Where have you gone, Tammany Hall?

In American politics today, the most common complaint is, why can't politicians get anything done?

Of course, our political system of checks and balances was intentionally set up to make it difficult to govern, lest we slide into tyranny. However, in recent years, it seems like our politicians have gone from governing and legislating into simply engaging in deliberate gridlock. It does "We the people" no good.

The people, of course, are at the heart of any democracy -- because here the people rule. At least, in theory. In practice, of course, people powered government is rough and messy business, much like the people themselves. That is why political parties came into existence, as a way for people and groups with similar interests to organize and claim power. It's always why the engines of political parties, i.e. "machines", became so vital in the 19th and 20th centuries: they helped people claim power and use the government to improve their lives.

A machine works like this: the people who work and vote for or finance the dominate political party in their respective city or state get benefits when the politicians they support get into the power. This can be a job or social services or various government favors. It's very much a transactional, back scratching way of governing. It is the "business" side of politics and government. 

Political machines, of course, have long been derided as sources of corruption since they can warp the machinery and priorities of government and leads to bad policies. Government ceases to function properly when instead of being used an instrument to help the population at large it is used simply to benefit the people who run and support it. However, political machines were not always sources of patronage and corruption. Instead, they were mechanisms to help the poor and dispossessed grab away the levers of government from the rich and connected. 

Here in NYC, from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Tammany Hall was the most powerful and notorious political machine in America. Tammany Hall ran NYC like the Vatican runs the Catholic Church: absolutely. The "bosses" of Tammany, like the infamous Boss Tweed and later people like Carmine DeSapio, would handpick candidates for mayor and other municipal offices and they were almost guarenteed victory on election day. At its height, Tammany's power reached to Albany, with even governors needed the backing of the powerful organization to get elected. But Tammany was not just a cease pool of power and corruption. In its early days, before the government granted social services, it was also a place where poor people and immigrants could go to get a job, food, shelter, even winter clothes. It helped the people at a time when the government and the wealthy didn't, and all it wanted in exchange was a vote. For many New Yorkers at the time, this was a great deal. 

In many ways, Tammany became a victim of its own success and power. By the mid-twentieth century, many of the politicians it had supported, like Governor Al Smith, had instituted social welfare programs in New York State that made the services Tammany used to provide people irrelevant. In the 1930s, the New Deal and the election of Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor made Tammany both irrellevant and, for the first time, politically weak. And, of course, corruption went from the "honest graft" of the 19th century, when politicians and bosses helped the people and themselves, into the vile corruption of Mayor Jimmy Walker -- who spent his days and nights drinking and chasing women while his city fell apart, thanks to the Great Depression and incompetency of City Hall. 

By the 1960s, Tammany Hall was dead. Many said and would say today good riddance. But is the city better off because of it? At its height, Tammany Hall was a strong advocate for New Yorkers who had no other. It truly cared and helped everyone. Today, who does that? Unions? The rich? Ha! And when you see ineffective the city, state and federal governments have became at truly improving the lives of ordinary people, Tammany Hall in its glory years seems truly glorious indeed. 

There is a new book that looks to reexamine the legacy of Tammany Hall. Perhaps, it argues, Tammany Hall has been unfairly condemned. And perhaps the people of our city would do better if another Tammany Hall could rise, a political organization that simply looked out for everyone without regards to wealth or connections. 

P.S. Where was Tammany Hall? It was originally located right off Union Square on East 14th street. The original building was demolished in 1927 but then moved to East 17th. 

Ghosts of Tammany Hall

I've blogged over the years about the once mighty Tammany Hall, the political machine that ruled NYC for over 100 years.

Ostensibly just the Manhattan Democratic Committee (located in the aforementioned "hall"), Tammany ruled the city and state of New York with nearly unbreakable power from the early/mid-19th century well unto the 20th century (Tammany was just a local party committee the same way Tony Soprano was just a "waste management consultant"). But the Great Depression and reform politicians killed it, and the power of the political machine waned. 

But not completely.

Today, no one machine rules the city or state. But local machines, local county committees in highly Democratic or Republican counties, still have enormous power in who gets elected to city and  county councils as well as the state legislature. The machines still rack up the money, endorsements, and turn-out operations behind preferred candidates -- and usually win. They operate quietly, behind the scenes, and their power is enormous -- they decide who the voters get to vote for, and all of us live under the policy decisions those machine-backed candidates/elected officials make. People with that kind of power are the godfathers, the ghosts in the machine of our  city and our lives.

For example, Marcos Crespo. Who's he? He's a State Assemblyman from the Bronx and heads the Bronx Democratic Committee. His power over the borough and the city is huge -- and most of us don't know who he is. 

But we may be seeing the twilight of the machine. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez defeated the machine boss of Queens in the Democratic primary in June. The IDC State Sentors overwhelming lost their primaries in NYC to non-machine candidates. And now a reform city councilman is running for District Attorney. The machines can't stop these candidates or stop the voters from voting for non-machine backed candidates.

More and more, the political machine is becoming a quaint relic of another time and another NYC.

The NYC Special Election of 1950

Last night there was a lively debate for the Public Advocate special election on February 26th. As previously noted, this is the first city-wide special election since 1950, when Acting Mayor Vincent Impelliteri was elected to complete the term of recently-resigned Mayor William O'Dwyer.

This upcoming special election was triggered when former Public Advocate Tish James was elected as New York State Attorney General last November and subsequently vacated the office. She ran for AG after former NY AG Eric Schneiderman resigned in a scandale.

Not surprisingly, scandale is what triggered the last city-wide special election in 1950. O'Dwyer was under heat for his connections to organized crime so he accepted President Truman's offer to become Ambassador to Mexico and promptly resigned in the summer of that year. City Council President Impelliteri became Acting Mayor and then ran in the special election.

This was at a time when Tammany Hall still exerted a lot of power over NYC politics and, for whatever reason, Tammany and Impelliteri had had a falling out -- so Tammany didn't support him for mayor. So Impelliteri, or Impy as he was popularly known, quickly created and ran on his own party line -- the Experience Party -- and won.

His victory would be short-lived. In 1950, the New York State government was completely controlled by Republicans, under the leadership of Governor Tom Dewey, and they did everything they could to thwart Impy's initiatives to govern the city (it's the opposite today, where the Democrats completely control the New York State government). Robert Moses was another powerful presence, heading various state and city agencies that turned Moses' policy preferences (i.e. building highways) into the mayor's. So Impy was boxed in -- and, in 1953, Tammany got its revenge when it supported Robert Wagner in the 1953 primary and Impy lost.

NYC would then not have another city-wide special election until now -- for almost 69 years. And whoever wins this race for Public Advocate will be in a powerful position to run for mayor either in 2021 or later on. 

Mr NYC Ahead of His Time

The 2025 NYC Democratic Mayoral primary will end on June 24th and it will go down in history as one of the most befuddling in our fair city. The leading candidates are a former NY State governor (Andrew Cuomo) who resigned in disgrace four years ago and a Muslim Socialist Assemblyman (Zohran Mamdani). 

Once upon a time -- let's say, ten years ago -- the idea that either person could win a primary and maybe get elected mayor seemed unthinkable. Yet here we are. Of course once upon a time we never imagined that a bankrupt conman convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who was twice impeached and tried to violently destroy democracy could be elected -- and re-elected -- President. Yet here we are. 

Dark times. Weird times. Take your pick.

But staying closer to home, one really has to wonder how Cuomo and Mandami became the mayoral frontrunners. This article posits that it's due to the withering of the political clubs in NYC. Tammany Hall is long gone, and the remaining clubs no longer have the power to "deliver" votes that carry mayors to victory. Instead, individualized campaigns took over from the clubs, public financing meant that clubs couldn't throw around money in quite the same way. Clubs can canvas and help turn out voters but they don't have the patronage power of jobs that they used to, they don't have the neighborhood-to-neighborhood power that they used to. And obviously television and social media and outright fame can deliver vastly more voters than a party boss.  

The article also revives the memory of a mayor that I blogged about in 2007: Vincent Impelliteri (called Impy) who was handpicked by Tammany Hall to run for City Council President in 1945 because he was an Italian from Manhattan ;they needed to balance the citywide slate (Mayor, William O'Dwyer; Comptroller, Lazarus Joseph; City Council, Impelliteri) with an Irishman, a Jew, and an Italian. When O'Dywer resigned in 1950 Impy became mayor. This is held up as an example of how clubs, the political "machines", made mayors back then.

But one thing the article gets somewhat wrong is that while the political clubs and machines can't "make mayors" these days, they can still make members of the city council, State Assembly and State Senate. No, they can't make another Impy -- or Robert Wagner or (going even farther back) Jimmy Walker, but the clubs/machines still wield a lot of power in NYC under the radar. 

So here we are, less than a week before the primary, and the most likely winners are a guy running on huge name-recognition and another on social media savvy. 

Tammany Hall could never have imagined that.

If you want to know more about where Zohran came from, read this article by three-time Mr NYC interviewee Ross Barkan about Zohran when Ross ran for State Senate in 2018 and Zohran worked for him. It's interesting to see where this possibly transformative political figure came from and who he is.

And remember, I was blogging about all of these people -- Cuomo, Zohran, Ross, even  Impy! -- several YEARS before this current moment. 

And yet again Mr NYC is ahead of his time while the rest of NYC is catching up!

Tammany Hall Lives!

As election day draws near, and a record number of New Yorkers turn out to vote early, much attention has been drawn to the operations of the NYC Board of Elections.

And it ain't good attention.

This brutal article examines how the BOE is a legacy, a relic, a complete vestige of the old Tammany Hall patronage system. It is not, and never has been, staffed by election professionals or even people who could get regular jobs either in government or the private sector. The people who run and work at the BOE are friends and relatives of a various elected officials, total amateurs, cronyism in its purest form -- people who don't even rise to the level of hacks.

The incompetence, the mistakes, the unforced errors, the dissaray of the BOE has a been an embarrassment to NYC for a long time. Sadly, it doesn't seem like reform will ever happen because the people in charge of reforming it -- i.e. elected officials -- are the very same people who have benefited from the BOE being this asleep-at-the-wheel mess. 

No matter who wins in November, the BOE will probably continue its not-at-all funny comedy of errors.

Queens: The Ohio of NYC

When people ask why New York City has elected Republican mayors for the past twenty years, the answer is to be found in Queens. In their tight victories in 1993 and 2001/2009, Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg owed their wins to getting a large chunk of votes in the borough. According to the last Census, Queens has a population almost 2.5 million, a close second to Brooklyn. 

If Staten Island is the Alabama of NYC and the Bronx is the Massachusetts, Queens is the city's Ohio -- the swing borough, the place where mayors are made. Unlike the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, which are highly urban and Democratic, or Staten Island, which is nearly highly suburban and Republican, Queens is a mixture of urban and suburban, Democrat and Republican. In a diverse city, Queens is its most diverse borough -- ethnically, racially, economically, and politically.

Most of our city's mayors have been Manhattanites or were living there when elected. After all, Manhattan was home to Tammany Hall, the political machine that controlled the city's government for close to two centuries. But Tammany Hall is long gone; Manhattan is no longer "the center of it all." These days, if you believe the hype, New York City is experiencing a Brooklyn Moment. From Girls to food co-ops, Brooklyn is on the rise -- heck, it's become a brand. If Brooklyn-resident Bill De Blasio is elected our 109th mayor on November 5th, the Brooklyn Moment will be complete. 

But his margin of victory and the depth of his support will be determined in Queens.

Assuming he wins, De Blasio will rack up huge margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Joe Lhota will probably win Staten Island and still lose the election overwhelmingly (much as Fernando Ferrer won the Bronx in 2005 and still lost the mayoralty by twenty points). Wealthy Manhattan may be more friendly to Lhota, as it was to Bloomberg and Giuliani, but De Blasio should still do well there. But if the middle-class white ethnic vote in Queens turns out for Lhota, and the minority voters in borough don't do the same for De Blasio, De Blasio's margin of victory might not be as huge as most polls predict. While De Blasio will certainly do better in Queens than previous (losing) Democratic candidates, he won't necessarily sweep the borough this year.

Also, Queens is the only borough to feature competitive city council races between Democrats and Republicans -- in areas like Bayside, Howard Beach, and Middle Village. Currently, two of these seats are held by Republicans. The Bayside seat is held by indicted Republican Dan Halloran (who is not running for reelection) and the race to replace him, between Democrat Paul Vallone and Republican Dennis Saffran, is fierce. In Howard Beach, Councilman Erich Ulrich is running for reelection against Democrat Lew Simon, who lost a close special election to Ulrich in 2009. The Middle Village race has Democrat Elizabeth Crowley running for reelection in a seat previously held by Republicans. If either Saffran or Ulrich wins, or if Crowley loses, in the face of a De Blasio landslide, it will show that even in a deeply Democratic city, these conservative pockets in Queens remain strong -- now and in the future.

However, if De Blasio triumphs in the borough and the Republicans lose these council seats, not only will De Blasio's margin of victory be enormous but it will show that the city has most definitively swung in a Democratic direction. His unapologetic progressive agenda will have the people's blessing. Like Ohio in presidential election, Queens will have the final word. 

So if De Blasio wins big, this Brooklyn Moment will have been brought to you courtesy of Queens.

David Garth: New York's Boss

Anyone paying attention to presidential politics for the last twenty years has born witness to the rise of the political consultant as celebrity. These are the campaign strategists, the brains of the organization, the men behind the curtains, the power behind the thrones who have helped elect -- some may use the term "make" -- presidents. No longer do presidents win elections themselves -- they are "made" by people of mystical genius and scary powers to influence an entire nation.

Lee Atwater made George Bush Sr in 1988, James Carville and Dick Morris made Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Karl Rove made George Bush Jr in 2000 and 2004, and David Axelrod made Barack Obama in 2008.

Some young budding politicos no longer dream of becoming president -- they dream of "making" them.

In NYC, mayors used to be "made" by the clubhouse. Political bosses like the infamous William Tweed in the 19th century and Carmine De Sapio in the 20th ran Tammany Hall and hand-selected candidates for mayor, oversaw their campaigns, and the results of the elections were basically a fait accompli. Since the fall of Tammany in 1961, the rise of party primaries, and the all-consuming power of television advertising, no longer do political bosses run the city from behind the scenes. Instead, the campaign consultant dominates.

Surprisingly, since 1965, one man has been responsible for helping to elect four of our city's last six mayors. Political strategist David Garth worked on the campaigns of Mayors John Lindsay (1966-1973), Ed Koch (1978-1989), Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001), and Mike Bloomberg (2001-2013). He has played a hand in determining who has run this town for 40 of the last 48 years.

Wow. Talking about reach. Eat your heart out Karl Rove (and company).

And not only that but Garth is responsible for not only making four of our last six mayors, he also helped to un-make the two others he didn't work for. Woe unto those mayors who ran against a Garth client: Mayor Abe Beam lost to Ed Koch in 1977 and Mayor Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani in 1993.

Put simply: the guy was good.

Why? Because he understood television and how to make his clients connect with voters and their concerns. He was a master of the sound-bite. He would create ads that summed up the problems the city's electorate faced and his potential mayor would offer a simple solution:

For example, in 1977, he had Ed Koch say in an ad: "Abe Beame says he wants four more years to finish the job. Finish the job? Hasn't he done enough?" In 1993, the Giuliani campaign slogan was "One City, One Standard."

Garth was something of a political chameleon for his entire career. He worked for both Republicans and Democrats and, for a man who dedicated his life to politics, his own political beliefs remained elusive. Unlike today's hot-shot political consultants who appear on TV and blab their mouths off, Garth shunned publicity, operated stealthily, and worked quietly to alter the course of the city's fate. And he did it for almost half a century.

Today David Garth is 80 years old and very ill. Although the mayors he worked for are known to every New Yorker, Garth is a mystery man to 99.9% of them. But his clients want that to change that: recently Giuliani, Bloomberg and Koch got together to start a fundraising drive to create a special professorship, a "chair" as it is known, at CUNY named after the man who made their careers (David Dinkins was noticeably absent for this event; Lindsay and Beame have been dead for years). I

If their plan works out, Garth will be remembered by our city's educational system for years to come. (Although why billionaire Bloomberg can't fund this chair himself is just strange.)

So know you know more about the man who made or unmade our city's last six mayors. If our city has had a political boss for the last forty-plus years, then it was him. You may hate or love the men he elected mayor but, whatever your feelings, you can't deny that David Garth made NYC what it is today.

AOC Cracks it Open

When AOC beat Queens political boss Joe Crowley in last year Congressional Democratic primary, the national media took note. Wow! they said. A young Latina newcomer beat a massively powerful 20-year incumbent! She's more progressive than he is! Younger than he is! Browner than he is! A much more telegenic and better social media communicator than he is! 

All true. But that's not what, here in NYC, was most notable about her victory.

As this article notes, as international and dynamic and exciting as NYC is, it's political culture is "sclerotic." It's old-fashioned, boring, extremely hierarchical and quite small-D "un-democratic", a legacy of Tammany Hall. Politicians in NYC are expected to start their careers as staffers and operatives, working their way up the ladder precinct by precinct, clubhouse by clubhouse, lousy political and government job after lousy political and government job, hoping and waiting to be "next in line" when, eventually some Assembly member, State Senator, or Congressperson retires -- or dies, or gets indicted -- and machine bosses like Crowley handpick them to run in same districts.

That's why, quite frankly, there are lots of mediocrities in elected office.

The political world in NYC is a closed-world and insular -- and its devilishly hard to crack-open. Machine-picked candidates almost always win because they can either kick outsider candidates off the ballot with petition challenges, bribe them off the ballot with jobs or promises of future office, or resort to smear campaigns and blackmail. Often it's just a case of the candidates leaving office endorsing the machine-picked candidates, sending all kinds of mailers and flyers showing the aging outgoing office holder smiling with and shaking the hand of his or her chosen replacement -- and the message to voters is clear, and the so the machine-backed transition to power is completed.

It's neat, orderly, organized, controlled -- everything that democracy, in its purest form, is not supposed to be. 

AOC busted that. She didn't wait her turn, didn't work in the weeds of the NYC political culture, and challenged not only an incumbent but also one of the most powerful in NYC. And she won. Big time, becoming an international political star. 

And it's made her lots of enemies.

Not just amongst Republicans who, naturally hate her politics, her gender, and her ethnicity. AOC's victory also enraged lots of local Democrats, people who have been playing by the rules, working and waiting their turn so that maybe, just maybe, some day down the line, they might become an Assembly-member -- and here's this much younger, complete outsider who took on the machine, beat it, and is now member of Congress. It's gotta sting.

In next year's Congressional primaries, all over NYC, there will be lots of AOC-inspired challengers to incumbents. It'll be interesting to see if she's really created a groundswell, a movement, to crack open the sclerotic political system in NYC -- or if she was just a big, notable exception.

"What Must the Widow Feel?" The Compassion of Al Smith

This past Wednesday we went to the second of Robert Caro's lectures at the New-York Historical Society on "The Shapers of New York." This time the subject was Al Smith, the great New York Governor who served on and off from 1919 to 1928. (I had blogged about Al Smith in October when both McCain and Obama, at the height of the presidential race, appeared at the Al Smith Dinner which is held every year in the old Governor's memory to raise money for Catholic charities). Caro indicated that this was his favorite lecture to give because of his great admiration for Al Smith (1873-1944) .He also sad that, sadly, there are no great books about Smith so learning about him and how important he was is difficult.

In this lecture, Caro talked about Al Smith's incredible rise from being a street kid in the Bowery to New York's first Catholic Governor. Smith worked as a laborer and ran errands for the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. Eventually he worked his way into a seat in the State Legislature where he became one of the hardest working and most capable legislators Albany had ever seen (amongst other things, he actually read the legislation he voted on, something a lot of his colleagues didn't do). During his time in the legislature (he rose to Speaker before becoming Governor), Smith came up with ideas that were revolutionary in early 20th century America but are commonplace today: state farm insurance, worker's compensation and safety laws (following the terrible Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire of 1911), health insurance for the poor, and higher teacher salaries. His compassion for the working poor and working women in particular was extraordinary. In fact, his ideas were so revolutionary that when FDR implemented the New Deal in the 1930s, he told people that "What we're doing is basically what Al Smith in New York." If FDR was the Father of the New Deal, Al Smith was its Godfather.

Smith's life and career had great highs and crushing lows. Although a very successful governor, he never realized his dream of the Presidency. He was the Democratic nominee in 1928 but was crushed by Herbert Hoover. The reason? He was Catholic, and people outside of New York and the Northeast didn't like Catholics very much back then. (It's amazing to think that 80 years ago a Catholic couldn't elected president but now a black man can.) And when FDR became President, he ignored Smith completely and he was never able to bring his talents to the Federal level. However, in the early thirties, the retired Al Smith helped to build the Empire State Building. But his anger at Roosevelt made him abandon his Democratic party affiliation and become something of an angry reactionary late in life.

One other interesting thing about Smith. He had a young assistant whose career he nurtured named Robert Moses. When Smith was retired and Moses was at the height of his power, Moses re-built the Central Park Zoo just for him. Smith loved animals and Moses made him an Honorary Zookeeper. He also gave Smith a key to the zoo so that the old governor could leave his apartment across the street on Fifth Avenue any time day or night to go into the zoo and visit with the animals. Moses, who was a legendary egomaniac, loved to demonstrate his power by calling everyone, including the Mayors and Governors he supposedly worked for, by their first names (including even Nelson Rockefeller). But Moses always called Smith "Governor" and his respect for him never waned. And neither should ours.

LaGuardia vs. Moses

This past week I went to Robert Caro's last lecture on "The Shapers of New York" at the New-York Historical Society. This final lecture was about the battle between New York's greatest Mayor and its greatest builder as they wrestled for control of the city's destiny during the Great Depression and World War II. While history has sainted Fiorello LaGuardia's Mayoralty as the one that successfully implemented the New Deal into our city, in the end Robert Moses won the battle as to who would set the city's priorities for literally decades to come.

LaGuardia and Moses were two titanic egomaniacs who literally could not stand the sight of each other. When the Mayor and his Parks Commissioner would be in the same room together, they would pace around each other like two boxers in a ring waiting to the punch the other guy out. They would yell and scream and call the other loathsome names. Moses would call LaGuardia a "dago" and "wop" or, even worse, an "organ grinder." And LaGuardia, the lesser educated and refined but more gentlemanly of the two, would call Moses "your grace."

As I mentioned in my first post about this series, each year LaGuardia would present a city budget that would take care of the needy and poor in NYC and Moses would then swoop in and re-jigger it so that he could get money for his building projects. But their disputes weren't only centered around money. Theirs was a brutal battle of wits and raw power.

This conflict is probably best exemplified in the Astoria Ferry incident of 1936. Shortly before Triborough Bridge was to open, Robert Moses wanted to get rid of the ferry service that took people from Astoria across the East River to Manhattan. These were working people who couldn't afford cars to go over Moses's new bridge and this service was vital to them. LaGuardia ordered that the ferry service continue. So one night, literally minutes after the last ferry had pulled away from the dock on the Manhattan side, a couple of barges pulled up in front of the dock. Bulldozers and pile drivers were unloaded and they began ripping and shredding it to pieces. A furious LaGuardia ordered the police to head down and stop this. Armed cops told the workers to cease and desist immediately. Their reply? "We don't work for you. We work for Mr. Moses." And their work continued without incident.

Robert Moses was so popular, so powerful, his power so unquestioned that not even the Mayor and police department of the greatest city in the world could stop him.

That said, Fiorello LaGuardia's impact on NYC was enormous. He reformed the corrupt Tammany Hall-controlled government and steered the city successfully through the Depression. He was also an out-sized, only-in-New York personality who liked to read comics to children over WNYC radio. But in his last years as Mayor, he was literally dying. After he left office in 1945, he would eat lunch at his favorite downtown club and grumble that Robert Moses had too much power -- and that while he, LaGuardia, could control him (which wasn't true) now no one could (which was true). He died in 1947. Today's he's remembered as NYC's greatest mayor and has an airport, a street, a high school and a college named after him. (This is especially ironic since LaGuardia never graduated from either). If you ever walk down LaGuardia Place, between Houston Street and Washington Square, you can see a life-sized statue of the Little Flower that captures his personality perfectly.

These final lectures were a lot of fun and very informative. It was great to hear Robert Caro bring old New York back to life and I was especially grateful that he autographed my copy of The Power Broker. He also told a funny story about how, when he was writing the book, he couldn't get a hold of Moses's Triborough Authority records which were legally sealed. However, he was told that carbon copies of all these records were stored by the Parks Department under the 79th Street Boat Basin. So Caro and his wife Ina would go there to browse through these carbons. The Parks Department made it clear they didn't like having them there and, whenever the guard went to lunch or stepped out, he would remove the light bulbs so that Caro and Ina would literally be in the dark. So after that they would bring their own light bulbs and screw them in whenever the guards went away.

Carbons and light bulbs -- just one of the ways that great history is unearthed so that the rest of us can better understand the great city that we live in.

Power in NYC

Due to life happenings, I haven't been able to blog much lately (in case you hadn't noticed) but I would be remiss if I didn't direct you to New York magazine's Who Runs New York? feature from last week (in case you missed it).

Obviously the most powerful people in NYC are Mayor Bloomberg and other politicians -- along with the powerful financial, real estate, and media interests that support them. But, as this insightful report indicates, it's more complicated than that. The days of the old moneyed Wall Street establishment are over, the days of The New York Times and their erstwhile newspaper competitors controlling the daily new agenda are waning, and there is a new generation of real estate moguls who have a different idea of what should and shouldn't be built in this town.

The power in NYC fragmented like never before. Chaos reigns.

For example, take the media. Those who own big the media in this town are no longer the most powerful people (think Sulzberger, Zuckerman and Murdoch). Instead, you have folks like Nick Denton, an irascible Brit, who founded the snarky Gawker site. Ten years ago this guy didn't even live here -- and now he's as important a media figure in this city as Jimmy Breslin ever was.

Or politics. Mayor Bloomberg still may run NYC with as close to absolute power as any mayor in history but his days in office are waning. Soon he'll be just a billionaire instead of the mayor/billionaire. So who will take his place? That will depend, largely, on the new political kingmakers in this town. We're a long way from the days of Tammany Hall bosses like Carmine De Sapio and from labor union leaders like Mike Quill and Albert Shanker. But if you want to find their successors, look no further than Dan Kantor of the Working Families Party, the third-party organization that has succeeded in getting lots of up-and-coming politicians like John Liu and Bill DeBlasio elected. The effectiveness of the WFP turn out operations on election day are becoming famous. In 2009, while Bloomberg spent $100 million on his third term, the WFP was able to get out enough voters to reduce Bloomberg's margin of victory to an embarrassing four points. Kantor may be the most powerful person in NYC you haven't heard of -- but you will.

And then there's the likes of Lauren Santo Domingo who may be in the running for become the city's new Social doyenne, the new Mrs. Astor.

As you can see, in this era of the niche, power in New York is getting more diffuse even as wealth is getting more concentrated. It's an interesting, almost absurd paradigm -- one that is powered as much by new technology as anything.

Even this blog could be considered, in it's small, small way, a part of the new power game in NYC. For example, here am I, a regular guy, a simple blogger, who has been able to publish interviews with the likes of Kurt Anderson and Michael Musto, who has been asked by various business to advertise and plug their products, who has been invited to parties and events because of this blog, and who has gotten more than one person (including a prominent newspaper editor) extremely angry by some of the stuff I published on here. None of this would have happened if not for this blog and the small, tiny bit of power it has in the huge NYC media universe. (By the way, with one exception, I've turned all the invites and requests to plug stuff down. I ain't that kinda guy.)

So who runs New York? Who has the power? We do, my friends, you and me.

Claire Shulman RIP

Claire Shulman served as Queens Borough President from 1986 to 2002, the first woman to hold the job and, for a long time, one of the only women to serve in high office in NYC. She has died at age 94.

Shulman was instrumental in the development of previously depressed parts of the borough like Jamaica, Flushing, and Long Island City. Most notably she speardheaded the transformation of Queens into a cultural hotspot, working to improve the Queens County Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the New York Hall of Science.

Shulman also had an impressive personal legacy -- her daughter is an astronaut named Ellen Baker and her son is a prominent oncologist. She had another son who died in 2001 and was a budding director.

Her rise to the BP job was dramatic -- her predecessor, Donald Manes, a flamboyant old-school machine pol had dramatically committed suicide in 1986 after being caught up in a wild mess of corruption, mob ties, and nastiness. In many ways, her time in office was transitional, as the last remaining ties to Tammany Hall and machine/mob-domination gave way to reform, good government, and a new city. 

RIP.

Remembering Fernando Wood, NYC's "Scoundrel" Mayor

Imagine a politician who built his wealth in real estate, was a racist demagogue who supported the Confederacy, incited a riot, married and fathered multiple children with multiple women, tried to undermine democracy and the law to make himself a dictator, and used his executive public office to enrich himself ...

Of course I'm talking about the mid-19th Century NYC Mayor Fernando Wood.

Born in Philadelphia in 1812, Wood migrated to NYC and worked as a laborer, got involved in Tammany Hall politics, and was eventually elected to Congress in 1840. After one term he left and got into real estate, accumulating a fortune but remaining involved in politics until he finally was elected mayor in 1854.

His administration was basically a giant shakedown and bribery operation but he did notch some significant achievements: rebuilding the city harbor, overseeing the approval and eventual creation of Central Park, and implementing the grid system. He also attempted to change the city charter to essentially make the city government the extension of one man – him – so he could act as a dictator. When he ran for re-election in 1856, he furloughed the police department and got a band of thugs to menace and beat up voters in order to get reelected. He was never prosecuted for this. 

Defeated for a third-term, Wood eventually got elected mayor again in 1860 – just as the Civil War was breaking out. He supported slavery and the Confederacy, and called for NYC to secede from New York State so it could keep trading with the south.

So did Fernando Wood ever face public disgrace or jail for his corruption and crimes?

Oh no. In 1862, he returned to Congress and opposed abolition. And he remained in Congress, becoming chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, until he died in 1881, a very wealthy man with a mansion on West 77th Street.

He also had three wives and fathered 16 children. The man was forever busy.

Today we live in an era of aspiring dictators and corrupt chief executives with a love of racism and violence and money. So while history has not been kind to Fernando Wood's memory, in some ways, he'd be right at home in our era.

But he's been condemned, at least, by popular culture: see the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln and listen to the 2011 Bowery Boys episode.

In many ways, Fernando Wood makes later NYC mayors Jimmy Walker and Eric Adams look like pillars of virtue.

Bryant Park

Nestled behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, right between Times Square and Grand Central Station, Bryant Park is a beautiful oasis in the overactive thyroid gland of Midtown Manhattan.

The fact that it's just ... there, and has been there for as long as anyone can remember, means that it's easy for most New Yorkers to take it for granted. Yet it really is a jewel and, particularly this time of year, is one of the little things that makes you grateful to live in New York.

In many ways, Bryant Park is the place that most reflects of the city. It does this in three major ways.

First, it's a place where natives and visitors alike can escape, right in the middle of the city, from their work or their trips, and take a few minutes to restore themselves. The big beautiful green space is fun to loll on and there are lots of tables and chairs for people to sit and relax on. Best of all, you can get a great look at the majestic buildings that surround the park and really get a sense of what an extraordinary city this is.

Second, Bryant Park is a place where, especially in summer and winter, New Yorkers can get together and have fun. In the summertime, on Monday evenings, HBO shows free classic movies in the open air. I've gone to the movies there a few times of the year, seeing A Streetcar Named Desire and MASH with several thousand of my fellow New Yorkers. In wintertime, Bryant Park turns into a holiday theme park. The park is taken over with small stores selling everything from candles and toys to fragrances and jewelry. In the middle of the park, the green space turns into a free ice skating rink. My wife and I went there recently (neither of us had been skating since childhood) and we had lot of fun swooshing around the (frozen) Pond. Amazingly neither of us fell down and it only made us want to skate again soon. (Warning: the line to get into the skating ring, particularly on a weekend afternoon, is incredibly long but it moves fairly fast). So in Bryant Park, New Yorkers come together to have fun in the sun and celebrate the Season.

Third, the history of Bryant Park almost reflects the history of NYC as a whole. It seems that whenever New York falls on hard times so does the park. But whenever the city resurrects itself, the park leads the way. In the 1920s, Bryant Park had fallen into ugly disrepair -- the city government under Tammany Hall let it go completely to seed. In the 1930s, however, under the WPA, the park was restored and once again became an urban refuge. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, it had once again come undone, this time becoming a playpen for drug addicts and prostitutes. In 1988 the park was closed and was renovated for four years. By the 1990s the park had once again become the beautiful space that it is today. In many ways, if you want to see how the city is doing, go to Bryant Park.   

A Commie by any other name ... like LaGuardia

As we head into the last two months of the NYC mayor's race, the media and his opponents keep calling Assemblyman and current frontrunner Zohran Mamdani a "communist."

The Republicans, the media and so-called "centrist" Democrats (they're all the same thing really) love calling regular Democrats communists. They've been doing it for decades. Quite frankly, it's boring and unoriginal -- and, if Democrats really were Communists, then the GOP/media/centrist Dems would have suffered the same fate as the Romanovs whenever Clinton or Obama or Biden got into power.

But if Zohran is a Communist, then he's in good company.

I'm currently reading a book about Fiorello LaGuardia, widely regarded as the greatest NYC mayor of all time. And whaddya know -- in reading about the 1933 campaign, the year LaGuardia was elected, the Heart media and Tammany Hall CALLED LAGUARDIA A COMMUNIST! 

Take a look at the excerpt below: "... the little red flower of Communism ..." and so much more. So when you keep hearing this crap about Zohran, just say "Well, they said the same thing about Fiorello and he turned out to be pretty great." 

A Commie by any other name ...