As for a $10,000 letter of credit, purchased for Mr. Walker by an employee of the Equitable Bus Company (which was then seeking favors from the city and received them) the mayor knew nothing about it. He did not know why the same Equitable employee had made good a Walker overdraft of $3,000 on the letter of credit while abroad.
When the drama ended, Tammany expressed itself as pleased. Its practical view was that “nothing had been proved on Jimmy.”
La Guardia Is Dead; City Pays Homage To 3-Time Mayor
September 21, 1947
A peaceful after-the-election scene at City Hall. Mayor La Guardia with New York County’s new district attorney, Thomas E. Dewey, at City Hall on Wednesday, November 3, 1937.
FIORELLO H. LA GUARDIA DIED IN HIS SLEEP at 7:22 a.m. yesterday. He was 64 years old. At the bedside were his wife, the former Marie Fisher, who had been his secretary while he was in Congress; their adopted children, Jean, 18 years old, and Eric, 15; and Mrs. La Guardia’s sister, Miss Helen Fisher.
The former mayor’s losing fight began last June when he underwent surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital. The operation confirmed fears that the ailment that had troubled him on and off for many years was cancer of the pancreas. It had reached the incurable stage, and his days were numbered.
A city of which he was as much a part as any of its public buildings awoke to find the little firebrand dead. Its people had laughed with him and at him, they had been entertained by his antics and they had been sobered by his warnings, and they found it difficult to believe that the voice he had raised in their behalf in the legislative halls of city and nation, on street corners and over the radio, was stilled forever.
Mayor O’Dwyer, his successor, expressed this feeling. Although Mr. La Guardia’s death was expected, the mayor said, his passing brought with it “a shock of awful finality.”
“In his death the people of the city, the state and nation have lost a great, patriotic American citizen,” the mayor said.
FIRE DEPARTMENT TRIBUTE SOUNDS
The Fire Department’s 5-5-5-5 signal, repeated four times, was heard in fire houses throughout the city at 8:06 a.m. It is sounded as a mark of respect on the death of a fireman killed in line of duty or on the passing of a high official. At 8:15 the announcement of Mr. La Guardia’s death went out over the police teletype system. Custodians of all city buildings were directed to lower flags to half staff. During the morning the facade of City Hall, nerve center of Mr. La Guardia’s multifarious activities for the 12 years he was mayor, was draped in black.
Expressions of sorrow were voiced by President Truman in a message sent to Mrs. La Guardia. Diplomats attending the United Nations General Assembly paid tribute, Assembly President Oswaldo Aranha saying that the world had lost “a champion of democracy.”
SET MODERN CITY RECORD
Fiorello H. La Guardia was the first man elected mayor of New York for three consecutive terms in modern times. He was the first reform mayor ever re-elected in the domain which Tammany Hall had ruled almost continuously for many years until the fiery little man with the black hat and the angry tongue crashed in to put the old-line politicians to rout. He was probably New York’s most colorful mayor since Peter Stuyvesant.
Dynamic and aggressive, he appeared to be everywhere at once, rushing to fires at times and at other times flying all over the country by airplane. A fighter by nature, he was always ready to take on all comers, big or little, from Hitler to the man in the street.
In the first World War he was the pilot of a bombing plane on the Italian front, and he kept on dropping bombs all his life—on “reactionaries,” prohibitionists and Ku Klux Klanners in Congress during the 1920’s, and on Tammany Hall during his long mayoralty.
He was a New Dealer even before the New Deal came into being and was associated with some of the most progressive legislation in Congress, including the Labor Anti-Injunction Act in the pre-Roosevelt days, and later the TVA Act.
His life was full of contradictions. Although nominally a Republican during most of his pre-Mayoralty Congressional career, he was generally in revolt against his party leadership. Elected Mayor for the first time the year after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first election as president, Mr. La Guardia proved much more of a New Dealer than most old-school Democratic politicians. Although he professed disdain and contempt for “politicians,” calling them “clubhouse loafers” and “tin-horn gamblers,” the mayor was himself one of the shrewdest politicians in the country.
Partly because of his good relations with the New Deal, Mr. La Guardia was able to get large amounts of federal money for public works, and his administration left New York with many improvements in the way of parks and playgrounds, health clinics, public markets, bridges, housing clinics, public markets, bridges, housing developments and other projects, including the La Guardia Airport and the Flushing Meadow Park, on the site of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair.
On Dec. 31, 1945, Mr. La Guardia moved out of City Hall after having served 12 years as mayor. In that time he had drastically altered the city in many ways. Its physical plant, its governmental structure and its political and social patterns had all been changed tremendously. A new city charter had been adopted in 1938; appointees of Mr. La Guardia filled the board of magistrates and virtually every other long-term appointive office; and the power of Tammany Hall had been reduced to a shadow.
A statue of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, designed for the south mall of Washington Square park by the Greenwich Village sculptor John Bennett 40 years after La Guardia’s death.
The Eight Years of the Lindsay Era
He Began With a Major Problem and Learned to Live With Many
By JOHN DARNTON | December 16, 1973
THE EIGHT YEARS OF JOHN V. LINDSAY fall into three periods, each a chapter to be read against his ambitions for higher political office.
There was his first term, beginning in the glow of lofty ideals and anticipatory excitement. He was the young, dashing Republican congressman from the silk-stocking district, the patrician with his shirt sleeves rolled up who, as image-makers liked to put it, was rising up from Washington on a white steed to battle the urban dragon.
But while the Lindsay image was projected nationally, the reality back home was less than promising: a series of unprecedented municipal strikes, including a devastating transit strike commencing on his inauguration day, scandals, crises and confrontations led more and more people to the conviction that, simply put, their government no longer functioned.
Finally, in mid-1972, Mr. Lindsay emerged a more mature, pragmatic mayor, who was concentrating intently on the business of running the city.
Though it took six years of on-the-job training, and lessons that were humbling to him and painful for the city, he has become by all accounts, even his enemies’, a good administrator. More important, he no longer interjects himself as an advocate in community controversies but instead reserves the role of behind-the-scenes mediator.
His handling recently of the tensions over busing black children from a Brownsville housing project to a school in predominantly white Canarsie, in which he worked in the background to open the schools, stands in contrast to his role in earlier disputes, which some regarded as provocation.
Areas where the mayor’s achievements have been considerable include: the establishment of a strong consumer-affairs department; stiff antipollution laws that have measurably cleaned the air; establishment of the Offtrack Betting Corporation; enactment of the commuter income tax and revenue-sharing through vigorous lobbying; a creative use of special zoning districts to guide development and a construction program that went from $200 million in 1965 to $1 billion in 1972.
Though it took six years of on-the-job training, and lessons that were humbling to him and painful for the city, he has become by all accounts, even his enemies’, a good administrator.
But critics, perhaps unfairly, point to urban ills that worsened during the Lindsay years: 250,000 jobs lost over the past th
ree years; the transit fare up to 35 cents; welfare rolls that have lately declined somewhat but climbed overall during his tenure from 500,000 to 1.1 million.
The prisons had riots, the courts had logjams, the Giants left town and school decentralization was termed a failure by one of its chief architects. And the larger historical forces—a changing population, rising costs and an eroding tax base—continued unabated.
In a jocular mood, when asked his single greatest accomplishment, Mr. Lindsay is apt to respond with a single word: “survival.” It is hard to tell whether he is referring to his own political fortunes or to the city that has been so intricately bound to them.
Mailer and Breslin Enter Race
By RICHARD REEVES | May 2, 1969
Mailer and Breslin campaigning in New York’s Garment District in June of 1969. Their bid was unsuccessful as Mayor Lindsay was reelected that year.
NORMAN MAILER OFFICIALLY OPENED A “serious campaign” for the Democratic nomination for Mayor yesterday with a 14-microphone news conference featuring jokes by Jimmy Breslin—his running mate for City Council President—a staff of solemn young writers, promises of a dozen position papers, and a three-word slogan, one word of which will be blipped out on television.
Mr. Mailer, who wants New York City to become the country’s 51st state, is the first winner of a National Book Award to run for office. Mr. Breslin, a former newspaper columnist, is continuing a short tradition begun four years ago by William F. Buckley, an editor and columnist who received 340,000 votes as the Conservative party candidate for mayor.
The writer-candidates promised that if elected they would make New York “famous around the world again for the charm, ferocity, elegance, strength, calm and racy character of our separate neighborhoods.”
The Mailer-Breslin candidacy was announced at the Overseas Press Club, 54 West 40th Street.
Their campaign literature had four major points: ‘Make New York City the 51st State! …Power to the Neighborhoods! … Achieve local control of Education, Housing, Sanitation, Parks and Police! … Kiss Off the Boredom of the Democratic Machine!”
The campaign began in two acts. The first, Mr. Mailer, was dead serious.
“We believe poor people must be given money and tools to solve their own problems their way,” he declared. “Our election in mayoralty election would be a miracle … Mayor Lindsay is a good example of how a man can do his best and fail … Robert Mayor is a grand seeing-eye dog—the greatest political disaster in the city’s history. Government cannot solve huge social problems … I’m not entering this to write a book. I promise you that. ”
Mr. Breslin came to the news conference 50 minutes late because of “a traffic jam in Queens.” He listened to a few whispered words from campaign aides and then began:
“Are we kidding? Have you seen the guys we’re running against? Do you call Mario Procaccino a serious candidate?”
Then Mr. Mailer, who is 5 feet 7 and refused to stand on the box that television people offer to short men, reappeared behind the cluster of microphones that partly hid his face.
“We have a simple slogan,” he said. “No more————! I present you gentleman with the problem of communicating our slogan to the public. On television it will come out ‘No more blip-blip!’”
A helpful writer suggested that the reporters point out that the blipped word “is an impolite way of saying baloney.
So How Are We Doing? Ask Mayor Koch
By ANNA QUINDLEN | December 26, 1981
Edward Koch, shown here at a press conference, served as mayor of New York from 1978 to 1989.
BOUNCING DOWN THE WEST SIDE OF Manhattan in the back of the blue sedan was a typical New Yorker, Edward Irving Koch.
He was, as usual, a public-opinion pollster’s dream, having a plethora of opinions and no qualms about making them public. If he only had less faith in Gov. Hugh L. Carey and Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato, and had a friend who had been mugged in the last year or two, he would have been in the mainstream of his constituency, at least as that constituency was reflected in a recent poll by The New York Times.
Unlike the 1,146 others who answered the poll questions, the mayor was surveyed in the back seat of his official car, rather than on the telephone, and was permitted to expound on his answers. Some of those answers came as no surprise: They have been the subject of campaign speeches, luncheon talks and town-meeting rejoinders.
The mayor favors—or “FA-voors,” as he put it—capital punishment, and supports gun control. He likes Ronald Reagan except for his budget cuts, and approves heartily of himself. Like 78 percent of those surveyed, he says he is proud to live in New York. Like 32 percent, he says he thinks things are going “fairly well.”
What one thing would he miss most if he were to leave New York? Not Broadway shows or family and friends, said Mr. Koch. “The energy and vitality,” he said, “because you can always come and visit your relatives, but you can’t take the energy with you.” And what would he miss least? “That’s a tough one. That small group of people who are discourteous and antisocial. The single major illustration of that would be the grafitti.”
When he was asked to describe the average New Yorker in one word, the mayor grinned and uttered a mildly offensive anatomical adjective synonymous with chutzpah. He then came up with “self-confident … and occasionally brassy … but very nice.”
In the Bronx, the mayor left his car to read from a prepared speech at the opening of the Bathgate Industrial Park. About 100 people looked on. When five of them were asked for one word to describe the mayor, they responded with: “terrific,” “the best,” “chutzpah,” “insensitive” and “bald.”
Back in the car, the mayor’s most surprising comment came in response to the question “Do you or does any other member of your household work for the City of New York?” “No,” said the Mayor. A press aide poked him in the shoulder with a tape recorder.
“Oh, I’m sorry, me,” said Mr. Koch. “I work eight hours for pay and eight hours for love.”
David N. Dinkins: A Groundbreaker Bound by Tradition
By CELESTINE BOHLEN | November 8, 1989
David N. Dinkins was the first African-American elected Mayor of New York. He served from 1990 to 1993.
DAVID N. DINKINS COMES TO THE OFFICE OF mayor after three decades of loyal, quiet service to the Democratic Party, making him a man who is a groundbreaker and very much bound by tradition.
In a race against two high-profile opponents—first Mayor Edward I. Koch in the Democratic primary, and then the Republican-Liberal nominee, Rudolph W. Giuliani—Mr. Dinkins was the candidate of moderation, a middle-of-the-road choice for a city that seemed eager to lower its own decibel level. His strategy was to soothe, not excite, and it worked.
Mr. Dinkins’s victory will make him the first black mayor in the city’s history. New York is one of the last of America’s big cities to elect a black mayor, and to recognize politically the mass migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North after World War II. But Mr. Dinkins’s appeal went well beyond his base, in large part because he was able to project himself as a candidate not of one group, but of the mainstream.
Because of the symbolism of Mr. Dinkins’s candidacy, his campaign sometimes had the feel of a crusade, while his example as a role model for the city’s minorities gave him special star quality. From the start, his campaign theme was an appeal to the city’s diversity—what he calls a gorgeous mosaic.
His repeated fumbling on questions about his personal finances revealed a carelessness that clashed with his otherwise meticulous attention to detail. He chafes when his campaign style is called flat or dull, suggesting he is being compared unfairly to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who became an issue in the campaign.
At Mr. Dinkins’s primary night victory party, Mr. Jackson gave a speech that grabbed the limelight and more importantly, television coverage. Since then, Mr. Jackson has not returned to New York to campaign for Mr. Dinkins.
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sp; A tennis player since college, Mr. Dinkins has developed such a passion for the game that, asked about his interests besides tennis and politics, he answered half-seriously, “What else is there?” He plays on weekends and on vacations, at swank midtown tennis clubs and Southampton beach clubs. Some of his closest political friendships have been made on the court.
From his early days when he hung posters at Harlem subway stops, to his last appointed post, as the $71,000-a-year city clerk, where his most visible duty was signing marriage certificates, Mr. Dinkins paid his dues up the ladder of the Democratic Party hierarchy.
An appointment as deputy mayor under Mayor Abraham D. Beame was withdrawn after Mr. Dinkins revealed he had not filed income taxes four years in a row. He subsequently paid back taxes, plus penalties, and soon after became city clerk.
His elected career was less smooth. After he served one term in the New York Assembly from 1965 to 1967, his district’s lines were redrawn and he chose not to run again. He lost two races for Manhattan borough president before winning in 1985.
A Reborn City, Stamped ‘Giuliani’
By JIM DWYER | December 31, 2001
VIEWED FROM THE BALCONY OF HISTORY, Rudolph W. Giuliani’s mayoralty will mark an era when the nation and the world saw New York anew, and New Yorkers saw their hometown fresh, vibrant and renewed. Those at the ground floor of daily life in the city have made it clear in opinion polls that while they approve of much of Mr. Giuliani’s work, they are ready, and indeed would prefer, to view him from the distance afforded by history.
Giuliani’s mayoralty will mark an era when the nation and the world saw New York anew.
Perhaps he had just worn people out the way politicians do. Over the last two years, as he attacked the character of an unarmed man who had been shot by the police, or announced a marital separation at a news conference before informing his wife, or disclosed that he suffered from impotence as a result of cancer treatments, few have run through so many exhausting lives as Mr. Giuliani. That list does not include the glittering dresses, wigs and pumps he occasionally donned for skits.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 38
