NY Times October 23, 2013 Big Lead Aside, de Blasio Holds Less Tightly to Line By MICHAEL POWELL
Bill de Blasio, the toast of Haute Liberal New York, is on quite the golden roll. He attends tête-à-têtes with titans and was feted by a former secretary of state at a million-dollar fund-raising gala on Monday. He leads his Republican rival for the mayoralty by the horse-race equivalent of 20 lengths in the bell lap. So no particular tension attended as he took the stage at the WCBS-TV studio for his second round of debate fisticuffs. The man likely to be the next mayor, Mr. de Blasio now sometimes seems less suggestive of a Nation magazine star than a savvy, even cool-eyed pol. (It’s worth noting that he barred reporters from his fund-raiser and declined to make public a list of the guests.) Being mayor is an indisputably complicated business, and his feints in directions other than to the liberal North Star are intriguing to watch. Early on Tuesday night, he was asked about Major League Soccer’s attempt to place a Spaceship-Enterprise-size soccer stadium in the midst of Flushing Meadows, Queens’s densest and most heavily used park. He cleared his throat with some populist rumbling about city tax giveaways. Then he allowed that, well, perhaps, maybe, a pro soccer stadium might raise the money needed to give that dowdy dowager of a park a face-lift. It was left to Mr. Lhota to make the point that, perhaps fortunately for Flushing Meadows, appears to have won the day: Our urban parks are a precious patrimony, and in this densest of American cities it is rarely wise to auction off greensward. If Flushing Meadows-Corona Park needs money, and enough three-piece-suit-wearing worthies cannot be found to toss together a conservancy, a mayor should find a way to pay for that park. “It shouldn’t be in that park,” Mr. Lhota said of the stadium. “We don’t have enough park space in this city as it is.” Mr. de Blasio spoke as well of his opposition to the mayor’s green taxicab initiative. Yogi-like, he took Mr. Bloomberg’s environmentally positive initiative, one that was aimed at increasing both environmentally friendly taxis and the quality and quantity of service outside Manhattan, and tried to stand it on its head. Mr. de Blasio framed his opposition as driven by a concern about rights for boroughs outside Manhattan. So he suggested that taxi service was fine out there, a claim that disintegrated like a meteor slamming into the troposphere. As I listened to him, I could not help recalling — banish the mean thought! — that Mr. de Blasio raised $250,000 from the taxi industry. He also recently singled out the taxi and limousine commissioner, the innovative David S. Yassky, as the Bloomberg commissioner he would most quickly fire. “I want someone who will work with the drivers,” Mr. de Blasio said. Soon after, as Capital New York reported, the drivers’ union leader, Bhairavi Desai, issued a statement noting that the drivers had in fact greatly appreciated working with Mr. Yassky. But whatever. Tuesday’s debate turned as well to the city’s much reworked streetscape. Mr. de Blasio had once described the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, as a “radical” and spoke of himself as an “incrementalist”; now he has found religion on this question and promises to vigorously expand bike lanes. Tuesday night Mr. de Blasio was asked if he would retain the pedestrian plazas and chairs and tables in Times Square. He turned cagey. He suggested this was popular with tourists, but perhaps not with New Yorkers. “The jury is out for me on this issue,” he said. “I would keep an open mind.” This is a controversial issue. At a City Council debate in Homecrest/Sheepshead Bay earlier this week, residents worried that their neighborhoods would be overrun with bicyclists and come to resemble Copenhagen. And the Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz watched Tuesday’s debate and harrumphed on Twitter that only “statists” could love Times Square, with its pedestrian-friendly mall. As a former taxi driver, I recall no such halcyon days of free-flowing traffic. Where the two great traffic rivers, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, crossed, I recall mostly sitting in my cab and watching precious minutes tick off the meter. More to the point, as the writer and urbanist Nicole Gelinas noted on Tuesday night, Bloomberg administration reforms have cut traffic deaths by 30 percent. Mr. de Blasio finished the night with his by-now-standard appeal to make the city more progressive and more equal. The take-away should not be that he is a fake. He is not. But as his day approaches, his footsteps toward power are worth measuring. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @powellnyt _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
