Welcome to the Gilded City of New York
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The Gilded Mayor
When New York’s 108th mayor, Michael Bloomberg, took the oath of office on January 1, 2002, few New Yorkers—including those who had voted for him—had any idea what to expect. A billionaire who had never held office, Bloomberg was mostly known as the Democrat turned Republican who had spent $74 million of his own money, or $99 per vote, to win the election.
Now, nearly twelve years later, Bloomberg has proved himself a powerful force, a mayor who has become at once a symbol and a source of many of the city’s changes. From his perch at City Hall, and with the aid of both imperial wealth and an often imperious personality, he has pushed a vision of the city that has charmed the chattering classes and confounded critics, even as it has defied easy categorization.
As the mayor of the civilized city—the one who has earned monikers like “urbanity’s great ambassador”—Bloomberg has pushed bike lanes, boutique parks and a complaints hotline. As the green mayor, he’s pressed tree planting, green building and an ambitious sustainability agenda. As the crusader mayor, he’s urged gun control and religious tolerance. And as the manager mayor, he’s wooed the tech sector, adding a shiny new spoke to the city’s economy, all the while keeping the wheels of city government spinning smoothly.
But there have been other Mayor Bloombergs. The top cop Bloomberg has presided over a vast surveillance program targeting Muslims and a massive, racially skewed stop-and-frisk dragnet. The union-busting Bloomberg has waged war on organized labor, leading—for the first time since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s—to a remarkable situation in which every major public employee union is working without a contract. As Giuliani with a smile, he’s cut social services, pushed the fingerprinting of food stamp recipients and tried to charge rent from homeless people in shelters. As the MBA mayor, he’s turned public schools into high-stakes testing centers. And as the imperial mayor, he pushed through a deeply undemocratic change to the city’s term-limits law to pave the way for a third term in office.
Attempting to make sense of this jumble of policies, observers have often resorted to catchy memes about the mayor’s motivations. Bloomberg, they say, is a classic centrist—part social liberal, part fiscal conservative. Or he’s an apolitical technocrat whose only concern is doing what works. As one breathless New York magazine profile framed it, “Mike Bloomberg’s politics are non-politics—it’s all about the numbers.” Yet these theories miss the larger point about the mayor’s tenure, which is that his pragmatism has always been in the service of a larger politics, and his twelve-year reign has been geared not simply toward technocratic efficiency, but toward realizing a very specific vision of New York.
Bloomberg himself expressed this vision in a March 2012 piece in the Financial Times bearing the title “Cities Must Be Cool, Creative and In Control,” in which he wrote:
For cities to have sustained success, they must compete for the grand prize: intellectual capital and talent.
I have long believed that talent attracts capital far more effectively and consistently than capital attracts talent. The most creative individuals want to live in places that protect personal freedoms, prize diversity and offer an abundance of cultural opportunities.
Then he added, “Economists may not say it this way but the truth of the matter is: being cool counts.”
This is New York for the creative and “creating” class—and with its culture, diversity and openness, that city is indeed a nice place for professionals to live. But what about those people who aren’t part of the creative class, who don’t descend on the city, post-college, with MacBooks full of “intellectual capital”? Bloomberg has answered that question as well, often quite explicitly, as he did during his weekly radio address not long after his Financial Times column appeared. Explaining why he opposed a “god-awful” City Council bill requiring employers to provide paid sick days to employees, he said, “It would be great if all jobs in the city paid a lot of money and had great benefits for the workers. Not good for the employers.” Which is to say: in the cool, creative and in-control city, ordinary workers don’t count.
In essence, Bloomberg’s is a vision of the city forged primarily around the care and feeding of thought leaders, professionals and strivers—with little concern, and sometimes active contempt, for the ones who do the care and feeding. (In 2011, 400,000 New York workers, many of whom toil in service sector jobs, were not paid enough to hoist themselves out of poverty.) This is a fundamentally two-tier style of urbanism, one in which a cool, creative and well-managed metropolis glitters like something lovely, its radiance drawing attention away from the dimmed surroundings.
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A New New New York?
More than 150 years ago, Walt Whitman stood on the deck of a ferry, heading home across the East River toward Brooklyn. As he crossed, he saw the crested waves, the belching foundry chimneys, the other passengers, and felt the demotic spirit move within him. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt/ Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,” he rhapsodized in what became “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
Decades later, much of that waterfront is gone, replaced by DUMBO’s shimmer, yet one suspects that a poet like Whitman might still find something universal in this city—in the bustle of an Occupy Sandy relief center, in the African markets that dot old Harlem, in the rattling can of a 7 or A train.
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Amid the two-tier urbanism of the Bloomberg era, many people have been working hard to make the city a more equal place. Workers have been coming together at fast-food restaurants, retail stores and car washes. Liberal-minded politicians, calling themselves the Progressive Caucus, have brought innovative ideas to the City Council. A coalition of the stopped-and-frisked has pressed for big changes in policing policy.
New York is a city forever giving birth to itself. It is no accident that Occupy Wall Street was born here. And in November, when New Yorkers go to the polls to elect a new mayor for the first time in twelve years, the city will reinvent itself yet again. “People aren’t good at describing what is in their own interest,” Bloomberg has said, to explain why he described it for them. Now the people will have a chance to define for themselves what kind of New York they want to live in: a Gilded City, or a genuinely democratic one.
Read all of the articles in The Nation's special issue on New York City.
