Opinion

Success of ‘Lion King’ shows why you should fear a Mayor de Blasio

Bill de Blasio might rate the Giuliani era as a dark chapter in city history, but you need look no further than the success of “The Lion King” to see that Joe Lhota’s term, “renaissance,” is infinitely more apt.

Who, after all, could have imagined 20 years ago that a family-themed stage production on then-seedy 42nd Street would be the first Broadway show to top $1 billion gross, as “The Lion King” is doing this week?

Older voters recall what a horror The Deuce was: Sex shops and drug dealers lined the streets. Smut movie houses catered to the perverse. Crime was rampant.

Sane folks avoided 42nd. At night, one study found, almost anyone walking the street was either a hooker or a male.

All that changed in 1995, when Disney agreed to renovate the 1903 New Amsterdam Theater. Its first big production: a stage version of the 1994 film “The Lion King.” AMC Theaters, Madame Tussauds and others joined the block party. Soon, the entire street would see a makeover, helping restore Times Square as a tourist mecca.

The show moved around the corner to the Minskoff Theater in 2006. But its 1997 opening marked a rebirth of the once-thriving heart of New York — and, in a sense, the city itself. Yet it didn’t happen by itself: Paving the way for renewal, and sustaining it until today, was then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s legendary crackdown on crime and the follow-up by Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD boss Ray Kelly.

Giuliani booted the sex shops. He targeted squeegee men, pushers, rapists and killers alike — there and elsewhere. Crime waned; confidence soared. They sealed the Disney deal with a bribe: Lacking support for a broad commercial tax cut, Giuliani gave the firm a $25 million low-interest loan.

Today, de Blasio vows to dump Kelly and crack down on cops. And he wants to raise taxes. If he gets his way, will anyone be singing “Hakuna Matata”?