Snow Makes the Mayor

The ghost of John Lindsay settles over Mike Bloomberg like a soft, two-foot deep snowfall.

New York had its first big snowstorm of the season last weekend. The rituals of snowstorms in this city fascinate me: people sledding and skiing on streets, the lakes that form on sidewalk corners, the peace that engulfs the noisy streets, and most of all, how fast the mayor gets on television to say, “The snowplows are on the streets!!! The streets will be cleared!!!”

The first vivid snowstorm memory of my childhood was the time we were stranded at my grandmother’s house in the Bronx for a week because our forest green VW bug was buried in a snowdrift on Esplanade and the streets weren’t plowed.

The first elected official in my memory was NYC Mayor John Lindsay. Because that was the guy my father and grandfather spent a week cursing out because those streets weren’t plowed.

And if you want to know why everyone in New York makes a four-alarm media alert for every small and mid-range snowstorm that breaches the city limits, here’s the story. For once, in the sixties, I can say, I was there. One month shy of my sixth birthday, I lived one of the great truths of Gotham politics. Forget the crime rate, the schools, the clean streets, the economy, forget it all...

Snow makes the Mayor.

Hey, is this our car? Bronx street, Blizzard of '69

Saturday morning, February 8, 1969. My mom and dad and my brother Chris and I pile into the Bug and head for Grandma and Grandpa’s, 1953 Tomlinson Ave, Morris Park, the Bronx. Going to G&G’s was always a big deal, you never knew what present they had waiting or what spare change they would pump into your hand. So Chris, who was 4, and I were already excited.

Light snow was predicted. My dad could deal. The city thought it could, too.

By the end of the weekend, 25 inches had fallen on the city. Fallen might not be the right word. Dumped in one fell swoop might be more like it.

Manhattan loved John Lindsay. He had a patrician grace and an air of elegance. “He is fresh and everyone else is tired,” wrote the great Murray Kempton about Lindsay when he first ran for mayor in 1965. There were race riots in Newark and a dozen other cities, but New York stayed quiet. Many credited Lindsay’s ability to reach across the races. He lured the best and the brightest into public service.

But he was the bane of the white working class (in other words, my parents and grandparents). They concluded that John Lindsay didn’t give a damn about them. He may have saved the city from race riots. But could he get the streets plowed?

The snow started on Saturday, when we were at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. Grandma and Mom made hot chocolate. We watched the snow fall. On Sunday it was still snowing, we went out and made a snowman. On Monday it was still snowing a little, Chris and I had a snowball fight in Grandpa’s driveway.

And the snowplows never came. The VW Bug was going nowhere. And so were we.

My mother called the school to say we were snowed in and wouldn’t be getting there for a couple of days.

I thought all snowstorms are like this.

My father and grandfather, who both had to walk to work, sat at the dining room table and cursed John Lindsay until there was no breath left in them. Then they went to sleep, so they could gather their energies to curse him out all over again the next day.

I thought all politicians were like this.

It was Wednesday before the plows moved. Manhattan was moving just fine. Manhattan had subways. The boroughs didn’t have subways. So it was just another case of John Lindsay screwing the boros over the downtown crowd.

Was it Lindsay’s fault that people were trapped for days? Probably not. For one thing, the weather forecast was for light snow. Wrong. So everyone was caught off guard. It was also a very strange storm. Not only did the city get more snow than it expected, it got it real fast. If 25 inches fell, it seemed like 20 fell in one two-hour period Saturday night. So the snowplows themselves were snowed in. The city hired 10,000 shovelers to shovel out the plows. As the Times said, “Schools were closed, drivers were stranded in cars and travelers were marooned at airports. New Yorkers were ready to be dug out, but the city wasn’t ready to dig.”

The sanitation guys claimed that the streets weren’t cleared, they couldn’t get to work. Sure, they didn’t live in Manhattan. The Sanitation Commissioner swore for years that the workers dawdled in their response to make the mayor look bad. If they did, it worked.

Lindsay had walked the streets of Harlem and Bed-Stuy when the police were sure riots would break out. He stood eye-to-eye, without bodyguards, on hot nights, with some very angry men and calmed them down. And the city didn’t burn. He has walked streets piled with trash when the sani guys went on strike. So he decided to walk through Ozone Park, Queens, and face it down. The people in Ozone Park were just angry that he found a way to drive there when they couldn’t move their cars. They thought he had his nerve walking around their block. He tried to talk. They turned their backs. He tried to listen. They screamed. He got back in his black mayoral limo and drove back to Manhattan. They yelled him right off the block.

The Lindsay charm fails to move Ozone Park.

He couldn’t win, and that’s a bad thing for a politician.

We’ve had five mayors since Lindsay left in 1973. And believe me, every one – from Abe Beame and Ed Koch and Dave Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg -knows one basic truth. If there’s snow in the forecast, you better have the machines on the street. And to this day, my friends in the sani department tell me, Ozone Park gets plowed first.

John Lindsay actually won re-election later that year of 1969. It was the wackiest election not held in Florida. And in one of his campaign ads, he looked right into the camera and admitted he screwed up the reaction to the snowstorm. The people in New York (enough of them, anyway) bought it. But some never forgot. Lindsay died in 2000. I called my dad that day and said, “Guess what?” His first reaction? “That sonofabitch, there better not be any blizzards in Heaven or God’s going nowhere.”

Mayor Bloomberg and his sani commishioner
reassure Ozone Park.