Posted on 04/17/2005 11:00:34 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
NEW YORK - Time magazine has named what it calls the "five best big city mayors" in America.
The winners are: New York's Michael Bloomberg, Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Baltimore's Martin O'Malley, Chicago's Richard Daley and Denver's John Hickenlooper.
Gavin Newsom of San Francisco gets an honorable mention.
Time also designated three mayors as the nation's worst: Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick, San Diego's Dick Murphy and Philadelphia's John Street.
Neither list was ranked, and the mayors were listed in alphabetical order.
The lists appear in the issue of the magazine that hits newsstands tomorrow.
Bloomberg and Murphy are Republicans. All the others are Democrats.
Man, King Willie Herenton's gonna be p***ed he didn't make the list. Oh well!
Like duh...he's a Republican.
Were these people high on drugs when they made these choices ..??
I notice they are ALL DEMOCRATS - OF COURSE.
Am I the only one who noticed that all these mayors were in executive charge of ratholes?
I was born and raised in Philly .. long after 1952
I remember a time when one could walk the streets in daylight hours without fear of a crime
I can't say it's all Street's fault .. but he was a major player in the decline of Philly
"Gavin Newsom of San Francisco gets an honorable mention."
Wonderful. That's what we need - mayors who refuse to follow state law derived straight from the voters for their own personal agenda.
When Jeb Bush even considered interfering in something he felt strongly about (Terri Schiavo), the liberal media crucified him.
Time is a liberal rag whose opinion isn't worth squat.
I guess if youre white and goodlooking and a Democrat, youre 80 % there in lefty elite opinion.
Boston's Mumbles Menino gets my vote.
I think Howie Carr should have a separate web page with nothing but wav files of Mumbles mangling the English language and non sequiturs.
I still haven't found out how to get Howie's "Best of Mumbles" audio CDs.
Do you listen to Jayne Carrol? Love the 'PortaPotter' line.
Mayor Street and his staff are not good for Philadelphia. The positive note is that they have not firebombed a home from a chopper and burned down 60 homes. A Democrat can blow up an entire neighborhood have terrible schools and
have a high rate of crime and still be elected. The voters in Philadelphia always vote Democrat because that is exactly what they are told to do. We will not even mention the city wage tax and the exodus of business and workers.
I have to take issue with that. I've been a citizen of Philadelphia since my birth in 1974, and have lived in Cedar Park (University City), Mt. Airy, and Fox Chase. Most of Philadelphia is a very nice place to live. There are a few smaller areas that are total hell-holes, much like those found in almost any large city from time immemorial (Rome had and has its Trastevere and London its Cockney), and these appear to get stereotyped into the entire city when it comes to Philadelphia.
As to Mayor Street, he is a corrupt buffoon, which appears to be par for the course since Rizzo left office. However, I can't think of any actions hes taken that have been detrimental to the city, unlike Rendell or Goode or even Rizzo. Quite the contrary, my taxes and auto insurance have gone down under his tenure (and will drop further), while they are going up in the suburbs, and the city is definitely much cleaner since Rendell left office with the city finally taking up under Street its responsibility to demolish rickety abandoned buildings, clean-up vacant lots for redevelopment, and tow abandoned cars. Street has brought down the high-rise projects and has overseen the building of an amazing amount of attractive new housing in their place.
Much as I dislike to admit it, Street appears to have been a better overall Mayor for the city than anyone since Rizzo.
Lets just compare Rendell and Street, for example. Rendell gets lots of props for a supposed "rebirth" of Center City. Actual credit for this should go to Mayor Goode, who oversaw the building boom of new high-rise offices, and the commencement of the rebuilding of Market St. in Old City (5th to Front) and University City (32nd to 42nd). Anyone who has been here long enough remembers what a shambles the former was, and how the latter was nothing more than a strip of vacant lots from a failed urban renewal project. Somehow Rendell gets all the glory for this. Similarly in reverse, Rendell takes none of the blame for his saturation bombing of Overbrook Park, Kensginton, Elmwood, Juniata Park, Crescentville, and Oxford Circle with Section 8 housing in the 1993-1997 period. Philadelphia had had stable neighborhood racial/ethnic patterns and populations since the time of Rizzo and the white flight from Cedarbrook, West Oak Lane, St. Hugh's/Old Kensington, Eastwick and SW Philly. Rendell managed to singlehandedly start off another entire round of neighborhood degeneration, then hand-off the bag to Street to take the blame for the resulting problems. Similarly, while Mayors Goode and Street presided over times of fairly stable or slowly growing city employment despite recessions, Mayor Rendell oversaw a massive POST-recession loss of 150,000 jobs in the 1992-1995 period, many from his supposed glory area of a "rebuilt" Center City, watching major tenants flee for the suburban hills. It is difficult to actually find things that Mayor Rendell actually did to improve the city. Rebuild University City? Nope, that was an initiative of the Universities without much help from the city in the 1990's. Start off the Center City housing boom? No, that was a development after 1999. Rebuild North Broad up near Temple? Nope. The only big Rendell initatives I can actually think of was his "Avenue of the Arts" project and the white-elephant Convention Center.
Street on the other hand has actually done the things he promised to do, yet they don't seem to register as positive activities in the mind of his critics. He's gotten abandoned cars cleared off the street, had 100,000 cars confiscated from licenseless/insuranceless drivers, overseen the brining in of a number of new home developers - I don't recall any tracts of new homes being built in the city when I was younger since the failed Easwick redevelopment project - under Street, its not hard to drive around NE Philly and not notice a new housing development on some formerly unused parcel of land either underway or recently completed. There have been three major developements totalling around 200 new homes in my neighborhood of Fox Chase alone completed in the past 5 years or so, with another one under way as I type. I ride the train to work every day and have watched the progressive rebuilding of homes creeping north from Spring Garden to Berks St. by the PHA. And in case you already missed it, redevelopment is spilling north from Northern Liberties into of all places - Old Kensington. Soon, it will be too late to get in on the ground floor of real estate in Brewerytown too.
Street has no sense of shame or of PR, therefore he gets no credit for what he has done, and he is unashamed of being caught with his hand in the cookie jar (and not smart enough to have not been caught there in the first place). These things and his stupid "Brothers and Sisters" comment are what people unfortunately remember and then use to tar the city.
I'm very optimistic for the city if the people who are left living here look beyond the rhetoric and reporting to see what is actually going on. Unfortunately, I am not so confident in them doing so.
And no, I've yet to see a snow plow on my street in wintertime, but then, I've never seen a snow plow on any residential street whereever I've lived in Philadelphia in 30 years. In the 1983 blizzard, we sleded down the street for days because it was untouched by plow until the snow melted.
Shirley Franklin is a dunce!
Well, they have Dick Murphy right. Hope he's sufficiently humiliated so when he goes to jail he'll feel right at home.
San Antonio's mayor, Ed Garza, has to be among the worst. Four years of nothing but stagmation and corruption. Two council members pled guilty to federal bribery charges while Garza's been mayor. Plus Garza gave Jerry Jones half a million dollars to use the Alamodome for Dallas Cowboys training camp instead of making the Cowboys pay rent. All I can say is thank God we have strict term limits here.
Um, that's stagnation, not "stagmation"... oops
Interesting that you mentioned Trastevere as a "hell-hole" part of Rome. I studied in Rome in 2001 and my school was in Trastevere, so I spent a considerable amount of time there. I thought it was the best part of the city - historic, charming, not so touristy, etc. There were a few more gypsies and panhandlers in some parts of Trastevere than you'd find in other parts of Rome, but it wasn't much of a problem. The neighborhood seemed about as far from a hell-hole as you can get. Was it worse in the past?
Screw Bloomberg.......he concerns himself solely with a new Jets stadium and needs to be gotten rid of asap.
All of you people saying cities like Atlanta, New York, Boston , Chicago, San Diego etc. are nothing but rat hellholes are absolutely ridiculous. I could understand not wanting to live in an urban environment but finding no redeeming qualities in any of these cities is quite a stretch.
So Vera Katz is no longer mayor. Term limits?
If Bloomberg's a Republican then I'm Raquel Welch.
Where to start ?
Underfunding pensions
Lying on a bond sale.
Rolling over for any/all union demands
A real limp wrist PC accomodater - NO LEADERSHIP HERE !
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