Bookmark. I’m interested in what knowledgeable FReepers have to say. (I don’t know enough to comment on this.)
Take it from someone who knows and lived through it... Rudy deserves most of the credit, along with Bratton... He got rid of squeegee men, folks who committ smaller crimes, cleaned up the city, REFUSED to even meet that scumbag charlatan Sharpton - for 8 years...
Rudy was fantastic for NYC - a Godsend.M
This is nothing more than a hit piece on Rudy, and no doubt, his detractors will jump all over this... FR has become pathetic....
Blast Rudy for other things, but don't pile on a bunch of leftist lies.
I can tell you that folks I know, family and friends who either lived or worked in NYC or traveled there for business or shopping, theater, etc. saw a real improvement in the overall quality of life and civility in the city.
Under “General” Dinkins and Koch before him, things had gotten really, really bad and even native New Yorkers were shocked and disgusted - and that’s saying a lot.
The urban planning may have been in the works for a while but investors and tourists won’t come if they are going to be the victims of petty and not so petty crime.
What Giuliani brought to the table was zero tolerance policing. Meaning that petty thieves, panhandlers, squeegee kids (who were very aggressive panhandlers) were going to be arrested, were as before they were largely being ignored.
To his credit, he was a good mayor overall but he won’t get my vote for President. Now if he’d like to come to Baltimore and help us do something about our out of control violent crime and murder rate and get the aggressive panhandlers out of Harbor Place and other restaurant and entertainment areas…..
The deals that clean up Times Square were in the works since Koch.
The "revival" of Times Square took place over a period of more than a decade. Specifically, it began in the mid-1980s when the NYC Planning Commission formally approved the zoning changes for the "new" Times Square district. The area would have seen improvement much sooner than it did, but the stock market crash of 1987 and the real estate decline that occurred in the aftermath of the 1986 changes in the Federal tax code caused many institutional investors to scale back their exposure to new real estate projects.
The "official" start of the Times Square renaissance occurred when the first two major companies -- Disney and Bertelsmann AG -- signed deals to move into new buildings in the Times Square area. Both of these deals were signed in 1993 -- when David Dinkins was still mayor of New York City.