Michael Goodwin: Looking back on 2 former NYC mayors who sparked major crises — as inexperienced Mamdani enters City Hall |
With New York about to embark on a dangerous voyage piloted by Zohran Mamdani, a singularly radical mayor hell-bent on shredding the policies that have kept Gotham afloat, now is a good time to explore how the city got into and out of earlier mayor-made crises.
Over the past 50 years, national recessions, Wall Street crashes and the horrors of 9/11 took turns challenging New Yorkers’ legendary toughness.
But during that span, there have been just two clear brushes with civic collapse.
These were not solitary events, nor did they result from national policies or mistakes made by people living outside the five boroughs.
Rather, the two crises were caused by policies that originated in City Hall.
As such, they offer case studies in how much damage bad mayors with bad ideas can cause, and how it can take years to clean up the mess and get back on track.
The first of these crises was the financial calamity of the 1970s.
The city’s brush with bankruptcy was the fault of two mayors, John Lindsay and Abraham Beame.
Lindsay’s misguided rule over “Fun City” lasted for two terms, from 1966 to 1973.
Beame then served a single term in City Hall, but his main contributions to the fiscal disaster came during his previous two terms as city comptroller, when he was supposed to make sure the books were balanced.
Had he done his job properly, the numbers would have been written in red ink.
The two men were polar opposites in many ways.
Lindsay was a handsome, dapper Republican from Manhattan’s East Side, while the short, rumpled Beame was a numbers man straight out of the Brooklyn Dems’ clubhouse culture.
Unfortunately, they shared a belief that it wasn’t necessary for revenues to match........