Debating Lindsay's LegacyLegacy
The Lindsay era’s legacy in New York is still debated. In his second term, the mayor could not pay for his program of expansive urban government. Massive borrowing laid the groundwork for the fiscal crisis of 1975-76, whose impact was felt for many years after. Lindsay’s own vision succumbed not only to fiscal problems, but to a new politics polarized by racial, ethnic, and class resentments, and conflicts over busing, abortion, and women’s and gay rights. The mayor’s own plans for ending inequality and segregation helped to trigger a conservative backlash embraced by many urban voters on into the Reagan era. The dream of reinventing the city to vanquish poverty, racism, and crime proved unattainable.
Yet Lindsay’s mayoralty was also a moment of innovation and hope that left its mark on New York. Lindsay’s willingness to walk the streets in angry times, his faith in participatory democracy, his efforts to bring the poor into the mainstream, and his commitment to a more livable cityscape all represented the high tide of 1960s urban liberalism. Lindsay made the easing of racial inequalities, and the use of government to aid the less fortunate, top priorities in the face of poverty and social division. And, as many predicted the death of American cities, John Lindsay insisted that the future of New York City, and of urban life, was the future of America.
The following reflections are drawn from the companion book to the exhibition, America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (Columbia University Press and the Museum of the City of New York, 2010).
When the fiscal crisis hit New York City in 1975, under the leadership of Mayor Abraham D. Beame, numerous critics and journalists blamed Mayor Lindsay, arguing that the generous settlements he had given unions and the social and welfare benefits he allowed to flow to minority populations had stretched the city’s budget far beyond capacity. Some added that he gave too much attention to issues of the poor and minorities, while ignoring the needs and interests of white middle-class residents. The criticisms rang true for working-class white ethnics. But countless black and Hispanic New Yorkers remember John V. Lindsay as a close friend in difficult and changing times; a rare political leader who understood the impact and cost of injustice and discrimination, and a courageous man who did all he could to change the way cities and the nation address problems of racial inequality.
The founding of the Mayor’s Film Office—the first agency of its kind in the world—remains to this day one of the Lindsay administration’s signal achievements, an innovation in governance that has since been replicated by agencies or commissions in almost every state and big city and in scores of countries and provinces around the world. In New York alone, it helped to usher in what has become virtually an entire new industry . . . Along the way, it has also helped to ensure that New York retains its status as one of the most familiar and compelling urban landscapes in the world.
The political legacy of John V. Lindsay has been thought to be one of failure. . . . Yet many potentially valuable Lindsay-era practices did become part of everyday governance in New York City. The Lindsay administration’s idea that decentralization could make city policies more responsive to neighborhood interests was institutionalized in Community School Boards, created in 1969, and Community Districts, expanded in the late 1960s and formalized by the 1975 City Charter. The Lindsay administration’s use of policy analysis and output measurement as tools to help city agencies reallocate their resources in ways that improved their results also lives on. Even the Giuliani administration’s widely praised Compstat innovation in the Police Department should be read as a daughter or granddaughter of the fourth platoon deployed by Police Commissioner Howard Leary in 1968. The Lindsay administration’s practice of making contracts with community-based organizations to deliver public services . . . has flourished. New York City remains a laboratory for urban policy experiments.
Lindsay saw the city through a design lens, which was an unusual perspective for a big-city mayor, let alone any politician. He believed that poor urban design had damaged the city and that improving the physical environment would improve the quality of life. His achievements in the realm of urban design made his administration one of the most remarkable and creative chapters in American urbanism.
Lindsay can fairly be credited with two exemplary policy innovations that changed the face of local government throughout the country. The first was the strategy of a non-militarized response to civil unrest—talking rather than shooting, while building a massive police presence to suppress disturbances by sheer weight of numbers. . . . The other was the second term’s greater focus on productivity, which has become an enduring feature of governments. But the other side of the balance sheet is as imposing. Policy making in the first administration tended to be moralizing and racially polarizing, and, intentionally or not, often communicated disdain for the city work force.