Jay Kriegel’s New York, and ours

News of the death of Jay Kriegel came as a complete shock to me. You see, when I first met Jay in 1966, he was one of the 20-something whiz kids on the staff of New York’s ambitious new mayor, John Lindsay. And despite all the years that have passed since those heady days, he remains in my mind that same brash, fast-talking young man.

In fact, Jay wasn’t just one of the whiz kids, he was the whizziest of them all. He was fearless in speaking his mind when it came to offering Lindsay advice in difficult situations. And he spoke so fast that it was often impossible for the rest of the staff to keep up.

I can’t remember how many meetings I sat in as the mayor’s deputy press secretary listening to Jay rattle off recommendations about how to handle some crisis or another. It was like being armed with a cap pistol when he was carrying a machine gun.

But that was Kriegel: quick on his feet and full of ideas, some good, some not so good, but always plentiful in supply. And no question about it, Lindsay

liked him for those qualities. He knew Jay’s advice could be off the mark, but he valued the energy, imagination and directness.

Lindsay was like that as a boss, always willing to listen to suggestions and wonderfully tolerant of human error. I remember Jay telling me once that he had lain awake all night in agony over a blunder he’d made that he was sure would get him fired. But in the morning when he explained what he’d done, he said Lindsay just laughed and told him to get back to work.

Jay’s rapid-fire style and his seeming ubiquity in the mayor’s office wasn’t lost on the rest of the staff. Once when someone asked where Kriegel was, the mayor’s then-speechwriter, an acerbic Irishman named Jim Carberry, promptly replied, “Probably in the mayor’s ear.”

And there were times when Jay could be impressively laconic. Gordon Davis, who would go on to become an outstanding parks commissioner and one of the city’s foremost lawyers, was newly arrived in New York when he landed a job in Lindsay’s Budget Bureau. He was such a standout that he was soon brought over to City Hall to become an assistant to the mayor.

Gordon said afterward that he was so astonished when Kriegel offered him the job, he blurted out, “Wow, I’ve only been here for a year and I’m already on the mayor’s staff.” To which Jay replied, “If we’d known you were black, you would have been here a year sooner.”

For much of the eight years Jay served in City Hall, he was the mayor’s liaison to the Police Department. It was, to put it mildly, incredibly stressful since Lindsay’s relationship with the NYPD was generally contentious. He was determined to reform a department he saw as poorly managed and stuck in outmoded ways, particularly in dealing with minority communities. Jay was the point man, and that got him into considerable hot water.

Still, many of the changes took hold, and Jay Kriegel deserves great credit for his behind-the-scenes role. One change, in fact, is now a nationally recognized icon of New York — the façade of the new headquarters Jay helped shepherd into existence, One Police Plaza.

In the years after City Hall, Jay emerged as one of Lindsay’s most loyal friends and promoters. Thanks largely to him, to cite one example, there was a beautifully mounted exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York on the Lindsay years.

You could say John Lindsay inspired that kind of loyalty, and that would be true. But in Jay’s case, it’s also the kind of person he was: intense, dedicated and passionate about the things he believed in, most especially this city that he grew up in and loved.

Laird was an editorial writer and oped editor for the Daily News, 1977-2005.