The impeccable nytimes City Room blog recently wrote about a truly horrendous snowstorm of 1969, killing 42 and injuring 288. I’m still trying to figure out how that happens. Falling trees? Slipping on ice? New Yorkers snowed-in, starve to death because they can’t eat out?
My guess: Lack of heat=hypothermia? Impassable streets=zero medical attention?
Anyway, then Mayor of the New York City John V. Lindsay failed abysmally in snow removal, providing an abject lesson for most of his political ilk:
There were no buses, taxicabs or delivery vehicles, and no trash or garbage collection for days. “As far as getting to the United Nations is concerned, I may as well be in the Alps,” Dr. Bunche wrote. “This is a shameful performance by the great city of New York, which should certainly condone no second-class borough.”
Mr. Lindsay traveled to Queens, but his visit was not well-received. His limousine could not make its way through Rego Park, and even in a four-wheel-drive truck, he had trouble getting around. In Kew Gardens Hills, the mayor was booed; one woman screamed, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” In Fresh Meadows, a woman told the mayor, “Get away, you bum.”
Mr. Lindsay’s predecessor, Robert F. Wagner, had spent an enormous amount during the last major blizzard, in 1961, but the Lindsay administration was wary of going over budget. And there were rumors that sanitation workers — still angry about the Lindsay administration’s heavy-handed actions during their strike in 1968 — had deliberately ignoring Queens to sabotage the mayor.
Dr. Cannato reveals a fascinating episode. During the mayor’s walk through Fresh Meadows, a woman called him “a wonderful man,” prompting the mayor to respond, “And you’re a wonderful woman, not like those fat Jewish broads up there,” pointing to women in a nearby building who had criticized him.
The comment was recorded on tape, but The New York Times, The Associated Press and WNEW radio declined to run with the story.
Hmm… wonder what the reasoning was there.
A number of other mayors have followed Linday’s diastrous lead (though I don’t think you can really say that Lindsay lost re-election because of this one event… the blogpost doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, but it’s a fine story, even as it folds back in on itself… either one too many or one too few rewrites with this one.)
O, Proud District! You’d never fail us like Lindsay did Queens? Right?
And then there was Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. of Washington, who somehow survived his mishaps with bad weather. In 1987, Mr. Barry was in southern California attending the Super Bowl — getting a manicure and playing tennis at the Beverly Hills Hilton — when a winter storm buried the District of Columbia. The nation’s capital became the butt of ridicule. In 1996, Mr. Barry — who was elected to a fourth, nonconsecutive term in 1994 after serving a federal sentence on cocaine possession charges — was excoriated by residents after it took nearly a week to clear the streets of snow.
First he had to clear the snow out of his nose. ZING!