Lindsay opened up the parks, established 911 calls and created a city that people wanted to live in. At the end of his two four-year terms, the city was better defined and rising, whereas many cities in the United States were bewildered and strewn with rubble. John Lindsay kept this city from bursting asunder during one of the most difficult transformational periods of our country’s history. Two were great Mayors: John Lindsay and Ed Koch. Mayor Giuliani did an excellent job of organizing the city’s recovery from the attack on the World Trade Center, but that latter day spurt of competence did not make him a good mayor.
Dubious characters hung out at City Hall, while honest citizens were excluded. A vicious war against City University was launched by City Hall. Two excellent Education Chancellors were forced out of office. But it was set amid eight years of pointless turmoil and mean spiritedness. One Mayor had a shining moment of brilliance, following the 9/11 attack – Rudolph Giuliani. But if the initial revolution fizzles, as it did in the Dinkins Administration, that reciprocal process never takes place. Then the excesses of the reaction stimulate more revolution, and so on and on. Revolution stimulates reaction in politics. David Dinkins rode a pro-integration wave into Gracie Mansion, but seemed perhaps too content with that accomplishment, and was unable to muster the revolutionary fire that many of his followers had anticipated. Robert Wagner seemed unable to cope with the times that were “a’changing,” in the 1960s, despite his long life of public service. Two Mayors were not as good as we had hoped. Governor Hugh Carey had to step in and put the City into a kind of receivership, with the State backing up City borrowing to get us out of the pickle. Abraham Beame was a good and decent man, but he was overwhelmed by the City’s incipient bankruptcy of the mid 1970s.
Of the Mayors who served in City Hall since I arrived in New York in 1957, only one seemed to be not really up to the job, and he had been dealt a bad hand. It’s also setting a tone of leadership for the city. Being a good Mayor is more than hiring good people. “History will judge Mayor Bloomberg as one of the best Mayors,” he wrote. So although Henry Stern was really writing about good people, commissioners and deputy commissioners, leaving City employ as the end of an administration approaches, he felt that in the process he had to pay respect to the current Mayor, who had hired those good people. Stern, as our Parks Commissioner, left behind a record of enthusiastic devotion to the corpus of our great city – to the people, the buildings, the streets, the bridges, the concerts, and of course, to the parks and several thousand trees, to which he was a tender mid-wife. When Henry Stern writes of public service, as he did recently in New York Civic’s column, the rest of us should read attentively.
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