity to begin the now fabled journey into the middle class.  What’s to be regretted is the loss of  Hewitt’s vision over the past half-century when New York has been unable to maintain what it once built, much less erect major new projects.  We stopped building, lost sight of the harbor that had once sustained us,  and in the bargain once again suffered from the disorder of  the “dangerous classes.”  In a sense consolidation succeeded too well.  It created a city so dominant that by the second half of the twentieth century it had forgotten the successful competition with other cities that had made it great in the first place.   
      The New York of  Melville and Hewitt was still very much alive in 1948, or so it seemed when the city celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of  consolidation. When Allan Nevins and John Krout put together a volume of essays “The Greater City: New York, 1898-1948,” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of consolidation, there was nary a negative word.  New York,  unscathed by a war that had ravaged London, Paris and Berlin, was at the top of its form.  For a half a century, the move to unification played out brilliantly as the city successfully  absorbed generations of immigrants into an ever expanding and highly diversified economy.   The complaints from Brooklyn Protestants about the “great mistake” and the warnings from the Brooklyn Eagle about  the dangers of  a “Manhattan pattern” imposed on the outer boroughs were largely forgotten.  The expanded tax base had been  used to build the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, as well as the subways,  sewage and  water systems necessary for a rapidly growing city.   One of the prime purposes of the merger, a unified harbor, was created, and it  attracted  an ever increasing tonnage. But even then the consolidation had left behind an important piece of  unfinished business that would come back to haunt the city.
        For Brooklynites one of the primary purposes of the consolidation  was to build a cross harbor rail connection linking its deep water port to the mainland.  In the absence of a rail tunnel goods were shipped across the harbor in barges or lighters, the so-called “Manhattan Transfer” made famous by John Dos Passos.  The “Manhattan Transfer,”  however couldn’t sustain the demands WWI placed on the port when, as Lankevitch describes it , trains arriving on the Jersey side “were backed up as far as Pittsburgh” and some ships sailed for Europe without full loads.  
       When WW I  ended New York and New Jersey collaborated   to create a Port Authority modeled on the semi-autonomous agency already running the London docks.  The new agency took on the job of building the rail tunnel and therein lies perhaps the greatest “might have been” in New York history.  In the late 80s Rebecca Shanor published  The City that Never Was: Two Hundred Years of Fantastic and Fascinating Plans that Might have Changed the Face of New York City.  These included a dirigible port atop the Empire State Building and Robert Moses’s plans for a bridge from the Battery to Brooklyn.  This is a wonderful book but strangely it didn’t include William Wilgus’s Regional Plan proposals for modernizing the rail freight connections to the harbor.  Wilgus, a master engineer best known for building Grand Central Station  showed how an inner rail line could update the port by connecting the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts and connecting Brooklyn  to the mainland by way of a rail tunnel.  
       The Port Authority took up the Wilgus/Regional Plan proposal  but was rebuffed when, as historian Robert Fishman explains it, “the twelve trunk-line railroads achieved a rare level of agreement through their concerted refusal to cooperate with the Port Authority.”    That, as far as the new York side of the port is concerned, is the PAWETH, not a rail line but the Point At Which Everything began To go to Hell for  New York’s blue collar economy.   “In precisely those industrial and working class areas that would  . . . . become tragic loci of decay and deindustrialization,” writes Fishman, “the (Wilgus) plan called for massive investments in new rail and mass transit lines, highways and shipping piers.”
      Instead,  the city, saddled with the financial costs of  the La Guardia years  when the city had assumed the widest range of social services available anywhere in the US and rising municipal labor costs, looked to shed itself  of the infrastructure that had been its glory.  The city’s two airports were turned over to the  Port Authority which went on to mismanage them.  As for the port, in 1946,  a tugboat strike shut down the harbor. Mayor O’Dwyer settled the strike but two years later he proposed that the Port Authority take over the city’s docks.   The Tammany connected Longshoreman resisted furiously, but they like O’Dwyer himself were tainted by their mob connections.  The docks of lower Manhattan rimmed the modern service economy represented by Wall Street stood a remnant of the world described in Gotham.   Cut off  “from the rest of the city by a steel-ribbed highway and a wall of bulkhead sheds,” wrote Daniel Bell in 1951, is the New York waterfront, an atavistic world more redolent of the brawling money-grubbing of the nineteenth century than the smoother mannered business transactions of the twentieth.”  In the late fifties this “atavism” sustained by the earlier failure to modernize the harbor was turned over to a Port Authority which by then had, at best,  only a secondary interest in maritime commerce. 
       The Port Authority had turned away from both rail modernization and the harbor and dedicated itself  first to building car and truck bridges and tunnels and then to collecting tolls from them.   The regional planners meanwhile turned to clearing Manhattan of “inappropriate uses,” manufacturing that is.   Without the Wilgus rail lines, most manufacturing was eventually pushed not only out of Manhattan but out of New York altogether.  Over time the two trends, congestion in the Manhattan and Brooklyn manufacturing districts and the new bridges and tunnels to the suburbs helped reshape the region.  White collar commuters came to Manhattan and manufacturing jobs left for the South or the suburbs.  This to be sure isn’t the whole story;  over-taxation, over-regulation, the excess of  Robert Moses’s and John Lindsay’s desires to bring as many people onto welfare as possible played their part  in the city’s travails. 
        In the late 1950s, with the help of  New York  Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the Port Authority transferred most of what remained of  New York’s port to Newark  and  Elizabeth which were well connected by rail.    New York got that twin-towered white elephant, the World Trade Center and higher downtown vacancy rates, while the Port Authority, which had devolved into the kind of monopoly William Leggett would have recognized as an enemy of opportunity, started an art collection.  
       It looked for while as though  New York could have the best of both worlds. Between 1947 and 1963, notes Berrol, the city added 58 million square feet of office space including the Time-Life, Equitable and Seagrams buildings while still employing 927,000 people in manufacturing.  Today only a little more than a quarter of  the manufacturing jobs remain. Some of this transformation was both inevitable and desirable as the United States shifted to a service economy.   Land in Manhattan once devoted to  docks and innumerable small factories has been converted to office towers for the far more remunerative financial sector.  But it came at the cost of not just a decline but a near catastrophic collapse of the city’s extraordinary ecology of small specialty manufacturing companies, which, as in Silicon Valley, both competed and co-operated with each other.
        A  century after  New York’s unification, its underside has became apparent.  The city which had lived facing the sea has turned its back on it.  The worlds of finance and trade, once intimately intertwined, have been severed.  There is today no longer a Port of New York to speak of, the Port has been removed to the shallow waters of  New Jersey  while Manhattan is now almost solely a white collar world attached to outer boroughs almost denuded of  blue collar work. In the new Manhattan-centered economy, the vast revenues that poured out of Wall Street,  which have been both a blessing and a curse for the city, have been used to finance the city’s sizable welfare populations located in  the two poorest boroughs, Brooklyn and the Bronx.  
        With the post-1965 wave of immigration well educated and entrepreneurial Korean and Indian arrivals, like the 19th century Germans, have generally moved up quickly.  But New York is having a very  hard time incorporating its largely unskilled arrivals.   The loss of the harbor has meant the loss of  the jobs traditionally filled by young often illiterate immigrant men. Listen to this story of a young Puerto Rican man in the 1950s  as he told it to  journalist Robert Suro: “I started after school hauling ice, and then as soon as I was 16, I dropped out of school and went down to The Fulton Street docks to become a stevedore.  When there was no work on the docks, you could always go to the Garment District and just look for signs, . .  .and I never spent a day on relief.”   Since 1960 the Puerto Rican labor force participation rate has dropped from 85 to 50 percent and the city’s 900,000 Puerto Ricans have become not only downwardly mobile but perhaps the poorest group in the country.   Today they are joined in their downward mobility by the city’s  fast growing ethnic group its roughly 750,000 Dominicans.      
       ““The net effect of the repeal of  New York’s harbor geography,” wrote Roger Star, “has been to turn the primary asset of the city, the foundation of its greatness into a liability.”  The manufacturing intimately tied to the port has been marginalized and the city has been left, even in the booming 1990s, under the administration of a mayor as extraordinary as Rudy Giuliani, with an immigrant population but without an immigrant economy.  In the hurly-burly immigrant  city depicted by Gotham disorder in the streets and opportunity in the shops were joined.  The danger for the future is that the disorder of the downwardly mobile has scant means, crime aside, of entrepreneurial expression.  
       Mayor Giuliani has given up on the Port Authority which has 
dabbled in fishports, airports, teleports  and resource recovery centers without every carrying out the mission for which it was chartered.   He has proposed that the city take back what it once ceded to the Port Authority and take on the task of building the cross-harbor tunnel itself.   It’s  an idea that might redeem Hewitt’s vision of New York as an “engineers city” and the harbor as an engine of opportunity for a “Greater New York.”