One of the many reasons that the 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for New York is its legendary mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Irascible, energetic, funny, polylingual, authoritarian, and deeply humane, he delivered the city government from Tammany Hall, built significant new infrastructure, and gave a voice to ethnic and racial minorities. Here, he assumes his duties for the first of his three terms, getting a good-luck handshake from his predecessor, John P. O'Brien, in the mayor's chambers in City Hall, January 1, 1934.

Photo: Associated Press

great info on the mayors / political leaders of New York - on the anti side, how about the absolute worst and most destructive , regressive, or otherwise harmful in its history?

This one is mostly covered by my first post about NYC mayors, where I discussed the mayors from Lindsay to the present. However, I can talk about earlier mayors, even though most of them were bland non-entities. One major exception to this rule was Fernando Wood.

If there was one consistent theme of Wood's career - other than fraud (Wood stole from his bank and his own brother-in-law) and corruption - it was racism and violence.

From the very beginning of Wood's political career, he distinguished himself as the most pro-slavery man in New York Democratic politics, seeking the patronage of figures like John C. Calhoun and James Buchanan. When he shifted from Congress to mayoral politics, Wood went back and forth on what variety of pro-slavery politics he preferred (variously backing Douglas' popular sovereignty position and Buchanan's anti-Douglas position), but was a consistent enemy of John Van Buren's Free Soil Democrats, "Black Republicans," and abolitionism as a concept. Nevertheless, he managed to win election in 1854 with a bare third of the total vote.

Unlike more pliable Tammany mayors, Wood believed in "one-man rule" rather than collective pursuit of power, particularly when it came to direct mayoral control of the police force. While claiming to stand for home rule, democratic accountability, and efficiency, in reality Fernando sought to remove any commissioners on the police board who stood between him and turning the Municipal Police into his personal army. In the 1856 election, Wood gave the police the day off so that the Dead Rabbits gang could engage in street violence, physical intimidation of voters and poll workers, and theft of ballot boxes. Evidently Wood needed the help, because he won with a tiny plurality of the vote and ran well behind the Democratic ticket.

Wood managed to skate from any indictment from Election Day violence, but he had gone too far politically. Tammany broke with Wood, barring him from the building and promoting his political opponents to Federal patronage positions. The Republican-controlled state legislature enacted a new Municipal Charter that ordered a new election for 1857 and transferred control over public works to state commissioners appointed by the governor, and then a Metropolitan Police Act that abolished Wood's Municipal Police and replaced them with a new force under state commissioners.

Wood refused to accept the Metropolitan Police Act or the Municipal Charter as law, ordered his Municipal Police to physically remove state commissioners from government buildings, and when the new Metropolitan Police attempted to arrest him for selling the office of Street Commissioner for $50,000, Wood mobilized the Municipal Police against the "Black Republicans," leading to the "Great Police Riot" in which the two police forces met in open combat on the steps of City Hall. 53 people were injured, the state militia had to be called out to disperse the Municipal Police, and Wood was arrested (and then promptly released by a friendly judge).

New York City's gangs, with Wood's allies the Dead Rabbits very much in the lead, realized that with the city's two police forces at war (Wood had directed the Municipal Police to stop the Metropolitan Police from carrying out arrests, leading to frequent skirmishes), there was no state monopoly on violence to restrain them.

Amid a rising crime wave, the Dead Rabbits Riot broke out on July 4th - in which the Five Points gangs under the leadership of the Dead Rabbits invaded the Bowery and went to war with both the Bowery gangs and the Metropolitan Police. At its height, the riot involved 800-1,000 armed men and women who responded to police charges by building barrricades. Once again, the state militia had to be called out to quell the violence (at least 8 people killed and about 100 injured), although fighting would continue for another week. Ultimately, the courts ruled against Wood and the Municipal Police were disbanded.

In the election that year, Wood ran on a pro-slavery platform that praised the Dred Scott decision and Buchanan's pro-slavery policy in Bleeding Kansas, while attacking Republican efforts to expand voting rights to black New Yorkers. This race-baiting failed to distract voters from the violence and corruption of the Wood Administration, to say nothing of the Panic of 1857 which had sent unemployment in the city skyrocketing. To get rid of Wood, Tammany formed a fusion ticket with the Republicans and Know-Nothings that narrowly defeated the incumbent mayor.

Learning nothing from his defeat, Wood blamed the loss on a shadowy cabal of "Black Republicans" who had supposedly infiltrated Tammany Hall and formed his own rival Democratic machine out of Mozart Hall. In 1859, Wood once again used armed violence, this time to try to seize control of the State Democratic Convention from Tammany delegates. When this didn't work, Wood once again turned to racism in his campaign to get back into the mayoralty, running on a pro-slavery, anti-John Brown, and anti-abolition platform. He just barely managed to pull out another tiny plurality victory with only 38% of the total vote.

In his next term, Wood crossed the line from mere bigotry to open treason, calling for New York City to secede from both New York state and the United States (both controlled by "Black Republican" abolitionists, according to Wood) so that it could trade freely with the Confederacy. In 1861, Wood came in third place for re-election, finishing only a thousand votes behind both the Republican and the Tammany Democrat.

Despite (or arguably because of) his vocal pro-Confederacy stance and his supporters having caused the 1863 Draft Riots, Wood became the leader of the so-called "Peace" Democratic faction against the War Democrats. Lest you think that Wood was motivated by his abbhorence of war, Wood made the reasons for his opposition clear when he pushed for constitutional amendments to protect slavery, attacked War Democrats as "a white man's face on the body of a negro," and led the Congressional opposition to the passage of the 13th Amendment. In 1868, Wood was censured by Congress for his verbal attacks on the Reconstruction Acts. This censure accomplished nothing, and Wood continued his Congressional career unabated, which culminated in becoming Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee following the end of Reconstruction.

Wood had the reverse Midas touch of turning everything he touched to shit, such that even the few good things he supported - like home rule for New York City and public works jobs for the unemployed - became tainted by association with his violence and corruption. As far as I'm concerned, they should have done him like they did Vallandigham.

Compared to Wood, the faults of every other NYC mayor seem like the most minor of venal sins.

"Gentleman" Jimmy Walker was corrupt as fuck - supporting his lavish lifestyle by taking bribes from anyone with a pulse, selling the services of the NYPD to the mob, getting in bed with Arnold Rothstein, and perhaps having been connected to the murder of a whistleblower on police corruption and the disappearance of a New York Supreme Court judge - but he was also part of the progressive wing of Tammany Hall and a talented administrator (albeit one who only worked from 3-5 so as not to interfere with his more important time with showgirls, nightclubs, speakeasies, and boxing matches). He supported social welfare policies, opposed the KKK, built municipal waterworks and subway lines (albeit through corrupt contracts), and created the Sanitation and Hospitals Departments.

Similarly, William O'Dwyer was a typical Tammany politician who oversaw a massive police corruption scandal in Brooklyn, and ultimately had to flee to Mexico to avoid investigations from the Justice Department and the Brooklyn DA into his ties with organized crime, but he was in most other respects a typical if unremarkable mid-century NYC Mayor.

Shouldn't have raised the subway fare to ten cents, tho.

Ed Koch

NYC Mayor Wants To Force People To Lower Their Mask (And Why This Is Not The Solution He Claims It Is)

Who hurt Mayor Adams and why does he go to such great lengths to cause so much harm to New York City? As an activist who loves their city, I prefer to shop at small local businesses versus the giant corporate chains, I realize how hard it is for a small business to make it (especially in these times) and how vital the movement to support them really is. That said, as a proud disabled woman who gets around via a motorized wheelchair, I sometimes have no choice but to shop at the larger chain stores due to accessibility issues. It only takes one step to prevent someone like me from having access to a store, but when I see that a small local business has put in the effort to get a ramp etc, it does not go unnoticed. But lately, Mayor Adams has added yet another obstacle for disabled people like me. I don't know what he hopes to accomplish by forcing store employees to harass customers like myself to lower our mask if we want to enter a store. While many people like to pretend that the pandemic is over (and I get it, we all want it to be, but fun fact: that's really not how this works), a lot of us do not have the luxury of such illusions. For people like us, wearing a mask is not optional. From the beginning of the pandemic, my safety as a disabled person has been at best an after thought. And now Mayor Adams wants to make it even harder by forcing people like me to lower our mask, which immediately puts me at risk for COVID. But he's not just harming people like myself. If I can't safely shop at the local stores, then I have no choice but to give my money to the larger online chains. As a result, smaller businesses will lose money, and is this really what Mayor Adams thinks the city needs right now? It also makes you wonder, where does the absurdity end? Many people for religious reasons cover their face (which is their prerogative.) Is the Mayor going to make store employees harass them as well? Will this policy be enforced consistently or will this turn into yet another form of profiling? Mayor Adams insists that this is being done in the name of public safety, but I think the majority of New Yorkers can see through that. After all, if the Mayor really wanted to reduce crime, then he wouldn't be so eager to massively cut funding to education and social services, while giving the NYPD an increased budget. More police has never been the answer, and if his goal was truly to reduce crime, then he would address the root issues as to why crime exists in the first place. Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with people wearing masks.

[image description a photo of New York CIty Mayor Eric Adams is stand outside. He is a bald man with brown skin, wearing a blue blazer with a white shirt. He is smiling and adjusting his collar. behind him you can see a sidewalk and various buildings that are blurry as he is the focus of the photo. ]

Something even worse than Missouri. Pretty soon, so-called "undesirables" will be jailed just for existing.

ive been trying to articulate this since his election but she did it so much better

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR4HJhLW/

Screw this twat. Forever and always, thank you.

THEY MADE A SHIRT LMAO

In a hypothetical situation where Moris Hilquit wins the 1917 mayoral election by a plurality, how do you think the ideal socialist for successful dentists would have performed as mayor of new york?

That is a tricky scenario to pull off, as alternate histories go.

In "original timeline" New York City, Morris Hillquit (SPA-NYC) got 145,000 votes for mayor, which is impressive....for third place, with the Democratic nominee (John Francis Hylan, a man who had impressively worked his way up from railroad laborer to engineer and then to lawyer, and who managed to win the support of both Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst) winning 314,000 votes, and incumbent reform mayor John P. Mitchel (having largely alienated his Fusion alliance) winning 155,000.

So the first thing that would have had to happen was Mitchel not running and splitting the anti-Tammany vote. However, Hillquit and Mitchel together would still be 14,000 votes short - and you know what happens when there's a close mayoral election and Tammany Hall is on the ballot.

So the second, and arguably more important thing that would have to happen is for Hearst to run against Tammany, like he did in 1905 (as a "Municipal Ownership League" candidate, no less!) and 1909, splitting the Democratic vote. (Words cannot describe what a weird guy William Randolph Hearst was politically. Depending on what part of his life you're talking about, he was an imperialist or an isolationist, a supporter of the New Deal or an outright Nazi.)

As for how Morris Hillquit would have done as mayor of New York City, I think he would have faced a pretty unrelentingly uphill battle on a lot of fronts. Hillquit was running as an anti-war candidate at a time when the country as a whole was starting to shift in a pro-war and anti-socialist direction - which would ultimately see five Socialists ejected from the New York state legislature in 1920. (Note that it would take until 2020 for New York socialist electoral politics to reach its former high-water mark.) Mayor Hillquit might well have joined them as a casualty of the First Red Scare.

While I think that Hillquit's support for municipal ownership of the subway and other utilities, women's suffrage, and the Socialist Party's proposal for government food-purchasing to help deal with the crippling cost-of-living crisis would have been quite popular, I think he would have had a very hard time getting socialization of the subway through the Board of Alderman.

Whatever its temporary woes in mayoral or gubernatorial races, Tammany was always strongest in the legislative branch (in no small part because that's where the money was) - and Tammany's empire of corruption rested upon a foundation of bribes and kickbacks paid by private companies looking to get "franchises" (i.e, private monopolies) for water, gas, electricity, commuter rail, and subways. They would have fought tooth and nail to stop Hillquit from taking these utilities under public ownership and stopping their gravy train, so Hillquit would have had to win a majority on the Board of Aldermen as well.

So I think that Tammany would have tried to do to Hillquit the same thing they did with reform mayors like Seth Low and John P. Mitchel: wait him out. (Incidentally, this is what made Fiorello LaGuardia a terrifying enemy to Tammany Hall: he was the first reform mayor to ever get re-elected, which gave him the time he needed to push through a new charter that abolished the Board of Aldermen, essentially permanently crippling Tammany.)

Eric Adams

Source

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