His team rezoned nearly twelve thousand blocks, or almost 40 percent of the city, including many waterfront or industrial areas51 that were underused and often dangerous or dilapidated. With new zoning and other encouragements like parks, schools, and tax breaks, a building boom followed in every borough. The Times tracked forty thousand new buildings of all sizes including clusters of skyscrapers in Manhattan,52 Brooklyn, and Queens. “Bloom Town,” some of the mayor’s fans call his city.
In 2002, Bloomberg had canceled Rudy Giuliani’s contract to build Yankee Stadium. Later, with Bloomberg’s encouragement, plus millions of dollars in tax breaks and public money, the Yankees built a new stadium in the Bronx, the Mets got a new field in Queens, and Barclays Center opened in the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.53
He organized the funding of the 9/11 memorial—the massive voids and waterfalls at the former World Trade Center site—and made certain it was ready in time for the tenth anniversary of the attack.54
He pushed for same-sex marriage—“Near equality is no equality,” he said, and presided as mayor over the city’s first official same-sex marriage a month after the law passed in Albany in 2011.55
He defended the right of Muslims to have a mosque in Lower Manhattan a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. In a powerful speech on Governors Island, Bloomberg said of the four hundred responders who died in the World Trade Center attack, “Not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ ”56
His “game changers,” a group created to figure out how to diversify the city economy, devised a competition for a new graduate school that became the Cornell Tech graduate school on Roosevelt Island. New York became a center for tech-based companies—Silicon Alley, one area was called—and the number of tech workers began to increase steadily after 2010 to make the city highly competitive for Google, Twitter, and others.57
After cutting back recycling in 2002, he soon became an avid environmentalist and created a detailed road map for improving the environment by 2030 with PlaNYC in 2007. He joined city tree lovers like Bette Midler to plant nearly 700, 000 trees on the way to a million. New Yorkers painted nearly six million square feet of rooftops white—thereby cooling city buildings and reducing CO2 pollution. As he left office, air quality in the city was the cleanest it had been in fifty years.58
Two days before Halloween in 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City with a fourteen-foot wall of water at high tide made worse by a full moon. Bloomberg and other officials had scrambled to warn those in low-lying areas to evacuate, but Sandy killed forty-three people and destroyed or damaged thousands of structures across the city. In his last months as mayor, Bloomberg only started the work to help people rebuild and repair, but he wanted those buildings to be able to withstand the next Hurricane Sandy or worse. His experts created a highly detailed proposal that they called “A Stronger, More Resilient New York.”59 It listed ways to prepare for storms and ways to buffer the city’s 520 miles of shoreline—tasks that would fall to future mayors. Sandy also added to his urgent concerns about climate change, and while still mayor, Bloomberg began organizing other cities around the world in the fight against a warming planet.60
The Young Men’s Initiative to help black and Hispanic youths began in 2011 and was so successful that President Obama adapted the initiative for a federal program called My Brother’s Keeper.
He maintained a poverty rate that was essentially flat after twelve years while it rose in other cities—an increase of 17 percent in Philadelphia, for example, and 22 percent in Chicago.61
He opened one important section of Water Tunnel No. 3, one of the most important infrastructure projects in city history, in 2013. After six decades of dithering, Bloomberg promised a whopping $4.7 billion in capital funds to create the tunnel to assure that future New Yorkers had enough fresh drinking water. “It’s not sexy. Nobody says thank you,” he said.62 But the city would shrivel and die without enough clean water.
* * *
If the positive side was a longer list, his critics had their tally as well. Most glaringly, Bloomberg failed until late in his time at city hall to monitor and correct the excesses of his police department in their vigorous search for illegal guns. The number of so-called “Terry stops” rose from 100,100 to nearly 700,000 in 2011 when mostly black or Hispanic youths were stopped and frisked in ways soon judged “unconstitutional.” Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly cut down stops to about 200,000 by 2013,63 and Bloomberg continued to defend Kelly’s street stops long after he left office.
The number of homeless people rose to the highest levels since the Great Depression with more than 53,000 people in shelters, nearly 23,000 of them children.64 Bloomberg, who had wanted to “end” chronic homelessness, helped find more places for the street people to move indoors, but even with his housing program—175,000 affordable units built or preserved—too many families were pushed into temporary shelters. He streamlined the system for helping those without housing and built a new intake center, but the number of homeless families continued to rise, even long after a new mayor took over.
Bloomberg’s administration tried new systems for encouraging reform among those in jail. But an investigation by U.S. prosecutor Preet Bharara found gruesome stories about life on Rikers Island, especially for the young prisoners. Bharara said Rikers was run like the brutal culture described in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
The New York City Housing Authority, the largest public housing authority in the country, was designed to provide the basics for about 400,000 people. Without enough federal or state funds, the authority was burdened with a $168 million operating deficit65 and a structural deficit of between $50 million and $100 million a year.66 In 2013, Bloomberg, promising not to desert the NYCHA residents, dedicated $40 million for “essential” repairs before he left office. That barely touched the problem, and his successor faced the possibility of a federal monitor imposed on the city’s housing team in 2018 because of lead paint and other problems.67
He imposed fingerprinting on nearly two million food stamp applicants (until Governor Cuomo ended the practice in 2012).68
The increasing use of outside contractors instead of city workers led to a major scandal during the Bloomberg years. Started by Mayor Giuliani, the budget for the CityTime system for employees rose from $63 million to nearly $700 million before investigators found a nest of corrupt individuals who “treated the city like it was their own giant A.T.M. machine,” as one prosecutor said. Bloomberg was not involved directly, but his administration failed to monitor the culprits stealing from the city. Prosecutors got much of the money back,69 and Bloomberg promised more surveillance over contractors.
Bloomberg’s record on public education drew more criticism with each reorganization of the system. Chaos, some called it. After the mayor and school officials celebrated a drastic improvement in test scores, state officials decided the tests were too easy and predictable, and scores dropped dramatically. Although graduation rates improved, an unnecessarily high percentage of those students had to take remedial courses in college.
Bloomberg hired an array of superstars, dozens of high-powered people who took the time to work and work for the city’s 108th mayor. But he made a few unfortunate choices. One was Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis. Bloomberg picked Goldsmith in 2010 to be deputy mayor for operations, one of the most important jobs in city government. Goldsmith began trying to reorganize the city workforce including the sanitation department that was still in turmoil a few months before a disastrous snowstorm in December 2010.70 Both Bloomberg and Goldsmith were out of town when the storm hit, and the city’s traditional snow-clearing protocols broke down. After the storm, “Blizzageddon” it was called, Bloomberg inappropriately suggested that people should take in a Broadway show before later admitting the city had not done its job and also Broadway was dark on Mondays. Goldsmith left the job eight months later.71 An even more public mistake was his hiring of Cathie Black, a socia
l friend and former president of Hearst publications. Bloomberg surprised and horrified New York’s education establishment in 2011 when he picked her to be chancellor of city schools. She lasted ninety-five days.72
* * *
In a dozen years as mayor, or 4,380 days, counting weekends and holidays, there would, of course, be missteps and mistakes. But Bloomberg had tried to use his heavily scheduled time as mayor mostly for the benefit of eight and a half million New Yorkers. He encouraged inventive solutions to old problems and did not worry excessively, or sometimes at all, about making hard decisions. He was the city’s executive, the manager, the boss-mayor who oversaw substantial improvements in the health, economy, and stability of his charges. He would pass along to his successor a far stronger New York City than he inherited.
On the afternoon of his last day in office, December 31, 2013,73 Michael Bloomberg stood on his desk in his famous bull pen—he’d always wanted to do that, he said—and thanked his cheering crowd of current and former staffers for all their work. Then at 5:05 p.m, he walked out into the cold and shook hands with a crowd of admirers as he headed to his subway stop outside city hall. The seventy-one-year-old mayor then took his retiree’s MetroCard out of a well-ordered wallet, and he and a few companions rode the subway uptown for a private staff party. His audience the next morning would not be so adoring.
25
BACK TO BUSINESS
“You have to understand that when God comes back, things are going to be different.”
—Dan Doctoroff, head of Bloomberg LP, on Bloomberg’s return
January 1, 2014, was a cold, bitter day, the sun offering little relief as Michael Bloomberg ceded New York City to his successor, Democrat Bill de Blasio. Bloomberg’s time as mayor had earned him praise from people on the street and leaders around the globe. He was “dean of our profession,” offered London’s then mayor Boris Johnson. He was “the mayor’s mayor,” a label bestowed by Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael Nutter,1 and even “a proper rock star,”2 as Bono once said of the outgoing Bloomberg. The Times declared that, despite any flaws, “New York is in better shape than when he became mayor.”3 Citizens Union gave him their public service award in 2013 for making the city “safer, stronger and greener.”4 But for all the congratulations coming his way as he walked out of city hall on his last day, the inauguration of de Blasio less than twenty-four hours later would not be a graceful transfer of power. Instead, there was an undisguised bitterness to this routine event, an attempt at public shaming.
De Blasio had campaigned as the anti-Bloomberg candidate, accusing the outgoing mayor of cleaving New York into “two cities” divided between the few satisfied rich and everybody else. One of the new mayor’s chosen speakers railed against the “plantation” created by his predecessor, and when it was his turn to speak, de Blasio promised to create a “fairer, more just, more progressive place.” Bloomberg’s face was tight; the veins in his neck pulsed with anger, and even when former President Clinton, de Blasio’s highest-profile speaker, tried to soften the tone—to make it more of a celebration for the new mayor and less of a public mudslinging at the old one—Bloomberg crossed his arms against the cold and the criticism.
An ordinary person might have carried that wave of indignation into some suitable hiding place. Bloomberg, now a civilian, had many fortresses to choose from including those in Bermuda or Vail or Florida or London. Instead, he and his companion, Diana Taylor, took off for a high-profile, luxury tour, mainly to play golf in Hawaii and New Zealand. He went to try out the plush golf courses run by his friend Julian Robertson, one of America’s earliest hedge fund managers. Bloomberg’s aides said it was the ex-mayor’s first normal, two-week vacation in more than a dozen years. But, two weeks off would be a trial for someone so restless most of the time that he could barely make it through a long weekend, and when rain overwhelmed New Zealand’s perpetually green golf courses,5 Bloomberg rushed back to New York City, arriving at his sleek Bloomberg LP offices as the sun was rising the next workday morning.
Some colleagues saw a Mike Bloomberg who seemed to wander through his enterprises looking for a fitting role, even in the gleaming office tower in midtown Manhattan that flashed his name at every turn. He would go to his philanthropy headquarters on East Seventy-eighth Street, where former city officials were preparing a new venture to offer free help for cities that wanted to try Bloomberg’s methods for dealing with urban problems.
But it was still clear his calendar had too many empty hours.
Meanwhile, at city hall, de Blasio was busy focusing on Bloomberg’s policy failures—the poor, the homeless, and the overreach by police in the name of gun control. De Blasio would dismiss Bloomberg’s efforts to deal with these issues, offering only images of the frosty billionaire who could be blamed for any criticism coming the new mayor’s way.
The rising partisan clamor from de Blasio’s camp was obviously infuriating to the Bloomberg loyalists. But the former mayor sent out word that no one—absolutely no one—should fight back. When the media asks for a response, don’t bite, he decreed. Instead, his old city staff seethed in silence until de Blasio’s former campaign treasurer accused Bloomberg’s efforts to reform the 911 emergency system as a shocking case of mismanagement. Only then did Bloomberg allow former deputy mayor Cas Holloway to respond with a point-by-point rebuttal.
Bloomberg had already moved on, and he was shelving the criticism and harvesting praise elsewhere. On January 31, 2014, four weeks after he left office, the United Nations made him a special envoy for cities and climate change. That meant the ex-mayor was now a diplomat, helping the UN secretary general mobilize cities as a way to fight global warming.6 A little more than three months later, Israel gave him their first Genesis Prize, soon dubbed the Jewish Nobel. The prize was created to promote the best of Jewish values. He seemed thrilled, obviously, but he carefully made the award more inclusive. He said that, yes, his parents had instilled in him the best Jewish traditions, but “the values I learned from my parents are probably the same values that I hope Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists learned from their parents. They’re all centered around God put us on earth and said we should take care of each other. We have an obligation not to just talk about it, but to actually do it.”7 Bloomberg took the $1 million prize and decided to “pay it forward,” as he said at the time.8 He set up a contest to find young entrepreneurs whose work would help follow a Jewish code of tikkun olam, a way to repair the world and make it a better place. As one example, Bloomberg’s Genesis winners included a group called BIP, which stood for Building with Israelis and Palestinians. They took their $100,000 to help Jewish and Palestinian youths work together on the basics, creating water and sewage facilities in the Palestinian territories.
A few months later, Queen Elizabeth named Bloomberg an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in recognition of his multibillion-pound business headquartered in London and his philanthropy to promote the arts and education in Britain.9, 10 He was on the board of both the Serpentine gallery and the Old Vic theater, and he had become such a presence in London that one of the noisier tabloids started predicting he might run to replace Johnson as mayor.11 The New York Post immediately featured a front page with Bloomberg in the high black fur hat and red coat of the Queen’s royal guards.
At the home office, Bloomberg found that his own backyard had become far more challenging. The computerized financial markets had morphed into a hyper-complex world—super-fast and convoluted, the primary domain of “quants” or quantitative analysts with algorithms and all the new, ever-changing double back flips of finance. While he was mayor, Bloomberg had asked his former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff to take charge of his company. Doctoroff, Peter Grauer, Tom Secunda, and Lex Fenwick had increased revenues from $5.4 billion in 2008 to just under $9 billion in 2014.12 Doctoroff and his colleagues had created both a workable incentive plan for employees and new profit centers and acquired such business sta
lwarts as BusinessWeek and BNA, an important source of detailed tax, legal, and regulatory information. (The additions became Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg BNA.)
The core was still Mike Bloomberg’s idea—serve the customer, give the broker the data and news he or she needs and wants—and Bloomberg LP now provided a daily avalanche of information, elaborate analyses, customer support, and news of all kinds from all kinds of places around the world. The financial news division, Bloomberg News, was now quoted regularly by mainstream news organizations, and the company had hired a slew of expensive media types to talk about politics on air or redo and modernize some of the publications.
Bloomberg began turning up at more company meetings, gatherings where employees inevitably turned to him, not Doctoroff, for approval. Doctoroff’s friend and then colleague Norman Pearlstine tried to warn him that he was sitting in a very temporary seat. Pearlstine, a former news executive at the Wall Street Journal who went on to edit the Los Angeles Times, knew the lure of the top job. “I was one person who told Dan he [Bloomberg] was coming back,” Pearlstine remembered, “and Dan said, ‘Absolutely not. He never goes back. He always goes forward,’ and I said, ‘He’s gonna come back. The company’s three times the size it was when he left, and he’s going to want to run it.’ ”13
Doctoroff finally realized Pearlstine was right. It had always been Bloomberg LP, not Doctoroff, Inc.
As he announced his departure nine months after Bloomberg’s return, Doctoroff made his choice sound biblical. “Mike is kind of like God at the company,” he said. “He created the universe. He issued the Ten Commandments, and then he disappeared, and then he came back. You have to understand that when God comes back, things are going to be different. When God reappeared, people defer.”14
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 32
