From the halcyon days of Fiorello H. LaGuardia on down to the present, the ten men who have served as mayor of New York have come in three sizes.
LaGuardia, elected in 1933, was, and probably always will be, the biggest of the Big mayors—the inimitable icon, the gold standard, the city’s immortal soul. A notch or two below, we’ve had four other Bigs. In chronological order, but arguably in ascending order of Bigness: Robert F. Wagner, Jr., (elected 1954); Edward I. Koch (1977); Rudolph W. Giuliani (1993); and the outgoing incumbent, Michael R. Bloomberg (2001). Like LaGuardia, all but Giuliani served for twelve years, and Rudy would have had a third four-year stint if it hadn’t been for the adoption of term limits. And all of them, with varying mixtures of good and ill, left indelible marks on our self-styled Greatest City in the World. Then there were the two Faders, reasonably good mayors who at first seemed destined for Bigness but ended up vaguely disappointing: the dashing, impossibly handsome Upper East Side patrician John V. Lindsay (1965), a liberal Republican turned liberal independent turned liberal Democrat, whose brilliant slogan, lifted from a Murray Kempton column, was “He Is Fresh and Everyone Else Is Tired”; and David N. Dinkins (1989), the courtly ex-Marine who was our first, and so far only, African-American chief executive. Lastly, three little Smalls: William O’Dwyer (1945), Vincent R. Impellitteri (1949), and Abraham D. Beame (1973). The less said about them the better.
Needless to say, mayoral Bigness has nothing to do with physical size. The Little Flower was little only in the vertical sense; like Abe Beame, LaGuardia was a mere five foot two, though he compensated horizontally, via a girth within hailing distance of Chris Christie’s. Koch was six feet tall. Lindsay was six foot four—too tall to be mayor, Jimmy Breslin once wrote, though the columnist’s point was metaphorical. The other six mayors were of what some of us would consider normal height: taller than five-seven, shorter than five-ten. Bloomberg is five-eight.
Nevertheless, one must take one’s Bigness where and when one can. Bill de Blasio stands six feet five inches from heel to crown. He will be the tallest mayor in the history of New York City. He is taller than anyone who has ever been President of the United States, for that matter—an inch closer to heaven than L.B.J. without the Stetson or Lincoln without the stovepipe.
We’re years from knowing whether de Blasio is Big. But lucky for him that he is, at least, big—because the man whose custom-made Italian shoes he is about to fill, or replace with loafers from Payless, has been outsize in so many ways.
Mike Bloomberg has been unlike any mayor we have ever had. He has governed New York (ruled it, really) less as a standard elected official, a grubby pol beset by grubbier pols, than as a Roman consul or a Roman emperor—one of the better emperors, too: a basically public-spirited type like Augustus or Vespasian, as opposed to a Nero or a Caligula.
The magistrates of ancient Rome were almost always among the city’s richest men, and they often obtained their positions by dispensing their wealth, liberally or judiciously or both. Bloomberg is one of the ten richest Americans. He is either the richest or second richest New Yorker. His wealth is entirely self-made, so he is free of the complexes that often mar the self-confidence of heirs and heiresses. He could not be bullied, or at least he made it seem that he couldn’t be. He was not beholden, at least not financially beholden, to any “special interests.” He had the ultimate in fuck-you money—and in make-nice money, too: the largesse his private philanthropy has showered upon New York’s charities and artistic and educational institutions purchased the support, or, at worst, the acquiescence, of the city’s cultural and, to some extent, intellectual élites.
Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor has been more tranquil than has been customary around here in recent decades. His administration has been efficient, competently run, and notably free of corruption or scandal. He quickly damped down the post-9/11 hysteria. The city feels, and is, safer from crime. Brooklyn has bloomed, even if that is partly a consequence of Manhattan’s soaring rents. Bloomberg’s transportation policies have been visionary. He didn’t get the London-inspired congestion pricing for motor vehicles he sought, but his bicycle lanes are terrific, Citi Bike is a masterstroke, and Times Square, now a lively pedestrian mall, is almost like an actual square. Central Park and Prospect Park are in tiptop shape. On the city’s waterfronts, the ratio of parkland to wasteland has steadily grown. The downward trend in the city’s population has reversed: once again, there are eight million stories in the naked city. Private-sector job growth here has been better than in most of the country. Some aspects of Bloomberg’s record have earned even his successor’s praise. At a lunch with New Yorker editors and writers, Bill de Blasio mentioned three: the mayor’s public-health initiatives, especially his banishment of smoking but also his abortive bid to ban big sugary soft drinks; his efforts at diversifying the city’s economy, especially in high tech; and his bringing of the school system under mayoral control (if not the purposes to which that control has been put).
De Blasio’s enormous election victory—he garnered nearly three-quarters of the vote, vastly more than Bloomberg ever dreamed of—has been interpreted in some quarters as a triumph for left-liberalism or “progressivism.” In truth, it was more like the city reverting to form. De Blasio is certainly the most ideologically and rhetorically leftish mayoral victor since—well, maybe ever. But it wasn’t ideology what elected him. The twenty-year Giuliani-Bloomberg interregnum has been an anomaly. Giuliani unseated Dinkins—just barely—at a moment when the city seemed equal parts crime, graffiti, and squeegee men. Bloomberg beat Mark Green, in 2001, because of 9/11 jitters and because Bloomberg’s biggest contributor, himself, wrote a check for seventy-five million dollars. Giuliani and Bloomberg didn’t win on account of “conservatism,” and de Blasio didn’t win on account of “progressivism.” Absent a trying period of Democratic fecklessness plus a talented, independent-minded, and/or filthy rich Republican alternative, a big win for the Democratic nominee, no matter who, is always a foregone conclusion. This is a city that’s six-to-one blue.
Nor did de Blasio end up on top because he was more “progressive” than his Democratic rivals, or not mainly because of that. His biggest break was the implosion of Anthony Weiner. Even after the first Twitter detonation, Weiner had climbed back to first place in the polls. And even after Twitter II sealed his fate, he dominated the televised debates. He had more energy and hunger than the rest of them put together. Personally, I could never have pulled the lever for him—I’m a single-issue guy, the issue is bike lanes, and Weiner was hostile to this excellent urban amenity. But Weiner, like Hillary, was liberal enough. And while his in-your-face, ur-New York pugnaciousness isn’t to everybody’s taste, I’m convinced that a winning plurality of Democrats would have found it an entertaining change from Bloomberg’s Olympian flatness and an exciting contrast to the relative dullness of the rest of the Democratic field.
Finally, identity politics played out in interestingly new ways this time. With a hip black President ensconced in the White House, the competent but bland Bill Thompson had a hard time mobilizing his fellow African-Americans and sympathetic liberals. For a long time it looked as if this would be Christine Quinn’s year, despite her role in having helped Bloomberg elide term limits. As president of the City Council, Quinn was well known. She was next in line. But in a city that had been decisive in sending Hillary Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand to the U.S. Senate, the urgency of “It’s time for a woman” was much reduced. That left Quinn’s lesbianism as her remaining trump card, a seemingly powerful one at a moment when gay liberation and marriage equality were at flood tide. But she lacked charm, and de Blasio’s amazing family trumped her. The genial white candidate, his black ex-lesbian wife, their son’s stupendous Afro, the beauty and poise of their daughter, with her latte complexion—these, far more than any ideological checklist, were what did the trick, and did it in the most inclusive, least divisive, most joyous manner imaginable.
Twelve years of Bloomberg have infantilized us. He has been our city father, stern and a little distant but reassuring—our Daddy Peacebucks. We felt taken care of. We didn’t worry about things going horribly wrong. We felt governed. Now, with de Blasio’s help, we will have to learn to govern ourselves.
Bloomberg was Big. It remains to be seen if de Blasio can be Big, too. But in a field of Lilliputians—in most cases physically but, more to the point, metaphorically—Bill de Blasio stood head and shoulders above the rest. He was tall and everyone else was—well, short.
Photograph by Adrees Latif-Pool/Getty.
