Photo of the Day: Mayor Gaynor Memorial, Brooklyn, NY

Okay, I cheated a bit with this headline. Technically, this is called the William Jay Gaynor Memorial. But the men (and so far, it’s been all men) who have held what John Lindsay once called “the second-toughest job in America" have, more often than not, ended up nonentities to most New Yorkers several decades after their deaths.

So, I figured that giving his title in the headline might bring at least more recognition to William Jay Gaynor than he’s had in a while. I myself knew next to nothing about him when I saw this monument to him in Cadman Plaza Park, near the Brooklyn Bridge, and decided to photograph it back in October. I decided, at some point, that I would research his life and career. So much for good intentions.

Then, in November, I came across a New York Times article about Presidential aspirants who found their final resting place in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, and became interested in a hurry. Gaynor not only belonged to this group, but among an even smaller, more fortunate one: a politician who’d been shot—and survived. For a while, anyway.

The bust of Gaynor, little noticed these days, was created by Adolph Alexander Weinman. The German-born sculptor added, to each side, allegorical bas-reliefs representing law and strength on one side and knowledge and ease on the other. One side sounds like the attributes of someone dedicated to the life of the law; the other, a politician. If it sounds a bit incongruous, it wasn’t more so than the thought that Tammany Hall would nominate this reforming state supreme court justice, for Mayor.

According to H.L. Mencken, reviewing a biography of Gaynor in the February 1932 issue of his magazine, The American Mercury: “When he sat on the bench in Brooklyn he [Gaynor] tried to enforce it to the letter, to the natural scandal of his brethren of the ermine. Scarcely a day went by that he did not denounce the police for their tyrannies. He turned loose hundreds of prisoners, raged and roared from the bench, and wrote thousands of letters on the subject, many of them magnificent expositions of Jeffersonian doctrine. Unfortunately, his strange ideas alarmed the general run of respectable New Yorkers quite as much as they alarmed his fellow judges, and so he was always in hot water.”

A former Christian Brother, Gaynor would not interfere with citizens enjoying Sundays as they wished, whether going to saloons or playing baseball. But, to Tammany Hall’s post-election horror, he had a short way with patronage seekers, and a marvelous asperity that would surely come in handy nowadays in dealing with fake news. ("Dear Sir," he wrote one correspondent while in City Hall, “I care nothing for common rumor, and I guess you made up the rumor in this case yourself.")

In August 1910, just as he was about to depart for Europe on a vacation, Gaynor was shot by James Gallagher, who was angry over being fired from the Docks Department a few weeks earlier. The bullet, lodged in Gaynor's throat, was too dangerous to be removed, his doctors decided. Though the mayor recovered and returned to work, the stuck bullet left him subject to frequent, exhausting coughing spasms.

At the 1912 Democratic Convention, Gaynor was mentioned as a potential Presidential candidate, and actually received one vote on each of six ballots until the delegates finally turned to New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, the winner that fall.

The following year, with Tammany firmly rejecting him and a Republican-Fusion ticket supporting John Purroy Mitchell, Gaynor attempted to assemble his own coalition for a re-election bid. That September, exhausted from his efforts, he was on another vacation to Europe when he died. Thousands paid their final respects to him as his body lay in state on a bier in City Hall.

Only 19 years later, Mencken was already noting that Gaynor was “almost if not quite forgotten.” The memorial in Cadman Plaza ensures that the mayor never will be completely lost to curious visitors.

Photo of the Day: The Providence That Buddy Left Behind

In selecting and editing the image that accompanies this post, I not only cropped my original photo but also, because of the waning, mid-afternoon light of the late-October day in which it was taken, lightened the setting: the lovely, water-centered downtown of Providence, R.I. In certain ways, something similar is occurring in summaries of the life of a man instrumental in remaking this landscape, former mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, who died Thursday at age 74.

In the attempt to get a sharp focus on his life, a number of commentaries have inevitably excised certain elements that would add context. At the same time, the darkness that existed at various points in his life has been radically reduced, to the point that the question legitimately arises whether one is getting a true picture of past and current reality.

In guidebooks I read and a tour I took of Providence on a short vacation last fall, Cianci was, after Roger Williams, the name that came up repeatedly. The general gist of these fast summaries went something like this:

“See that gentrified neighborhood? It was organized-crime turf for decades before Buddy prosecuted the Mafia as part of the Rhode Island Attorney General's Anti-Corruption Strike Force. See our downtown? It symbolized Rust Belt urban decay until Buddy supported historic preservation and creating Waterside Park. People even started calling Providence ‘America’s Renaissance City’! And Buddy was everywhere wearing this toupee that he called his ‘squirrel.’ Then he ran afoul of the law and went to jail. Now he’s out. Wanna guess what he’s doing? Hosting his own radio talk show, that’s what! Can you believe it?”

In a number of these commentaries about Buddy (it was never “Vincent” or even “Vince”), the words “charm” and “rogue” appeared so closely together that the temptation seemed irresistible to conflate the two, as if he were a successor to New York’s Prohibition-era mayor, Jimmy Walker, or Boston’s James Michael Curley (the model for the hero of Edwin O’Connor’s classic novel about the decline of big-city political machines, The Last Hurrah). 

And he seems positively consequential when one looks around Providence and sees a tangible architectural legacy, completely unlike the monstrous Albany glass boxes created by New York Governor Rockefeller: a downtown whose gondolas and popular Waterfire display has led some to view Providence as a New England version of Venice. The city rediscovered its heart through three rivers redirected with Buddy's support.

Unfortunately, Buddy could redirect bodies of water far more easily than he could rechannel his own restless energy, greed and resentment. Over the years, some New Yorkers have spoken of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani with the same disdain they might display towards another grim zealot, Tomas De Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition. 

But it may be that Cianci’s snappy one-liners made him far more dangerous in his own sphere than Giuliani could ever hope to be in his. After all, Giuliani was only “America’s Mayor” for two terms; Buddy was elected to lead “America’s Renaissance City” six times.

For a long time, humor was, I believe, Buddy’s stay-out-of-jail card. For the first nine years of his time in City Hall, 22 city workers and contractors—including Buddy’s chief of staff and city solicitor—were convicted of corruption charges. But the mayor was not charged for those offenses. Far too many people would rather take the word of this uninhibited extrovert that he didn’t know a thing about what went on under his own nose.

What got him the first time, in 1984, was an act too blatant and brutal to ignore: Suspecting that a contractor was having an affair with his estranged wife, Buddy summoned him to his home, on the pretext of negotiating city business. With the contractor seated in a chair in front of the fireplace, surrounded by a uniformed cop, the city’s director of Public Works and Cianci’s divorce lawyer, Buddy slapped his target around repeatedly, daring him to hit back, then threw an ashtray at him and threatened him with a fireplace log.

That first stint in City Hall ended with Buddy’s resignation from City Hall, the condition of his plea deal. But given the assault and the use of city officials to back him up, Buddy was lucky to get off even that easily.

All things considered, Buddy wasn’t out of office that long: only six years till he was back in City Hall. Originally a Republican, he had by this time turned independent, the way that a canceled sitcom might migrate from one network to another. These were the years when he became a media personality: acclaimed for reclaiming downtown, appearing on Don Imus, promoting his own pasta sauce—all while posing as chastened by his earlier career reversal.

For someone whose greatest weapon might have been the entertainment he brought people, this might have been the greatest act of all. All the while, he was orchestrating bribes for jobs, contracts and contributions to his campaign fund. The FBI caught up with him after another decade in office. Following a conviction on one count of racketeering conspiracy, Buddy entered prison (or, as he cheekily put it, a “gated community”). In 2014, the lure of office was still strong enough that, even stricken with cancer, he ran again for mayor--and his act still beguiled enough people that this convicted felon received 45% of the vote.

While Philip Gourevitch’s retrospective in The New Yorker acknowledged that Buddy was “notoriously thuggish” and “one of America’s most thoroughly corrupt political personalities,” it ultimately disappoints with a wider, not very apropos comparison:

“Was he more corrupt—or more corrupting to our democratic ideals—than that other Republican turned independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who is said to be incorruptible because he is so stupefyingly rich, but who used his power to persuade the City Council to overrule two voter referendums in favor of term limits and have a third term at New York’s City Hall? Was he more corrupt than Rahm Emanuel, of Chicago, whose City Hall covered up the police killing of a young black man? Should we really leave our judgment of whom we call corrupt to our courts?”

The simplest response to these suggestions is that neither Bloomberg nor Emanuel, to our knowledge, conspired with others to commit physical assault. Moreover, if the temptation of power had proved so intoxicating in a secondary metro area like Providence, what might have Buddy done if he had run a successful campaign for governor in 1980, or even achieved his earlier ambition of becoming President?

“I love this city. It’s a very, very saddening thought to be separated from it,” Buddy told the Associated Press just before he left for prison.

Hmm…Colluding with city officials as part of a revenge plot against a private citizen…Turning City Hall into an electoral slot machine…Turning out not much better, really, than the gangsters and machine politicians he beat at the start of his road to power…Funny how Buddy went about proving his love.

Yeah, real funny guy, that Buddy was.

Quote of the Day (Rudy Guiliani, on John Lindsay)

“John Lindsay defined an era in the life of New York City. He embodied the hopes of a generation after the death of John F. Kennedy, a time of discord, rebuilding, and re-birth, when all the action in our nation—for better and for worse—seemed to be taking place in our cities. He made New York City a symbol for urban America, by speaking out about what he believed was wrong, discussing what he believed could be made right, and proposing solutions whose legacy we live with today. There is no question that he had an enduring impact on the City that he loved. His energy, his optimism—and yes, his charisma—made him a national figure during the time he lived at Gracie Mansion.”— Rudolph W. Giuliani, Eulogy at the Memorial Service for Mayor John V. Lindsay, Friday, January 26th, 2001, delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

The half-lives of politicians—how, step by step, their vibrancy ebbs once they are out of the public eye—are rarely a happy sight. But John V. Lindsay’s seemed particularly sad and harrowing, especially in light of the “energy…optimism…and charisma” rightly noted by his fellow GOP member who followed him to Gracie Mansion two decades after he left it, Rudy Guiliani.

Lindsay died on this day 15 years ago in Hilton Head, S.C. He was far from the city that had elected him mayor twice, and, at age 79—battered by financial reverses, two strokes, Parkinson’s Disease and complications from pneumonia—even further away from the golden 44-year-old politician whose initial City Hall candidacy had inspired the memorable Murray Kempton line, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”

Expectations, created by the likes of quotes like this, had become unrealistically high by the time he took over in January 1966. ''John Lindsay was the best mayor New York ever had before he took office,'' a press aide to his predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, is supposed to have quipped, according to the New York Times obit after Lindsay's death.

That predisposition to give Lindsay a pass because of who he was rather than what he had done is not unlike the rhapsodic reception accorded Barack Obama when he became President (including a Nobel Peace Prize awarded before the latter had completed even one year in office). The problem was that Lindsay not only had to campaign but govern. There, the magic vanished.

The similarities between Mayor Lindsay and President Obama did not end with great expectations. There is another, equally important one: the electoral coalition they hoped to count on. They were, in essence, much the same: the young, African-Americans, women, and liberals.

Fred Dutton, a former aide to Robert Kennedy who had moved on to advise George McGovern by the early '70s, saw these newly emerging groups as a means of shedding the Democratic Party’s union leaders, urban bosses, and related groups deemed too blue collar and reactionary. Seeing increasingly little room in the Republican Party for his brand of urban liberalism and this "new politics," Lindsay had switched parties in 1971 and run in the Democratic Party’s primaries the following year.

Lindsay’s electoral problem was not in failing to anticipate the future promised by these new groups (one on which Obama successfully capitalized in 2008 and 2012) but in not negotiating the here and now beforehand. He actually ran to the left of McGovern in 1972, but the South Dakota Senator had stolen a march on him in winning the support of these voters by using recent rule changes regarding composition of convention delegates to his advantage.

Worse than that, Lindsay disastrously exhibited early in his administration an almost aristocratic disdain for unions. This immediately complicated his relationship, in his first days in office, with the fiery Irish-born Transport Workers Union head Michael J. Quill, who contemptuously referred to the new mayor as “Lindsley.” 

The resulting strike, which lasted 13 days, immediately cost the city, in lost productivity and wages, an estimated $1.5 billion. Moreover, the eventual deal--$52 million for two years, double the size of any transit pact negotiated by Mr. Wagner—set a standard that other unions would try to match.

Over the following eight years, Lindsay would contend with strikes or sick-outs by the city’s police, teachers, bridge workers, sanitation workers, and firemen. To close the growing deficits spawned at least partly by these work actions, he pressed for a new municipal income tax--along with a new commuter tax--that managed to simultaneously alienate two groups who could not normally agree on anything: business leaders and blue-collar workers. (See a prior post of mine that contrasted the 1966 strike with one that had a more successful outcome: the 1980 transit strike under Ed Koch.)

For all his fierce unpopularity with a large portion of the electorate, Lindsay was fortunate that he didn’t have to face them when the bills for all this labor largesse had to be paid. By 1971, according to Ken Auletta’s The Streets Were Paved With Gold, the Lindsay administration had not only vastly overestimated its forecast of federal aid, but also issued more than $300 million of budget notes to cover inflated revenue estimates. The following year, it rolled up these notes with a new set. Through these budget gimmicks, the city was living beyond its means, setting the stage for the 1975 municipal bankruptcy crisis.

Inevitably, any historical assessment of Lindsay must take this fiscal irresponsibility into account. That does not bode well for his ultimate reputation. But other aspects of his work and career need also to be entered into the ledger. Ironically, the person who made one of the most eloquent and surprising cases for him is someone he had precious little in common with him.

In some ways Giuliani can be thought of as the ultimate anti-Lindsay: ethnic Catholic rather than WASP; a charm-challenged figure versus one whose affability was effortless and genuine; a Republican who quelled his maverick instincts enough to remain within the party fold, rather than one who found a more congenial home in the Democratic Party; a baseball rather than tennis fan; a politician whose base was the outer boroughs rather than Manhattan; and a chief executive acclaimed for rising to the occasion in a crisis, instead of one who seemed to fold his tent quickly when pressed by opponents. 

But once in awhile, politicians can sound unexpected grace notes. Guiliani’s came not merely in how he spoke of Lindsay after his death, but in how he had come to his aid before that.

Lindsay left City Hall a spent force in 1973, with even Kempton now calling him a "splendid flop." His last campaign, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1980, ended with his defeat in the primary. Then, in the 1990s, two law firms with which he had been associated went bankrupt.  Surprisingly, a man associated with patrician, prep-school privilege had no health insurance and, under city rules of that time, no pension eligibility. All of this occurred as his health began to fail.

Enter Guiliani. Upon becoming mayor, he had been impressed by Lindsay’s graciousness in a long chat they had at Gracie Mansion. Amazingly, he even felt something of a kinship with the liberal as another politician who had tried to reform the old political system. Now, with other friends, he was able to secure for the former mayor a position as special counsel to the City Commission for the United Nations, with health coverage, a $25,000-a-year salary, and, under rules that had more recently gone into effect, enough time to qualify for the 10 years needed for a city pension.

In one sense, Guiliani may have been overly generous in stating in his eulogy that his predecessor had “an enduring impact on the City that he loved.” Unlike Fiorello LaGuardia, Ed Koch, Guiliani or Michael Bloomberg, Lindsay was not a transformative figure who either left the lives of New Yorkers demonstrably better off or changed the physical or operational landscape of the city. The perception grew under him that, far from being the “Fun City” he hailed, New York was an ungovernable one.

Yet Guiliani was also correct in recognizing, as even many who vehemently disagreed with his policies did (including a conservative friend of mine who told me he was the best interview he ever had) the essential decency and humanity of Lindsay. The problems of race that overshadowed his eight years in office have hardly vanished in America or New York, as events of the past year have shown. The one great achievement of his tenure can be phrased as a negative, but it remains significant for all that: unlike other American cities in the late 1960s, New York did not burn.