Strong leaders delivered safer streets and better schools. Their successors proved weak or worse.
Sunday’s cover of the New York Post featured a large photo of a drugged out middle-aged man. He’s standing, hunched forward on a city sidewalk in broad daylight. His bare legs and arms are covered in open sores, and a hypodermic needle dangles from one of his biceps. You can’t help but wince.
The photo reminded me of “Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York,” a documentary film released this year that ought to be required viewing for the city’s political leadership. It features interviews with more than two dozen former City Hall officials, police commissioners and policy analysts who recount the legacy of New York’s six mayors between 1966 and 2013.
“If you don’t really understand that legacy,” says former Manhattan Institute president Lawrence Mone toward the end of the movie, “you’re doomed to watch it fall apart before your very eyes.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Henny Ray Abrams/AFP via Getty Images
