The three garbage collectors had neatly parked their truck and were en joying a beer break in a Second Avenue saloon. Suddenly they were summoned outside. There on the sidewalk stood the tall, angular figure of John Vliet Lindsay, the mayor of New York City.
The embarrassed men could have climbed the truck’s hoist and disap peared with the garbage, but Lindsay had no reproofs. “Come on,” he said simply. “Let’s clean up the city.” In his own way -which involves paying personal attention to New York’s trash as well as its panache -Republican John Lindsay has been trying to clean up his city since he took on the mayoralty just a year ago. The results are certainly not all that he hoped, nor all that the city expected. But the effort is quite a sight to see.
Like no other mayor since Fiorello La Guardia, Lindsay has displayed a style and vitality that seem to pump adrenaline into the city. He calls his administration a “wild show” and pur sues his quest for “visible government” by ranging the city day and night, turn ing up at fires and theater openings, dropping into police stations and art galleries, presiding at Waldorf banquets with bigwigs and at street-corner chaf-ferings with slum constituents. He has, in fact, an excess of both zeal and guts that has made him assault the city’s gargantuan problems with reckless disregard for his own standing. In his many tilts with the city’s plodding, 300,000-man bureaucracy and other reform-resistant interests, he has shattered many a lance. Yet his supply of new ones seems endless.
Political Heresy. Ever since he was hit by a subway strike barely five hours after he assumed office a year ago, Lindsay has been involved in an almost constant courtship of calamity. After the transit strike came a fare hike, and neither of them endeared him to voters. Faced with an empty treasury, he imposed a new city income tax and made the New York Stock Exchange consider exile across the Hudson because of an increased stock-transfer tax. His cherished civilian-controlled board to review complaints against the police was ignominiously defeated 2 to 1 at the polls in November. Even nature seemed to be conspiring against him last month when a canopy of poisonous smog mantled the city for three days.
The surprising thing is not that a majority of New Yorkers now tell pollsters that they disapprove of the mayor’s performance, but that only 51% of them feel that way. Unpopularity is, after all, an occupational hazard of New York mayors; even Lindsay’s bland predecessor, Robert Wagner, a Democrat in a city with a 7-to-2 Democratic registration edge, had 53% of the voters against him, according to a poll taken toward the end of his third term. The high hopes built up by a fresh new face made a letdown inevitable. Lindsay was, says Wagner, “the greatest mayor the city ever had -before he took office.”
Lindsay is the first to admit that the air and the streets are still dirty, the city’s sources of new income meager, the ghettos wallowing in misery. What makes him different is that he really believes that something can be done about it -practically a political heresy in cynical New York City. Chipper and resilient at 45, even if his fair hair has greyed a bit along with his image, Lindsay is often accused of being a cross between Don Quixote and a spinsterish schoolmarm because of his sometimes rigid righteousness and such of his fancies as “the Athenian idealization of public service.” Still, for all his high phrases and sometimes frenetic activity, Lindsay has made some significant strides in his effort to reorganize and govern the nation’s least governable city.
Demand for Involvement. One of the main features of his administration, from top to bottom, is the demand for involvement. Often he telephones city agencies without identifying himself and, if the voice on the other end is rude or indifferent, administers a mayoral dressing down. He can be snappish and imperious, exclaiming “I am the mayor!” or “Didn’t you come prepared?” His disdain for established procedure puts down bureaucrats and raises hackles, but it gets things done; when he found that it would take months to appropriate a few thousand dollars to install fire-hydrant sprinklers in slum neighborhoods, he personally raised the money among friends. During that potentially explosive summer, Lindsay’s in-the-street efforts in the face of incipient racial violence helped keep the slums much cooler than they would otherwise have been.
Though he inherited an ocean of red ink, Lindsay has begun to restore the city’s fiscal integrity with his new taxes. To balance a welfare-bloated budget of $4.5 billion -bigger than any other state budget except California’s and destined to swell still more next year -he is pressing the state for as much as $150 million in new aid, has opened a Washington office so that New York can get a larger slice of the federal pie. After the state legislature blocked his attempt to gather all the city’s transportation functions under a unified leadership, Lindsay achieved part of his goal with an executive order. He now aims to regroup most of the city’s 80-odd departments and bureaus into ten superagencies. Before bothering to obtain legislation, he has already created six such superdepartments, covering transportation, housing, health services, human resources, recreation and cultural affairs, and finance. This week formal legislation will be introduced in the city council to implement the reforms fully. Other controversial proposals are ahatching.
Ranging Search. To lead his reorganized administration, Lindsay has enlisted a team of what he calls “great urbanists” as his aides. He has largely ignored the tradition -honored even by Reformer La Guardia -of divvying most of the spoils among local politicos, has ranged the nation in search of talented men. Despite complaints from the press about his free hand, he pays them salaries that go above $30,000, an incentive to talent that few big cities offer. Among those who have answered Lindsay’s call: » Mitchell Sviridoff, 47, who made New Haven’s antipoverty program famous well before the federal program began and became president of the National Association of Community Development. He put together New York City’s new human-resources administration and last week was sworn in as its first director.
» Police Commissioner Howard Leary, 55, a career cop with a law degree who rose to head Philadelphia’s police force before being asked to New York by Lindsay. Leary has displayed not only the qualities of an efficient administrator but also a badly needed talent for improving police relations with Negroes and Puerto Ricans. » Corporation Counsel J. Lee Rankin, 59, a Nebraskan who served as U.S. Solicitor General in the Eisenhower Administration and later as chief counsel of the Warren commission. » Budget Director Frederick O’Reilly Hayes, 43, holder of a Harvard master’s degree in public administration, who served as chief examiner for housing programs in the Federal Budget Bureau and deputy director of the community action program in the Office of Economic Opportunity. » Thomas Hoving, 35, a New Yorker with a Princeton Ph.D. (in art history), who was a museum curator before becoming grand vizier of “fun city.” Hoving has brought life and imagination to the park system as parks commissioner, recently took on the post of city director of cultural and recreational affairs to try to do the same on a wider scale.
All on the Doorstep. Not all the talent in the world, of course, can solve some of Lindsay’s problems. Despite a variety of economy and efficiency measures, Lindsay faces another deficit threat next year, and he admits that local taxation has gone “almost to the point of no return.” Lindsay believes that the city’s agony of purse and soul begins at the ghettos’ doorstep; while New York’s operating budget has risen 150% in ten years, the cost of social-welfare services has gone up 222%. Lindsay hopes to relieve the mounting burden by changing the basic approach of public welfare services from merely dispensing cash to emphasizing vocational training and family planning.
While worrying about the plight of the ghetto, Lindsay also gives some hope to the city’s despairing -and departing -middle class and its huge reservoir of talent. His interest and participation in cultural activities and his just plain hijinks -capering on the Manhattan Bridge with a film crew to encourage motion-picture production in the city or playing touch football in Central Park -are reviving the city’s ability to enjoy itself. If his energy and courage hold out, Lindsay may just manage to make New York City more livable as well as more governable.
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