A Mayor for All Cities

New Yorkers didn’t need the national media to dub Rudy Giuliani “America’s mayor” to believe our mayor was of outsize importance. We’ve always presumed that our mayor is the only one who really matters—a skyscraping figure who sets urban policy not just for the city but the nation, and stands above governors and senators at the altitude of the president.

It has been observed that in New York City we have a grand tradition of electing mayors who are reflections of their times: rakish Jimmy Walker in the Roaring Twenties, scrappy Fiorello La Guardia during the Depression, steady Robert Wagner during the sober Fifties, and so on. But more accurately, we expect out mayors not to be a product of their age but an embodiment of it—a prism through which our city’s identity shines and the rest of world can see exactly what we’re made of.

My father used to say to me that there was no danger of ever being perceived as too tough when running for mayor of New York—indeed, we demand a mayor as rough and tumble as our city. We want to feel that we can walk up to the mayor on the subway, curse him out, and that he’ll give it right back to us—and more.

We also embrace eccentricity in our mayors. It suits us just fine that our mayors are brash and quirky, and proud of it—just like a New Yorker is supposed to be. That’s probably the reason why no elected mayor in our city’s history has ever attained higher office. If you can make it here, it appears, you’re too weird for everywhere else.

When John Lindsay called the city’s mayoralty “the second hardest job in America,” no New Yorker had any doubts that the claim was true— except those who thought it was an understatement. Though we have no tolerance for failure and our expectations are impossibly great, so too is the affection we heap upon our mayors who live up to them. We love our best mayors as we love our city—with fierce pride and absolute certainty.

Already a cavalcade of commentators have conjectured what kind of mayor Bill de Blasio will be, and what kind of era he will come to epitomize, but the truth is that no one knows.

Right now, rather than spinning our wheels in spurious prognostication, we are better served by simply wishing Mayor de Blasio well, for as the incarnation of our city in the years ahead, his triumphs will belong to all of us, just as we will all bear the weight of his failures. So let us root for the mayor, root for New York, and hope that the next chapter in our city’s remarkable history is a Golden Age.