After eight years of Bill de Blasio’s “tale of two cities” rhetoric and ruinous rule, Eric Adams in his early months in office unabashedly cheerled for a New York City he clearly loved and adored.
He sported custom-made $2,000 suits, showed up everywhere from the Met Opera Gala to nightclub Zero Bond, and in every way celebrated the city’s greatness and resiliency. “We’re not coming back, we are back,” he proclaimed of the slow but sure recovery from the pandemic.
The tonic Adams served us is a quaint memory now. His bungling of the migrant crisis, irrational budget cuts and an overall inability — if not unwillingness — to focus on any crisis long enough to fix it cost him his short-lived goodwill. Adams may even lose the mayoralty altogether over his multiple campaign-financing and conflicts-of-interest investigations in connection with officials related to the Turkish government.
But God help us if that happens because the “world’s greatest city” needs all the boosting it can get. Notwithstanding Gotham’s financial and cultural supremacy, the city of New York has few friends on any side of the political spectrum.
A mayor can’t much alter the world’s prevailing winds, but he can set the city’s mood. Rudy Giuliani restored civic discipline when he tamed street crime and led the city through 9/11 and its aftermath. Mike Bloomberg renewed the conviction that wealth was to be appreciated, not condemned, for the benefits it could bring the less-wealthy.
Bill de Blasio, by his words and actions, on the other hand encouraged New Yorkers to be ashamed of their city. Adams’ unbridled love for the place was on its way to wiping away that gloom despite sniping over his night-and-day partying.
And then, courtesy of a migrant invasion he didn’t have the will to tame, it all came crashing down.
Unchecked perception of irreversible decay will only accelerate actual decay. The business “exodus” to Florida will swell from what’s essentially a trickle to a future where Miami one day overtakes Manhattan as the capital of Wall Street, as Citadel founder Ken Griffin recently forecast. Tourists who come in growing numbers since the end of the pandemic will think twice when there’s no mayor to persuasively assert, as Adams did, that crime isn’t as prevalent as others claim.
The left is comfortable with the city’s polycultural diversity and street disorder. But it detests our commercial and financial dominance, which is, in the end, what makes New York City, New York City. “Occupy Wall Street” was, and is, the goal of many more capitalism-haters than the few hundred zanies who filled Zuccotti Park.
While some analysts fear the possible collapse of the office market and banking industry, the “progressives” who infest government and academia appear to actually want them to fail. To them, the much-debated “Urban Doom Loop” scenario is not a portent of catastrophe but a providential stroke to enable precisely the measures that will only make things worse.
They want offices turned into “affordable,” i.e., free housing. They promote policies that yield more street crime because they want more street crime to substantiate their faith that American society is irredeemably racist and violent.
“Gentrification” — which rescues neighborhoods from despair in every borough — is evil. Wall Street is a force for oppression. Real estate companies erect monstrous towers and bulldoze out small stores, neighborhood doughnut shops and lower-income residents.
Meanwhile, the right (the far right especially) hates us just because. Not only does Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene believe New York is “disgusting,” “filthy”, “repulsive” and a “terrible place.” The unhinged loathing is present in the deranged emails I get when I write about any new development project or even a new burrito (“Let New York s—ty sink into the ocean” is the standard line).
We are hated in Washington, as when Republican senators in 2010 sought to block funding for 9/11 rescue workers’ medical care. We’re hated in the suburbs whose residents view the five boroughs as a crime-ridden, filth-encased hellhole.
We’re hated by celebrities who made their fortunes here and fled to California — from Johnny Carson, who joked about Martians getting mugged in Central Park, to novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who fumed on a recent book-promotion visit, “How in the f–k does anyone live here?”
Nor can we take comfort from the political center. Democratic elected officials who aren’t as zany as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kill us by taking us for granted — e.g., the Biden administration’s using New York as a dumping ground for migrants, secure in the notion that no amount of chaos will prompt our progressive-minded citizenry to vote Republican.
It will take a new mayor with a vocal passion for the city to arrest its decline. To say, we are great despite our uneven economy and unequal justice. But the loony-left names touted as potential successors to Adams, such as Comptroller Brad Lander and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, give no reason for optimism.
Scariest of all is former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who trounced all others in a recent hypothetical poll of candidates should Adams leave office.
Queens-born Cuomo’s lack of love for the Big Apple was evident early on when he howled over the cost of rebuilding the World Trade Center. Worse, he seemed determined to punish the city during the COVID-19 crisis when he kept our stores, restaurants and movie theaters closed long after other parts of the state were allowed to open.
We should hope for Adams to muddle through his current travails and get his voice back. Be very afraid if he fails.