John Lindsay

Lindsay speaking at City Hall in January 1966

On his first day as mayor, January 1, 1966, the Transport Workers Union of America, led by Mike Quill shut down the city with a complete halt of subway and bus service. As New Yorkers endured the transit strike, Lindsay remarked, "I still think it's a fun city," and walked four miles (6 km) from his hotel room to City Hall in a gesture to show it.[12] Dick Schaap, then a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, popularized the term in an article titled Fun City.[12][13] In the article, Schaap sardonically pointed out that it wasn't.[12][13]

In 1966 the settlement terms of the transit strike, combined with increased welfare costs and general economic decline, forced Lindsay to lobby the New York State legislature for a new municipal income tax and higher water rates for city residents, plus a new commuter tax for people who worked in the city but resided elsewhere.

The transit strike was the first of many labor struggles. In 1968, in an attempt to decentralize the city's school system, Lindsay granted three local school boards in the city complete control over their schools, in an effort to allow communities to have more of a say in their schools. The city's teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, however, saw the breakup as a way of union busting, as a decentralized school system would force the union to negotiate with 33 separate school boards rather than with one centralized body. As a result, in May 1968 several teachers working in schools located in the neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, one of the neighborhoods where the decentralization was being tested, were fired from their jobs by the community-run school board. The UFT demanded the reinstatement of the dismissed teachers, citing that the teachers had been fired without due process. When their demands were ignored, the UFT called the first of three strikes, leading ultimately to a protracted citywide teachers' strike that stretched over a seven-month period between May and November.[14] The strike was tinged with racial and anti-Semitic overtones, pitting black and Puerto Rican parents against Jewish teachers and supervisors.[15] Many thought the mayor had made a bad situation worse by taking sides against the teachers.[15] The episode left a legacy of tensions between blacks and Jews that went on for years,[1] and Lindsay called it his greatest regret.[1]

Scene from NYC sanitation strike, February 1968

That same year, 1968, also saw a three-day Broadway strike and a nine-day sanitation strike.[16] Quality of life in the city reached a nadir during the sanitation strike as mounds of garbage caught fire and strong winds blew the filth through the streets.[17] In June 1968, the New York City Police Department deployed snipers to protect Lindsay during a public ceremony, shortly after they detained a knife-wielding man who had demanded to meet the mayor.[18] With the schools shut down, police engaged in a slowdown, firefighters threatening job actions, the city awash in garbage, and racial and religious tensions breaking to the surface, Lindsay later called the last six months of 1968 "the worst of my public life."[1]

The summer of 1971 ushered in another devastating strike as over 8,000 workers belonging to AFSCME District Council 37 walked off their jobs for two days. The strikers included the operators of the city's drawbridges and sewage treatment plants. Drawbridges over the Harlem River were locked in the "up" position, barring automobile travel into Manhattan, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage flowed into local waterways.

Lindsay meets with U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office, August 1967

Lindsay served on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission. This body was established in 1967 by President Johnson after riots in urban centers of the US, including Newark and Detroit. Lindsay maximized publicity and coverage of his activities on the commission, and while other commissioners made inconspicuous visits to riot-damaged sites, Lindsay would alert the press before his fact-finding missions. Nonetheless, he was especially influential in producing the Kerner Report; its dramatic language of the nation "moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal" was his rhetoric.[19]

President Lyndon B. Johnson ignored the report and rejected the Kerner Commission's recommendations.[20] In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.[21] However, in New York City, Lindsay traveled directly into Harlem, telling black residents that he regretted King's death and was working against poverty. He is credited with averting riots in the city with this direct response, even as other major cities burned.[22][23] David Garth, who accompanied Lindsay that night, recalled: "There was a wall of people coming across 125th Street, going from west to east ... I thought we were dead. John raised his hands, said he was sorry. It was very quiet. My feeling was, his appearance there was very reassuring to people because it wasn't the first time they had seen him. He had gone there on a regular basis. That gave him credibility when it hit the fan."[24]

A street in New York City during the storm. This scene is in Manhattan, 1969.

On February 10, 1969, New York City was pummeled with 15 inches (38 cm) of snow. On the first day alone, 14 people died and 68 were injured.[25] Within a day, the mayor was criticized for giving favored treatment to Manhattan at the expense of the other boroughs.[26] Charges were made that a city worker solicited a bribe to clean streets in Queens.[27]

Over a week later, streets in eastern Queens still had remained unplowed by the city, enraging the borough's residents, many who felt that the city's other boroughs always took a back seat to Manhattan.[28] Lindsay traveled to Queens, but his visit was not well received. His car could not make its way through Rego Park, and even in a four-wheel-drive truck, he had trouble getting around.[29] In Kew Gardens Hills, the mayor was booed; one woman screamed, "You should be ashamed of yourself."[29] In Fresh Meadows, a woman told the mayor: "Get away, you bum."[29] Later during his walk through Fresh Meadows, another woman called him 'a wonderful man", prompting the mayor to respond: "And you're a wonderful woman, not like those fat Jewish broads up there," pointing to women in a nearby building who had criticized him.[29]

The blizzard, dubbed the "Lindsay Snowstorm",[30] prompted a political crisis that became "legendary in the annals of municipal politics"[29] as the scenes conveyed a message that the mayor of New York City was indifferent to the middle class and poor citizens of the city.[1]

In 1969, a backlash against Lindsay caused him to lose the Republican mayoral primary to state Senator John J. Marchi, who was enthusiastically supported by Buckley and the party's conservative wing. In the Democratic primary, the most conservative candidate, City Comptroller Mario Procaccino, defeated several more liberal contenders and won the nomination with only a plurality of the votes. "The more the Mario", he quipped.[31] Procaccino, who ran to Lindsay's right, went on to coin the term "limousine liberal" to describe Lindsay and his wealthy Manhattan backers.

Despite losing the Republican nomination, Lindsay remained on the ballot as the candidate of the New York Liberal Party. In his campaign he said "mistakes were made" and called being mayor of New York City "the second toughest job in America."[32][33] Two television advertisements described his position: In one he looked directly into the camera and said, "I guessed wrong on the weather before the city's biggest snowfall last winter. And that was a mistake. But I put 6,000 more cops on the streets. And that was no mistake. The school strike went on too long and we all made some mistakes. But I brought 225,000 more jobs to this town. And that was no mistake... And we did not have a Detroit, a Watts or Newark. And those were no mistakes. The things that go wrong are what make this the second toughest job in America. But the things that go right are those things that make me want it." The second opened with a drive through the Holland Tunnel from lower Manhattan toward New Jersey and suggested that, "Every New Yorker should take this trip at least once before election day..." followed by video of Newark, New Jersey which had been devastated by race riots.[34]

While narrowly losing Brooklyn and the Bronx due to Procaccino's entrenched support among ethnic, working class whites (with Marchi winning his native Staten Island), Lindsay was able to vanquish his opponents with support from three distinct groups.[35] First were the city's minorities, mostly African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who were concentrated in Harlem, the South Bronx and various Brooklyn neighborhoods, including Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville.[35][36] Second were the white and economically secure residents of certain areas of Manhattan.[35][36] Third were the whites in the boroughs outside Manhattan who had a similar educational background and "cosmopolitan" attitude, namely residents of solidly middle-class neighborhoods, including Forest Hills and Kew Gardens in Queens and Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn.[35] This third category included many traditionally Democratic Jewish Americans who were repelled by Procaccino's conservatism. This created a plurality coalition (42%) in Lindsay's second three-way race. His margin of victory rose from just over 100,000 more votes than his Democratic opponent in 1965 to over 180,000 votes over Procaccino in 1969, despite appearing on just one third party ballot line (see New York City Mayoral Elections).[35][36]

Lindsay speaking at a senior citizens rally in October 1965

On May 8, 1970, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street and at New York City Hall, a riot started when about 200 construction workers mobilized by the New York State AFL-CIO labor federation attacked about 1,000 high school and college students and others protesting the Kent State shootings, the Cambodian Campaign, and the Vietnam War. Some attorneys, bankers, and investment analysts from nearby Wall Street investment firms tried to protect many of the students but were themselves attacked, and some onlookers reported that the police stood by and did nothing. Although more than seventy people were injured, including four policemen, only six people were arrested.[37][38][39] The following day, Lindsay severely criticized the police for their lack of action.[40] Police Department labor leaders later accused Lindsay of "undermining the confidence of the public in its Police Department" by his statements[41] and blamed the inaction on inadequate preparations and "inconsistent directives" in the past from the mayor's office.[42] Several thousand construction workers, longshoremen and white-collar workers protested against the mayor on May 11 and again on May 16. Protesters called Lindsay "the red mayor", "traitor", "Commie rat", and "bum". The mayor described the mood of the city as "taut".[43][44]

In 1970, The New York Times printed New York City Police Department Patrolman Frank Serpico's claims of widespread police corruption. As a result, the Knapp Commission was eventually formed that April by Lindsay, with investigations beginning in June, although public hearings did not start until October 18, 1971. Its preliminary report was not issued until August 1972, and final recommendations only released on December 27, 1972. Because of his forming of the Knapp Commission, many NYPD officers disliked him and didn't want him to attend their funerals in case they died on duty and heckled, hissed and booed him when he did appear. The wife of Rocco Laurie, one of two city police officers who were murdered by black revolutionaries in 1972, specifically stated that she did not want Lindsay to attend her husband's funeral that year.