I miss Rudy.
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani never cared what anyone thought of him as he whipped New York City into submission. In eight years, starting with Giuliani’s ascendance to City Hall in 1994, the seemingly impossible not only became the norm — city-dwellers learned to expect magic.
Before Giuliani, murders in the city hit a staggering high of 2,245 in 1990 when the ineffectual David Dinkins was mayor. Deadly riots motivated by anti-Semitism went on, unchecked, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Crack houses operated openly in cars parked in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
I was fortunate. I didn’t live in a housing project in which stray gunfire broke out on Saturday nights.
The liberal media loathed him like a disease. But even for a Republican who reigned in a fiercely Democratic city, the no-nonsense ex-federal prosecutor cut a heroic figure.
He marched to Ground Zero after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as others ran away. He ordered the late Yasser Arafat, the anti-Israel terrorist chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to be booted from a concert at Lincoln Center in 1995. Go, Rudy!
By the time Giuliani left office at the end of 2001, New Yorkers no longer planted signs on their cars that read “No radio’’ in a desperate bid to keep robbers from smashing windows and breaking in.
But those who benefited the most were the poor, immigrants and people of color. Folks who lived in places like now-gentrifying Harlem. Thanks to Giuliani, New York today is the safest big city in America.
“He stood up for the city,’’ said David Webb, founder of New York-based Tea Party 365, host of a show on Sirius XM satellite radio, who is black.
Giuliani brought “an increased feeling of self-worth, of the value of your neighborhood. New Yorkers became proud again,’’ said Webb. Under the watch of his successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, crime rates continued to plummet because the mayor let members of the Police Department do their jobs.
It won’t last.
If Giuliani, now 70, were still in charge, I guarantee he would boot the tip-seeking costumed creeps who continue to infest Times Square despite police crackdowns, the way he rid the Crossroads of the World of prostitutes, pimps and peep shows. But perhaps the most potent sign of New York’s renewed decrepitude is the return of the extortionists who once ruled the roads by spritzing filthy water on windshields, wiping them with squeegees, then demanding cash in return.
Post reporters last week saw two squeegee men operating in Queens and another in Manhattan, plus they heard witness reports of even more. Police Commissioner William Bratton, who helped rid the city of the squeegee scourge while working as Giuliani’s first commish and now serves under Mayor de Blasio, vowed to rid the city of the menaces. But he minimized the problem, saying city streets have not been “overrun’’ by squeegee-wielding vagrants.
But statistics don’t lie. And numbers compiled by the NYPD show that New York is heading back into the abyss. While murders in the five boroughs continue to inch downward, I was alarmed to learn that through Aug. 10 this year, there were 701 shootings, up from 621 during the same period last year, a 12.9 percent increase — as the number of people charged with gun-related crimes has dropped to 2,966 this year from 3,247 at this point in 2013.
Criminals know cops have stopped using the effective tactic of stop, question and frisk after a federal judge issued a ruling that’s hostile to a practice that has removed untold numbers of illegal guns from the streets. De Blasio opposes it. So does the newly energized Rev. Al Sharpton.
There was Sharpton sitting beside the mayor and the police commissioner at a recent City Hall “roundtable’’ discussion on race relations in the wake of the death of African-American Staten Islander Eric Garner, who died while resisting arrest as police tried to pick him up for selling loose cigarettes. Sharpton’s greatest contribution to the discourse was to declare that if de Blasio’s 16-year-old biracial son, Dante, wasn’t the mayor’s kid “he’d be a candidate for a chokehold’’ — like the one a cop allegedly used on Garner. Sharpton threatened that he’d be de Blasio’s “worst enemy’’ if cops don’t stop arresting minorities for small offenses à la the “broken windows” theory, which holds that crackdowns on minor crimes prevent more serious ones from occurring down the road.
The mayor was furious that Sharpton publicly humiliated him and damaged his credibility as a leader, sources told The Post.
“These guys only use each other,’’ laughed Webb. “Then when they need to distance themselves, they say they’re furious. They’re political frenemies.’’
Giuliani did not have a Sharpton problem. He banned the self-styled civil-rights leader from City Hall.
I’m waiting for an adult to take charge of this city. I’m waiting for another Rudy Giuliani. I may have to wait a long time for a real leader.
Orthodox Jewish rock band bars male fans from concert
“Excuse me, but where is Mayor de Blasio and the City Council on this blatant discrimination against men?’’ asked reader Neil Cosgrove.
Members of the all-female Hasidic Jewish rock band Bulletproof Stockings persuaded the owner of the Manhattan club Arlene’s Grocery to bar males from attending a recent show in deference to the gals’ religious beliefs. Cosgrove noted that de Blasio boycotted this year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and council members did not march under banners identifying them as government reps. That’s because parade organizers, guided by Catholic principles, don’t allow homosexuals to march in the parade wearing clothes or waving banners that identify their sexuality. But gays are free to march in plainclothes — a courtesy not afforded to men at a Stocking show.
“This is a gross hypocrisy,’’ said Cosgrove. He has a valid point.
Rich Hamptons vacationers defeat LI convent in naming of street for slain nun
A group of snobby Hamptons summer residents has won. Led by corporate lawyer John Carley — husband of Pia Lindstrom, a former TV reporter and the daughter of the late actress Ingrid Bergman — the rich thugs demanded that Southampton officials remove a road sign from Water Mill that read, “Sister Jackie’s Way.’’ The sign honored nun Jacqueline Walsh, 59, who was killed in a 2012 hit-and-run near the Sisters of Mercy Convent.
Nuns were made to feel unwelcome, so the convent head called the highway supervisor and asked that the sign be taken down. It was. Disgusting.
Uma Thurman brother moves farther afield to East Flatbush as Bed-Stuy too expensive
Actress Uma Thurman’s brother, Mipam, is buying a $549,000 two-family house in Brooklyn’s distant East Flatbush neighborhood after he was outbid on $1 million-plus places in formerly undesirable Bedford-Stuyvesant. Next stop Staten Island?
If anyone can still afford it.