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.
