The Last Days of New York: a reporter's true tale

Introduction:

Folly and Collapse

NEW YORK CITY WAS reeling in the summer of 2020. Riots had broken out after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May. Violent mobs targeted police officers, and more than 450 cops were injured by anarchists and Black Lives Matter protestors. Hundreds of New York Police Department (NYPD) vehicles were torched, and there were multiple attempts to firebomb occupied police cars. Hundreds of stores were looted of millions of dollars of goods. Unpermitted marches blocking traffic went on almost continuously.

In late June, hundreds of anti-police demonstrators occupied City Hall Park, between City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge, and pledged not to leave until the city defunded the NYPD in the forthcoming budget. The protestors indicated clearly that they wanted the existing police force disbanded and replaced by community-based conflict-resolution workers. Following passage of the budget, which shifted $1 billion in funding from the NYPD and cut recruitment, the occupiers refused to leave. Their camp turned the plaza next to City Hall into a shantytown, with violence, rampant harassment of local residents, and defacement of public and private property.

The month of July saw a shocking rise in violent crime across New York City. The number of shootings, compared with the same period the previous year, increased by 177 percent; the number of murders rose by 59 percent. Burglary, grand larceny, and auto theft were also up significantly. Neighborhoods around the city experienced a spike in street harassment and random assaults; thieves brazenly walked around luxury stores and walked out with whatever they wanted. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of residents were moving out or making plans to, thousands of businesses were closing their doors permanently, and the city was facing a $10 billion budget hole as tax revenue dried up.

In response to this unfolding inexorable disaster, Mayor Bill de Blasio made a bold move. On the morning of July 9, the mayor, joined by his wife, Al Sharpton, and a few dozen supporters, painted Black Lives Matter in giant letters on Fifth Avenue, in front of Trump Tower and television cameras. This is such an important moment for our city, announced de Blasio. This is something we need to do for New York City, here and all over. The mayor exulted, We are liberating Fifth Avenue! We are uplifting Fifth Avenue! Plans were set to paint similar street murals in every borough to celebrate the lost history that black people built Fifth Avenue, built New York City, built America. They gave people the right to have . . . luxury.

Later that same day, after helping paint the letter L, de Blasio went on CNN to discuss with Wolf Blitzer the cancellation of all public events for the foreseeable future, because of the pandemic.

So, no, we don’t need big events any time soon. We’ve had a lot of success making New York City healthier. We’ve got to really stick to that plan . . . like street fairs. It means, you know, big outdoor concerts, and it means things like parades, you know, things that here in this city can mean not just thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. It’s just not time for that now.

Blitzer then asked de Blasio the very question that many New Yorkers—who had spent the previous four months locked in their apartments, avoiding friends and family, missing graduations and proms, unable to attend the deaths or funerals of their loved ones—were asking: What about protests? If people want to march down Fifth Avenue, are they going to be allowed to do so?

The mayor did not miss a beat, segueing directly into the widely expressed contention that some mass gatherings—driven by the demand for racial justice—matter more than others and are therefore exempt from pandemic-related restrictions.

Look, Wolf, this is always an area of real sensitivity. If you’re just talking about health, we would always say, hey, folks, you know, stay home if you can. But we understand that this moment in history people are talking about the need for historic changes. I mean, today, in New York City, you know, recognizing the power and the meaning of the message Black Lives Matter, which we did in front of Trump Tower today—this is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that, but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we’re used to, the parades, the fairs, we just can’t have that while we’re focusing on health right now.

New Yorkers grew accustomed to hearing that despite lockdown and quarantine orders, it was okay to hold marches and rallies, blocking traffic while angrily screaming, because it was demanded by the arc of history. De Blasio repeated this sentiment whenever he was asked about the evident double standard. We are seeing a national historic moment of pain and anguish, and a deep cry for help and a deep cry for change. It is not your everyday situation, he told a reporter in June, a week after reports emerged that his own daughter Chiara had been arrested at a violent protest on lower Broadway, where police were attacked.

I love my daughter deeply, he told the world after her mugshot—deranged and wild-eyed, mohawked, with her earlobes gauged out—was published.

I honor her. She is such a good human being. She only wants to do good in the world. She wants to see a better and more peaceful world. She believes a lot of change is needed. I’m proud of her that she cares so much and she was willing to go out there and do something about it.

In her case, doing something about it meant joining a mob throwing bottles at cops.

It was hard not to feel that New York City underwent a kind of phase shift in that period: a fundamental transformation in kind that altered the city at the molecular level, more or less permanently. The city was, factually, collapsing. Plainly, the economic pain was going to be deep. The subways had been in major trouble before the pandemic; now, the very continuation of regular service was in serious question. New York City’s tourism sector, which hosted 65 million visitors in 2019, cratered; hundreds of thousands of jobs related to hospitality, entertainment, and shopping disappeared.

Morally, New York took on a revolutionary aspect in which agents of chaos and preachers of despair were touted as noble heroes, peace officers—the majority of whom are nonwhite—were derided as racist killers, and average residents were commanded to chant the slogans of the new Red Guard or face reprisal as fascists because silence equals violence, whereas violence, it seems, equals protected speech. Echoing their colleagues around the country, local politicians and reporters lavishly praised violent mobs as the heirs of Martin Luther King and the acolytes of Gandhi, while they analyzed videos of police engagements with Zapruder-like intensity, hunting for violations of the civil rights of raving anarchists puncturing tires and clubbing cops on the back of the head in the middle of a scrum.

Anyone who could, left. Anyone who couldn’t, cowered. To quell nighttime looting, the mayor declared an 8 p.m. curfew; in response, the public advocate—who holds a citywide position that assumes control in the event the mayor is indisposed—the speaker of the city council, and a clutch of other prominent officials knelt in Times Square at 8:01 p.m. to defy the principle of public order. This crew blustered that de Blasio’s belated curfew was ill-advised, probably illegal, and certainly inflammatory. State senator and former city comptroller John Liu said the curfew, which did dampen violence and destruction, was like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Councilman Mark Levine, chairman of the council’s Health Committee, condemned the police, tweeting, NYPD, your use of tear gas is increasing COVID-19 risk, because it (1) makes the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection, (2) exacerbates existing inflammation, (3) makes people cough. So stop. The NYPD did not use tear gas prior to this tweet, nor after it; Levine did not retract or correct his statement.

New Yorkers were thus forced to endure an absurd, self-serving spectacle, in which Mayor de Blasio accepted the role of the bad guy, supposedly imposing ferocious police state tactics upon placid practitioners of civil disobedience, while the lesser officials, all of whom were seeking reelection or higher office, pretended that they were fighting against fascism. This was not the first iteration of this circus-style dynamic, which both sides regularly exploited for their own purposes. Meanwhile, the city roiled.

When in the future people ask how New York City fell to pieces, they can be told—in the words of Hemingway—gradually, then suddenly. New Yorkers awoke from a slumber of ease and prosperity to discover not only that their glorious city was unprepared for crisis but also that the underpinnings of its fortune had been gutted.

Faced with a global pandemic of world-historical proportions, New York’s leadership dithered, offering contradictory, unscientific, and meaningless advice. The city and state became the world’s epicenter of infection and death. The protests, riots, and looting that followed the death of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement—cheered on and celebrated by the media and political class—accelerated the crash of confidence that New York City needed to rebound quickly from the economic disaster.

Bill de Blasio’s failure to manage the outbreak of COVID-19 is well established. But what is less well understood is how poorly he managed the city up to the point of the pandemic and how his mismanagement left New York City vulnerable to the social, economic, and cultural shocks that have leveled its confidence and brought into question its capacity to absorb the creative energies of the world and reflect them back in the form of opportunity and wealth, as it has done for hundreds of years. At a moment when socialist currents are stirring throughout America, Bill de Blasio’s term in office in New York City is a demonstration of what those impulses actually produce: debt, decay, and bloat.

1

Worst Mayor Ever

PEOPLE LIKE TO SAY that de Blasio is the worst mayor in New York City history. And there’s a good case to be made for it. One could argue that Abe Beame (mayor from 1974 to1977) was worse because it was under him that New York essentially went into receivership—but he inherited a dysfunctional city government that was addicted to social spending. David Dinkins (mayor from 1990 to 1993) is definitely in the running because it was under him that murders peaked at over 2,000 annually—but Dinkins took over a city in the throes of the crack wars.

De Blasio, in contrast, inherited a city that was in good working order in 2014. New York City had emerged from the Great Recession much more quickly than other cities. Tax revenue was pouring in. The streets were safe, with crime low and trending lower. Tourism was booming as New York enjoyed a stellar international reputation. Immigrants continued to flock here from overseas, and so did domestic migrants. The population hit 8 million in 2000 and added another 170,000 over the next decade.

So, in a sense, there wasn’t much demanded of de Blasio and the other Progressive Democrats—call their ascendency the Prog—who rose to control of New York City in the election of 2013. The ship of state was steady; all they had to do was keep it from taking on water. But de Blasio and the Progressives had campaigned as revolutionaries whose goal was nothing short of the elimination of economic inequality. De Blasio’s campaign statement insisted that 400,000 millionaires call New York home, while nearly half of our neighbors live at or near the poverty line. Our middle class isn’t just shrinking; it’s in danger of vanishing altogether. While it’s true that New York is legendarily a tough place to make it, the city’s poverty rate is actually lower than that of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, or Philadelphia, not to mention Detroit or Dallas, and its median income runs well ahead of most large cities. The precept that inequality equals misery simply isn’t true.

Economic inequality in New York City, which is majority nonwhite, with a large immigrant population, is easily cast in terms of race, and de Blasio’s Two Cities narrative was readily adaptable to the politics of racial resentment. It is common for advocates to talk about race as a proxy for various social ills. Coming to office in the middle of Obama’s second term, which was marked by increasing racial consciousness and hostility, de Blasio made every policy in New York—education, housing, health, transit, park access, statues and monuments, environmental sustainability, sanitation infrastructure—about the rectification of racial grievances. Structural economic inequality, which is after all impossible for a municipal official to do much about, gave way to demands for racial equity, which are amenable to superficial measures and symbolic gestures. Opportunity falls away as a goal in favor of endless harping about unequal outcomes.

Thus, useless, pointless spectacles like painting Black Lives Matter on Fifth Avenue, accompanied by highfalutin pontification, are the defining characteristic of the de Blasio years, infecting all levels of New York City government and politics. Easy to do, low cost, forgettable. As his years in office came to their end, New York was less safe, less prosperous, and certainly more divided than it was when he entered City Hall. This makes a powerful argument for his mayoralty as a low point in the history of New York City’s executive governance.

It is not the thesis of this book that Bill de Blasio was uniquely responsible for destroying New York. That would be an unfair caricature, and it would also endow de Blasio with a puissance that he frankly does not possess. What this book does detail is how an equity-oriented social ideology yoked to a big-city political machine, fueled by contributions from the real estate industry and public-sector unions recirculating tax revenue, funneled through a corrosive consultant class and supporting an unelected but hugely powerful nonprofit advocacy apparatus, rotted out the foundations of New York City to the point that it could not sustain itself against collapse when adverse winds began to blow.

Bill de Blasio is a focus of this book because he presided at the tipping point, but like any fulcrum, he has no moment. No one would ascribe forcefulness or gravity to de Blasio: he was a functionary around whom collapse occurred. The Great Man theory of history distinctly does not pertain here; this book is about a political culture of which Bill de Blasio was flower, fruit, and fragrance. On the other hand, of course, he’s the guy who made the speeches, stood in front of the cameras, and wielded the paint roller that liberated Fifth Avenue. So we can’t write a history of the de Blasio years without talking at least a little about the man named Bill de Blasio. What follows is a kind of ideological biography, along with a pen portrait of some aspects of his personality.

••••••••••

Warren Wilhelm, Jr., aka Bill de Blasio, was born in 1961 as the third son to Warren and Maria (née de Blasio) Wilhelm, both native New Yorkers; he was raised in Boston. His parents were in their midforties at the time of his birth, somewhat unusual for that era; their advanced ages meant that they had reached adulthood during the Great Depression and were familiar with its widespread economic privation. Bill de Blasio speaks constantly about that era and the stories he was told about it by older relatives, from whom he imbibed the salvific mythology of FDR’s New Deal. It is no exaggeration to say that de Blasio talks about the New Deal and the promise of expansive government to answer societal problems more frequently than he makes any other historical or cultural reference. It’s his lodestar.

De Blasio frequently references his mother’s family, who emigrated to the United States from Italy early in the twentieth century. In his 2015 State of the City speech he stressed the humble roots of his grandmother and her sister, who started an embroidery company out of their apartment in 1910. She did not stumble upon success through luck or charm; she forged it with hard work and raw grit, he said.

The story is somewhat more complex; by 1915, his grandmother and her sister had turned their house at 205 East 17th Street into a factory where no fewer than 34 people were working. According to contemporary coverage in the New York Times, his great aunt Imperior was arrested on charges of violating regulations relating to smoking and safety appliances. The arrest came as a result of an extensive campaign against fire hazards in the factories of the city; Imperior pled guilty to having an inadequate fire alarm apparatus. In the period following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 garment workers were killed, factory labor conditions and fire prevention had become major issues in New York City. De Blasio has chosen, understandably, not to emphasize his family’s sweatshop-owning history when he makes speeches about the exploitation of immigrant workers.

De Blasio’s father’s family is also interesting, though he almost never mentions it. His grandfather, Donald Wilhelm, came from Ohio, graduated from Harvard, and was a published author. He interviewed former President William Howard Taft for the New York Times, knew Theodore Roosevelt, and was Herbert Hoover’s personal secretary. De Blasio’s uncle, Donald Wilhelm, Jr., was an intimate of the Shah of Iran and apparently ghostwrote his memoir; the Shah thanks him lavishly in the Preface and calls him a personal friend as well as a friend of my country.

It seems clear that the Wilhelms had ties to the intelligence establishment and possibly the CIA. Certainly the Shah came to power through a CIA-backed coup shortly before de Blasio’s uncle helped him with his book. And de Blasio’s father worked for various organizations, such as the Russian Research Center at Harvard, that are known CIA front groups.

De Blasio’s parents attended elite colleges, Smith and Yale, at the height of the Depression, which indicates something about their class position, or at least their economic security. They met while working at Time magazine in the late thirties. His father lost a leg fighting in the Pacific during World War II and married Maria de Blasio upon his demobilization. After the war, the couple’s loyalty came into question when they were seeking federal employment; oddly enough, Maria de Blasio worked under Whittaker Chambers at Time, and he apparently reported her as insufficiently patriotic. (Chambers was a former communist and Soviet spy who broke with the party during the great purges of 1938.)

Their local Loyalty Board investigated the de Blasios and determined that the couple was not necessarily disloyal but nevertheless sympathetic to Communism. Maria de Blasio’s postwar membership in the Progressive Citizens of America, a Communist Party front group denounced by Eleanor Roosevelt and Arthur Schlesinger, probably didn’t help. Warren Wilhelm was denied access to confidential documents, and his career as an intelligence analyst was derailed.

The couple divorced when young Bill de Blasio was eight, and his father, dying of lung cancer, shot himself in a Connecticut motel room ten years later. These traumatic events clearly complicated de Blasio’s relationship to his father’s memory, as evidenced by his rejection of his birth name. Reportedly always called Bill anyway, de Blasio underwent a series of official name changes, first to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm in 1983 and then to Bill de Blasio in 2002, interspersed with a number of variations, including Bill Wilhelm in a 1983 Times article about recent college graduates, and William Wilhelm in 1990.

De Blasio has given a number of reasons for changing his name. Speaking to a Harlem church audience in 2016, he credited Malcolm X’s Autobiography as his inspiration, because he

felt that my mother’s side of the family was the family that brought me up, and I wanted to honor that. I wanted to connect myself to that more deeply. And it was my true self. And—you know—I think there was something about the autobiography that just—it was one of those lightning bolt moments that made me think we all have to find our own definition.

In any case, unshackling himself from his patriarchal slave name, cynics might note, didn’t hurt him as he eyed a political future in Brooklyn, where an Italian surname would be a plus, and the Prussian resonances of Wilhelm a distinct minus, given the borough’s demographics.

Earning a full scholarship, de Blasio went to New York University in Greenwich Village, where he engaged in campus politics and studied political science. After graduation, he won a Truman Scholarship and used it to get a master’s degree in Latin American politics at Columbia. In 1987, inspired by the Central American solidarity movement, he took a job at the Maryland-based Quixote Center, a pro-Sandinista social justice organization run by a renegade Jesuit priest.

For leftists in the Reagan era, the fight between the revolutionary communist Nicaraguan government led by Daniel Ortega and the American-backed Contras had a romantic appeal comparable to the Spanish Republican cause in the 1930s and similarly inspired thousands of sympathizers to action. Along with the fight against apartheid, solidarity with the plight of Central American peasants was the major leftist cause of the 1980s.

In 1989, de Blasio went to Nicaragua to distribute supplies blocked by an American embargo against the Sandinista government. His two weeks in the beating heart of world socialism did not disappoint the young radical, who described to the New York Times in 2013 an epiphany he had while working in a health clinic