The former mayor of New York City, John V. Lindsay was a charismatic and unforgettable figure on the political scene of Gotham. Pages for offline publishers more information He went from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in 1971 and launched a brief and unsuccessful candidacy for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, as well as for the 1980 Democratic nomination for senator from New York. In 1965, Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City as a Republican with the support of the New York Liberal Party in a three-way race.
He defeated Democratic mayoral candidate Abraham D. Beame, then Municipal Comptroller, as well as the founder of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr. The unofficial campaign motto, taken from a column by Murray Kempton, was “He's fresh and everyone else is tired.”.
On his first day as mayor, January 1, 1966, the United States Transportation Workers Union, led by Mike Quill, closed the city with the total interruption of subway and bus service. As New Yorkers were enduring the public transportation strike, Lindsay commented, “I still think it's a fun city,” and walked six kilometers from her hotel room to City Hall in a gesture to show it. Dick Schaap, then a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, popularized the term in an article entitled Fun City. In the article, Schaap sardonically noted that it wasn't.
The summer of 1971 marked the beginning of another devastating strike, as more than 8,000 workers belonging to the AFSCME District Council 37 were out of work for two days. The strikers included the operators of the city's drawbridges and wastewater treatment plants. Drawbridges over the Harlem River were blocked in the elevated position, preventing car travel to Manhattan, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated wastewater flowed into local waterways. Journalist Robert McFadden made an alternative assessment, who said that by 1973, his last year in office, Mr.
Lindsay had become a more experienced and pragmatic mayor. McFadden also credited him with reducing racial tensions, leading to preventing the riots that devastated Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark and other cities. Attempting to return to politics in 1980, Lindsay made a risky bet for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. UU.
Senator from New York, and finished third. He was also active in charities in New York City, served on the board of directors of the Association for a Better New York and was president of the Lincoln Center Theater. After her death, the New York Times credited Lindsay with an important role in the rejuvenation of the theater. He appeared on a poster with Governor Rockefeller at the inauguration of the former World Trade Center, in the city history section of the Museum of the City of New York, on Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.
Back in New York City, Lindsay met his future wife, Mary Anne Harrison (1926-2000), at the wedding of Nancy Walker Bush (daughter of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush and sister of future President George Herbert Walker Bush and aunt of George W. In 1968, in an attempt to decentralize the city's school system, Lindsay granted three local city school boards full control over their schools, in an effort to allow communities to have more say in their schools. Quill, had danced a pas de deux every other New Year's Eve with Mayor Wagner, threatening a strike for weeks with a tyrannical brogue, and then arrived at 11 o'clock with conditions that would allow him — and the city — to win each one. The scenes, captured on national television, conveyed the message that the mayor of New York was indifferent to the middle class.
Brownell helped him get a job at the New York law firm Webster, Sheffield & Chrystie, and start moving in the right Republican circles. Lindsay vetoed the budget approved by the city council for the fiscal year 1967-1967, but her veto was overturned by the city council. Lindsay tried to reduce and balance the city's budget in 1971 by laying off 2,800 people, and threatened to lay off more than 90,000 people unless the city received aid from the state government, reducing funding and increasing taxes. In articles by David Burnham in The New York Times, officials argued that businessmen, gamblers and drug traffickers were paying bribes to many officers to overlook crimes, and that senior officials and even some senior city officials had failed to act on evidence of corruption.
As New Yorkers of his time remember, he created Kennedy-style enthusiasm by bringing brilliant young people of ingenuity, zeal and imagination to the city government. Comptroller Abraham Beame stated that Lindsay had less control over budget spending than any other mayor of New York City and criticized Lindsay's budget cuts. On September 13, 1973, Mayor Lindsay traveled to Washington to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about his wonderful new program, and I accepted it. .
