On September 11, my wife was in Manhattan. If I had known she was on
Wall Street that morning - had, indeed, just gone through the PATH train
station under the World Trade Center at 8:45 - I would have been far more
worried than I was. Her usual travel route took her much farther uptown.
Cut off from cell phone access or the ability to dial any neighboring
area code via land line, I sent her an e-mail message titled, "Are
you there?"
She responded, as did so many workers and commuters that day, within
a couple of hours. E-mail worked where telephones wouldn't. As soon as
I had found out she was all right, I wrote to her, "There are two
things we can be grateful for: That Rudy Giuliani is Mayor of New York,
and not any of those doofuses who are running against him; and that George
W. is President, not Al Gore."
Giuliani
Now Rudolph Giuliani is, according to the mainstream press, sending "mixed
signals" about wanting to stay on as Mayor - maybe for three more
months, maybe for another term. This morning (October 1) in the New York
Times, columnist Bob Herbert condemned the Mayor in what is becoming typical
language, accusing him of having "a rapidly swelling head."
Other commentators have scored Giuliani for confusing the admiration he
earned for his superb administration of the terrorist crisis with some
kind of political mandate, accusing him of trying to turn a catastrophe
to his own selfish gain.
As usual among the chattering classes, simplicity eludes them. New York
City's very survival is on the line. The next Mayor will control an unprecedented
hoard of cash, both from charitable contributions and from federal and
state subsidies. The next Mayor will broker redevelopment deals and decide
issues, large and small, relating to the economic life of America's capital
city.
Within adult memory, New York City has been bankrupt. Remember the headline,
"Ford to New York: 'Drop Dead'"? That was only 25 years ago.
New York, in truth, has, in the modern age, been poised on the knife edge
of economic oblivion. It's an intimidatingly expensive and difficult place
to do business, to live, to move around, and to survive. Imagine the slate
wiped clean, New York empty of all business, with no more grand New York
momentum, no more glittering New York mystique: Would you, as the owner
of a corporation, decide to locate there?
Probably not.
Now, in the aftermath of this disaster, a great many companies will find
it very, very hard to justify staying in Manhattan. Just this past weekend,
a visitor to our house, the boss of the security division of a major financial
corporation, which had been located right next door to the World Trade
Center, was lamenting what might be the dissolution of his key corporate
shop. His employees won't come back. Several have left to take jobs for
other divisions of his corporation. His operation is scattered among emergency
locations ranging across 150 miles of New Jersey.
That story has been told over and over, hundreds of times in hundreds
of saddened living rooms, in this area.
Whoever runs New York City in the next four years is going to have to
cut sweetheart deals with big businesses: tax breaks, public-private partnerships
for real estate development, revenue bonds, and the like. He is going
to have to bust the opportunistic corrupters all along the way. He's going
to have to rebuild and restart the greatest urban economic engine in America's
history.
Fernando Ferrer, Mark Green, and Michael Bloomberg can't do it. They
can only pour money down various special interest ratholes, like public
education. Their constituencies will enslave them to balkanized racial
and ethnic pleadings, to unions, to self-styled "consumerists"
and "public interests." They will kill off "tax breaks
for the wealthy." They will kill New York.
Look: I'm an old-time urban rat, a writer, a musician, and an artist.
If I were single today, I'd be living in someplace like Battery Park City.
I've lived downtown in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. But I know that,
without big business, there is no jazz, there is no dance, there is no
theater, there is no art, there is no literature in a big city. The overflow
of capitalist dynamism makes big cities what they are. And there's never
been a city where that was so true as New York.
Rudy Giuliani knows it. He was born to do this job, and he sees the looming
peril of New York's future clearly. His offer to talk to the mayoral candidates
about a three-month extension? That was always a ploy, a bluff.
He knew that at least one of the candidates wouldn't go for it. That
clears the stage for Giuliani to engineer an outright run, somehow to
get around the term-limits law. He's got only a few weeks to do it, and
yes, it is a breathtaking piece of political audacity.
Thank heavens he's doing it. Because there's a simple choice: You can
vote for the Big Apple, or you can vote for Calcutta on the Hudson.
Lawrence Henry is a regular contributor to Enter Stage Right.