New Yorkers await the anti-bloomberg
Democrat Bill de Blasio, with his liberal agenda, is favoured to become next mayor
BROOKLYN, N.Y.
The election of a new mayor for The Greatest City In The World — and the end of the 12-year Michael Bloomberg monarchy — will happen Nov. 5, and winds of change are blowing Sandy-strong. Surveys heavily favour the eat-the-rich Democrat Bill de Blasio, who vows to be as un-Bloomberg as a burgermeister can get.
Signor de Blasio (he is Italian on his mother’s side and took her name as a young adult to erase an alcoholic father who committed suicide) doesn’t promise much: only to fire the police commissioner who has helped to make this the safest major city in the United States, with a homicide rate one-fifth that of Podunk Chicago; provide free preschool for every underprivileged child; halt the random stopping-andfrisking of (mostly) young men of colour; punitively tax Wall Street’s manifold billionaires (including the outgoing mayor); and redistribute all that cash to the bottom tranche of a town where 46 per cent of the inhabitants are considered “poor” by some measurements.
Hizzoner-to-be has a poet/ activist wife who — before she fell for Bill while they were both serving as aides to David Dinkins, New York’s most recent failed liberal mayor — was a member of an AfricanAmerican lesbian collective championing “the destruction of the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism”; an 18-yearold ear-stretching daughter in university in California; and a 15-year-old son who attends a public high school in Brooklyn and who sports an Afro hairstyle so bouffant and Angela Davis-circa-1968-- like that even Barack Obama has spoken wistfully of it in public.
The mortally uncool Republican candidate, Joseph Lhota, by comparison, is merely the former chairman of the city’s once-loathsome, now-sparkling subway system. But Lhota’s already-faint hopes have been reduced even further by the GOP-led shutdown in Washington, by his approbation of and by a Tea Party group on Staten Island and by the mathematics of a metropolis where Republicans are outnumbered six to one.
Last week, I went to a haunt called Colandrea’s New Corner, established in 1936, to gauge sentiment about the mayoral contest and watch the first de Blasio-Lhota debate. (Also, because it was “Explore Brooklyn Italian Restaurant Week” and I could get baked clams, chicken Scarpariello, a glass of wine and a Biscuit Tortoni for only $25, which is cheap for New York, New York.)
New Corner is where the would-be-small-time Mafioso (and my mother’s second husband) Fred Lucci would beckon a strolling violist and induce him to play a ballad of infidelity called Mala femmena by offering as much as 25 cents. Those were the days. Femmena Tu si na mala femmena Chist’ uocchie ’e fatto chiagnere
Lacreme e ‘nfamità ...
I was sitting with a couple of no-longer-young Brooklynites named Tony M. and Louie P. But instead of auditing the mayoral debate, they were watching the Boston Red Sox slug their way to the World Series, which was enough to make any New Yorker choke on his gnocchi.
“I want a mayor who’s not a politician, who’s for the people. That’s the kind of mayor I want. But you never get ’em,” Tony M. was saying.
Louie P., I learned, had reaped a fortune manufacturing caskets.
“At the end,” he smiled, “you still gotta die.”
“De Blasio wants to tax the rich,” Louie said. “That’s me. I’m the rich, NOW. But when I was a kid, I had no money, I didn’t have no daycare. My mother took care of me, day AND night. In those days, you didn’t get nothing. You had to go to work. The government didn’t give you a thing.
“That Bloomberg, he’s pretty good,” Louie P. conceded.
While I was talking to these Napolitanos, a first baseman named Mike Napoli hit a home run for Boston and the New Corner music system — canned, not live — as if bribed by Fred Lucci in heaven, played Malafemmena. Si avisse fatto a n’ato chello ch’e fatto a mme st’ommo t’avesse acciso, tu vuò sapé pecché? Translation: If you did to someone else what you did to me
this man would have killed you
do you want to know why?
Steve Colandrea, the thirdgeneration co-owner of the restaurant, came over. He launched into a litany of the relentlessly rising business taxes, minimum wages, health-care costs and employee benefits that, coupled with the transformation of this once-Italian district into a mash-up of Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern immigrants, was making it more and more difficult to nudge the New Corner into a ninth decade on Eighth Avenue.
“I am upper-middle class, I own real estate and stocks,” Steve confessed. He said he was fine with Mike Bloomberg, who had tried to rid the city of second-hand smoke and jumbo-gulp sodas and who now was inveighing against tanning salons, “but not this nanny stuff.” But at least neither Bloomberg nor his relatives ever had campaigned against the “economic system of Capitalism.” (In 1990, Bill de Blasio cited “democratic socialism” as his preferred system of governance.)
“Does it really matter who the mayor is?” I asked the innkeeper.
“It does matter,” he replied. “When Dinkins was mayor, you couldn’t walk on the street, there was so much garbage. With Bloomberg, the streets were clean. I even took the subway the other day, probably the first time in 10 years. It was nice!”