JIM DWYER N.Y. TIMES
Michael Bloomberg was keen to take on the impossible, or at least the seemingly so. And he did. A man whose public personality came in a plain brown wrapper presided during an era of radical change and rebirth in the city, much of it fostered by his administration.
He has stayed so long that he and New Yorkers are now getting on each other’s nerves: he, increasingly peevish and deaf to his critics; they, in turn, no longer able to detect or grant him any qualities beyond arrogance.
Mayors rarely leave office in New York on affectionate terms. In the case of Mr. Bloomberg, a relationship that was always fraught — and could it have been anything else with a mayor whose net worth, enormous to begin with, increased every 15 minutes by more than the city’s median annual household income? — has frayed.
Baffling, visionary, obstinate and brilliant, Mr. Bloomberg had complications that could be maddeningly hypocritical or endearingly human. He preached the virtues of dietary sodium restrictions, but sneaked shakes of salt onto slices of pizza. His staff let it be known that Mike Bloomberg had a regular guy palate for beer and a hot dog; at dinner with a few commissioners, he confided that he didn’t see why anyone should have to pay more than $300 for a good bottle of wine.
He led the country — indeed, the world — in taking strong measures to reduce carbon emissions, anticipating that the city’s population would grow by one million in the decade after he left office; meanwhile, he flew everywhere on private jets, the least carbon-efficient form of transportation on or above the earth, whether going to spend weekends at his house in Bermuda, or to lecture at a climate change conference in Copenhagen.
He was not naturally inclined to soaring oratory, so on his rare forays, the eloquence was indelible. Practically alone among elected officials in the United States, Mr. Bloomberg spoke in 2010 for the right of a Muslim group to open a mosque a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks, citing the founding principles of the nation. As he stood on Governors Island, with the Statue of Liberty visible over his shoulder, Mr. Bloomberg said: “We would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.”
Last week, during a news conference in City Hall, the same mayor snarled at a judge for ruling that in searching the pockets of millions of young black and Latino men who had done nothing wrong, the police and the city had violated their constitutional rights. The moment lacked even a whisper of the grace that had made his voice so powerful on Governors Island.
It would be futile to try squaring those two Bloombergs.
Yet as he enters his final months in City Hall, the full arc of his era is coming into view. Mayors are often spectators, forced to play the hands dealt them by history, the economy, the public, their allies or campaign contributors. As much as any mayor of modern New York, Mr. Bloomberg has been a transformative figure, a shaper of his time.
Elected to lead a city that was the grieving, wounded site of an atrocity, he will depart as mayor of a city where artists have been able to decorate a mighty park with thousands of sheets of saffron, for no reason other than the simple joy of it; where engineers figured out how to turn sewage gas into electricity; where people are safer from violent crime than at any time in modern history.
He is shrewd and has often had good luck, and when that happy combination was in short supply, his vast personal fortune helped patch things over, do good deeds, buy allies. He was not conventionally partisan, and was clumsy in dealing with the baroque centers of power in Albany. The ideology that shaped his goals was, broadly, the allure of large numbers: get enough rich people and companies here, and they will support a government that can keep the city running for everyone else; make policies in public health, education and policing that, when multiplied across eight million people, will create a healthier, smarter, safer city. The love of big numbers led to great success and, at times, toxic excess.
Perhaps most important, he has had a knack for avoiding unnecessary political fights, and little anxiety about trying and failing. At his best, that combination of emotional efficiency and fearless experimentation changed the city.
Imagine the deep, drawn breaths of the audience — the gasps — at the finale of a special show held at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle on Feb. 24, 2005.
In an elegant performance hall, 13 honored guests, delegates from the International Olympic Committee, had been treated to aperitifs and a 40-minute revue that captured the New York of story, song and cinema.
Mayor Bloomberg and his committee had spared nothing in the enchantments, hoping to lure the 2012 Olympics to the city.
....Finally, at the very back of the stage, a giant curtain began to drop from a three-story wall of glass, shifting the spectacle to the actual city.
Framed in the giant window was Central Park. Its winter browns were pillowed in snow and swaddled in streaks of the saffron cloth of “The Gates,” an art installation that was glowing, thanks to lights held by volunteers stationed along miles of winding paths. Overhead, fireworks spattered rivers of color in the sky.
The only word for it was breathtaking: ...The Olympics delegation rose in ovation.
Now, eight years later, all of that evening’s shimmer has been stilled, the last trumpet notes faded with the embers from the rockets and the pinwheels. The 2012 Olympics went to London, not New York.
Tucked into that evening was something beyond a fling with the Olympics, which many New Yorkers could not have cared less about. Beyond the overreaching was something far-reaching. In the gasps at the finale, in every breath drawn by the audience, was the invisible substance that could be counted as Mr. Bloomberg’s most enduring, radical work: cleaner indoor air. The room was free of tobacco smoke. Even during cocktails, no one lit up. And not just on that gilded night, in that privileged space at the center of Manhattan, but in every restaurant, bar and watering hole throughout the five boroughs since March 30, 2003.
Soon after taking office, Mr. Bloomberg had met at Gracie Mansion with his first health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who urged him to push for a complete ban on smoking in places where people work — no exceptions, no special pleadings by hotels or small places or private catering halls. A person who spent one minute in a smoky bar, Dr. Frieden said, would be exposed to as much pollution as someone who stood in the Holland Tunnel for 60 minutes at rush hour.
....the New York ban included bars and restaurants, whose trade lobbyists tried to stop it by warning of economic disaster. Commentators jeered about “Mommy Mayor” and the “Nanny State.” Mr. Bloomberg pushed past the catcalls and got a bill through the City Council that in addition to the ban, included money for cessation programs and steep taxes on cigarettes. The smoking rate for adults declined by a third, and for young people by half.
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Not just the air changed. City parkland grew by about 800 acres; 750,000 new trees have been planted, toward a goal of one million, an initiative that took off after the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, reported that every dollar the city spent on a tree returned $5.50 in savings on heating, cooling and public health.
The transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, added 285 miles of bike lanes and turned over parts of Broadway near Times Square to pedestrians.
The waterfront on the East River in Queens and Brooklyn, rezoned to accommodate the Olympics that never came, grew to absorb a population that increases by the thousands every month. The No. 7 train line is being extended to 11th Avenue from Times Square, and then south, to irrigate a new crop of skyscrapers being planted on and around train yards. The city alone picked up the bill — unusual for transit projects — and intends to pay for it with the real estate taxes collected from new development.
Mr. Bloomberg committed $4 billion, more than all his predecessors combined, to build the third water tunnel, which was first proposed more than 60 years ago. Construction had begun in 1970, then dragged on through six mayoral administrations, slowing and stopping when money was tight; his acceleration of the project, however farsighted, had no political upside — it will not be completed until 2018, but property owners have had to pay steep increases in annual water bills.
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The city cut the number of young people detained for trial in juvenile court by as much as 50 percent, and reduced over all the number of people it sent to jail. Crime went down. At the same time, public health doctors increased screenings and treatment at Rikers Island, a likely vortex of communicable disease.
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As one of his first acts, Mr. Bloomberg sought and won control of the schools, saying it would create accountability. He invested heavily in education: the amount of money spent on schools has doubled since 2001. More students graduated from high school in four years, though that success was not closely tied to how much money was spent in a given school; nor were the additional resources able to close the frustrating gap in test scores between higher-performing Asian-American and white students and their lower-scoring black and Hispanic classmates.
The city opened 28 career and technical education high schools, the first new ones since the 1960s. Teachers were paid more, though the city did not negotiate a new evaluation system when it agreed to the increases, and later got into an ugly fight over it. However, approval of tenure applications, once all but automatic, dropped to 55 percent from 97 percent.
Mayoral control of the education system meant that a central administration had the power to close schools, corral space for charter programs, and set rigid rules for assigning students to schools. Many parents found the new educational bureaucracy hidebound and remote, and looked fondly back at the once-reviled community board system.
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Unlike most elected officials, Mr. Bloomberg had ample balm to spread around when the city budget dried up; over nine years, he gave about $200 million through the Carnegie Corporation to 600 arts and cultural groups, many of which had been cut adrift from the city budget.
“The grants conveyed an indisputable good to the city’s social and cultural fabric,” the investigative reporter Tom Robbins wrote in The New York Post in June. “But political advantage was equally inescapable.”
The giving doubled in 2005, an election year, and tripled in 2008, when Mr. Bloomberg sought the right to run for a third term in office by undoing a limit of two that had been voted into law by public referendum. He spent more than $110 million on his re-election campaign, and barely won.
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No mayor finishes all the business that needs to be taken care of. When Mr. Bloomberg was toying with a run for president, he kicked liabilities down the road.
...the city’s public housing authority, which provides homes or vouchers for more than 600,000 people, has deferred maintenance in thousands of apartments. It needs $6 billion in capital financing.
And the durability of the experimental spirit that Mr. Bloomberg encouraged remains uncertain, as is the $383 million in private donations he raised in support of varied pilot projects: stopping domestic violence, preventing black and Latino young men from falling behind, manufacturing green roofs, getting salads into schools.
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The siren song of large numbers led the city to multiply the number of people that the police stopped and frisked.
But the Constitution protects the rights of individuals and does not recognize the laws of large numbers. It requires that the more invasive an action the authorities take against a person, the greater the cause must be.
More than a year ago, Mr. Bloomberg himself had — sotto voce — said there would be changes to the police approach. The number of stops declined sharply. A more agile Mr. Bloomberg would have avoided a needless fight on behalf of a program that was already being reformed.