STRUT YOUR STUFF!
This is how Mayor Adams can put the swagger back in New York City
‘WHEN a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger.”
So declared Mayor Adams on Jan. 3, signifying that he would be an energetic, larger-than-life, Big Appleboosting leader in contrast to his lazy, New York-defiling predecessor.
Good for him. Because to beat back the tide of crime, homelessness and endemic gloom enabled by Bill de Blasio, Adams will need more than politics-asusual to neutralize the woke establishment that’s cheered on by the race-obsessed New York Times.
His public rounds and smiling photos with bankers and real-estate executives are a fine opening move.
But for all his cocky talk about returning people to offices, getting guns off the street and cleaning up Penn Station, Adams is starting off with worse odds than the Giants against the Packers. His statutory powers are limited by state rules, circumscribed by the City Council, and undercut by turn-’em-loose judges. Newly elected Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s lawless-and-disorder agenda includes winking at armed street muggers who terrorize mostly minority neighborhoods.
To change the game, Adams needs the public on his side — not only the few who vote in the primaries. It will take some bold, showbiz strokes to drive the message home, even though he’ll surely be condemned as “divisive” and “grandstanding.”
Let him take a cue from former Mayor Ed Koch, who famously joined a march of New Yorkers walking to work over the Brooklyn Bridge during the spring 1980 transit strike. Koch raised his arms in a victory salute. The cheerleading image graced newspaper front pages and led the newscasts.
It couldn’t end the strike, which was a struggle between the union and the state MTA. But Koch’s move encouraged people who might have stayed home from their jobs to get to them by any means, including shoe leather. It catalyzed public camaraderie that helped keep businesses afloat at a time when the city had yet to recover from its mid-1970s near-bankruptcy.
There’s a parallel of sorts in today’s mostly still-empty office buildings. Adams has scolded Wall Street bank heads to bring their people back — “You can’t run New York City from home,” he said.
But the bosses are holding back because their employees are holding back. Camera-loving Adams should pop by one of the few towers where many employees have been back at their desks for months — Morgan Stanley at 1585 Broadway, say — and talk to happy brokers and traders, have lunch with them at their favorite spots, and let them say why they love being back in town.Turn the clips into commercials. Suburbanites fearful of returning to Manhattan might be swayed by Adams’ persuasive voice and smile to remind them of what they’re missing.
Crime? Adams can’t immediately undo bail rules. But the NYPD answers only to him. As every New Yorker out for a stroll or a subway ride can see, too many demoralized cops are slacking at their jobs except in cases of life-or-death.
Ex-cop Adams criticized police he spotted barely bothering to question combatants in a sidewalk fight on the elevated Kosciuszko Street J line station. He should keep up the pressure and encourage his new police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, to do the same. Catch slothful officers with cameras rolling. Or go into precinct houses and shame lax commanders.
It might not be pretty. But the police will know he means business. So will muggers and looters accustomed to cops standing by during their sprees.
For all his later failings, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, he halted the crime explosion and restored confidence in the city, not with sweet talk, but by scaring the hell out of the people who worked for him.
He held police captains accountable for curbing mayhem in their precincts. In the horrific weeks following 9/11, friends of mine who were involved recalled that when much of downtown was off limits, Giuliani demanded that his police, fire and transportation officials reopen more streets every day, even if it was one block at a time.
Adams needs to exercise the same bully-pulpit mentality, pushing for improvements one street at a time, every day of the year. That’s how the city gets its swagger back.