Call him the new Moses — Robert Moses, that is.
Mayor Bloomberg says that since 9/11 he has tried to transform the city on a scale not seen since the days of the legendary and controversial master builder of highways, bridges and parks that changed the metropolitan landscape.
“I think if you look we’ve done more in the last seven years than — I don’t know if it’s fair to say more than Moses did — but I hope history will show the things we did made a lot more sense,” Bloomberg tells The New Yorker.
“You know, Moses did some things that turned out not to be great: cutting us off from the waterfront, putting roads all along the water,” he adds.
One of these roads is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which separates the city from the Brooklyn waterfront.
The mayor has tried to undo part of the Moses legacy by rezoning for commercial and residential use large sections of waterfront property that had been the province of industry, the magazine says.
In an article examining Bloomberg’s run for a third term, The New Yorker says the mayor has been advising other cities, such as Newark and Washington, how to replicate his achievements.
“They see it as part of their mission to export ideas,” Newark Mayor Cory Booker, says of Bloomberg and his staff.
The magazine notes that former President Bill Clinton calls him a “good mayor” and President Obama calls him an “outstanding mayor.”
Booker and other young mayors around the country, such as Washington’s Adrian Fenty, call Bloomberg Papa Smurf, after the blue cartoon character.
“Thanks to his money, Bloomberg has managed, perhaps more than any other Democratic politician ever before, to govern strictly with what he considers to be the greater good in mind,” the magazine writes.
But the money has also served to curb New York’s usually lively political discussion, it says.
A Democratic political consultant tells the magazine, “He’s probably been a fine mayor, but he seems a lot better because all the usual agitators — groups that exist to drive a mayor crazy — have in one way or another been bought off.
“It’s amazing the climate you can have when nobody is criticizing you,” the consultant adds.
The magazine writes that many New Yorkers urged Bloomberg to use his billions to save the ailing New York Times, but “Bloomberg’s preferred white-knight scenario was on a grander scale than merely saving a family newspaper.”
Bloomberg “hoped to rescue New York City from financial ruin and prevent a return to the bloody chaos of the 1970s,” it adds.
“I didn’t want anybody to think that you walk away when the going gets tough,” the mayor tells the magazine.
Bloomberg, who ran an international news-gathering organization before becoming mayor, said he had a strict policy of not trying to influence stories.
“I would never try and have never tried to influence a story at Bloomberg,” he tells the magazine.