On Aug. 14, in the midst of its dramatic blackout, New York finally warmed up to the man the tabloids call “Mayor Mike”–at least a little. It’s not clear if Bloomberg’s management of the city’s power outage will become the defining moment of his administration as the September 11 attacks were for his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani. But Bloomberg’s efforts to reassure the public and to restore order played well to a jittery public. “He seemed to handle that stress well. He had the right tone. He was a calming presence, he said everything you wanted to hear and people needed that,” said James Grant, a resident of the East Village. “There’s no reason not to give him good marks.”
When the lights went out, Bloomberg had just sat down for coffee at the Park Street Diner in Brooklyn, where he was scheduled to launch a new anti-rat program. Within 15 minutes, the mayor was back in his office at City Hall, as thousands of people began streaming into the streets around him in a scene reminiscent of the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center nearly two years earlier. Within an hour, Bloomberg was giving TV and radio interviews, urging calm and insisting that the power failure appeared to be an accident–not a terror attack, as some had feared initially. As the afternoon turned to evening, New Yorkers throughout the five boroughs gathered on sidewalks and stoops to listen to his disembodied voice from car radios and battery-powered boom boxes.
Bloomberg’s command, and the presence of 10,000 officers on the streets overnight, helped maintain calm during the night. “Today it was calm and compassion,” said Bloomberg, noting the criminal activity was actually lower in the 24 hours following the power outage than on a typical hot summer day in the city. “It’s a great tribute to this city and shows that New Yorkers are determined to make their city better and not succumb to adversity,” he said. “All of us have a lot to be proud about. We’ll get over the pain and we’ll look back with great pride.”
The mayor’s blackout performance had its critics too. Some of the city’s residents thought he downplayed the seriousness of the outage. Lisa Stein, a SoHo resident who listened to Bloomberg on a battery-operated radio in her parent’s apartment on the Upper West Side, said she was reassured by the mayor’s upbeat manner but disappointed the next morning. “He was presenting a really positive picture. I thought, okay, when I get up in the morning, the power will be back on… So I went to bed and when I get up in the morning, the power’s not on. If it’s going to take two days, they should tell you it’s going to be two days.” (At a press conference Friday afternoon, Bloomberg explained that his initial estimates for the power restoration were based on information he had gotten from the city’s electricity provider, Consolidated Edison.)
Others were put off by a brief appearance the mayor made on the Brooklyn Bridge, greeting commuters trudging across the expanse to get home. “It was a ridiculous media stunt to go onto the Brooklyn Bridge when he should have been back at City Hall making sure everything was running as smoothly as possible,” said Laura Goldberg, a 35-year-old resident of Brooklyn Heights. “But it’s hard to gauge in the midst of a crisis what’s more important at a particular point in time–letting people hear you or see your face immediately, as he did by going on radio, or getting out there into the thick of things. Overall, I think he did a good job.”
But even among New York’s steadfast smokers–probably Bloomberg’s harshest critics–there were those who stuck up for him. When a group puffing away outside of Asylum a bar on Bleecker street in downtown Manhattan late Friday night grumbled about Bloomberg, another smoker retorted, “He’s only the mayor, what’s he really supposed to do?”
