Vanishing New York Backup

Top 10 highlights of yesterday's mayoral inauguration (in no particular order): 1. Watching the first family emerge from the subway station --and hearing everyone on the receiving line go crazy declaring their love for the fabulous Chirlane. 2. Bloomberg's unrelenting sourpuss. Without a glimmer of lightness, he never altered his unsmiling pouty face throughout the entire event. He looked like an angry child who just had his favorite toy taken away and who was determined to pout for the duration, no matter how much everyone around him was smiling. In fact, the more they smiled, the more he pouted. photo: Corey Sipkin, Daily News These are not the same photo. He just never changed his utterly joyless expression. Even when shaking Clinton's hand, it was little Pouty McPoutface all the way. 3. The fact that no one thanked Bloomberg until Bill Clinton, nearly an hour into the event. He was barely mentioned at all. Not only that, almost every speake...

At the end of each year, I usually do a round-up of that year's vanished places. But this year is special. This year means the end to the evil Bloomberg era, so I offer this "Master List" of Vanished New York from 2001 to 2013 . It's been 12 merciless years of destruction and loss, from "significant" losses to countless "smaller" ones--neighborhood laundromats, shoe repair shops, drugstores--far more than I have compiled here. If you look only at this list and add up all the years in business represented, we lost approximately 6,926 years of New York City history in only a dozen years. And we know the real number is much higher than that. Clearly, we need strong protections for the city's small businesses. Many of the closures were due to the impact of gentrification, either through rising rents, demolition for luxury development, or a decrease in business due to their neighborhood's up-shifting of demographics and values. A few closed...

This post is guest-blogged by author Julian Brash . A lot could be said about the recent demise of schools Chancellor Cathie Black , but one point that I make in my book is that Mayor Bloomberg's corporate approach to governing the city has major political weaknesses , as demonstrated by the administration's failure to build the West Side stadium and its inability to pass its congestion-pricing plan passed. One of these weaknesses is what I call the "anti-politics" of the Bloomberg Way: the denial of the legitimacy (and at times the existence) of conflicting interests within the city. However, as of 2005 or so, in response to the West Side stadium fiasco, the Mayor began tempering his anti-politics and engaging directly with various interest groups using a variety of means (philanthropy, bargaining, city contracts, etc.). By Fall of 2009, Michael Bloomberg's dominance of the city's politics had reached its zenith : the CEO Mayor had become a master politician...

This post is guest-blogged by author Julian Brash . The news that New York City has not grown as fast since 2000 as was expected has produced consternation and disbelief among a number of prominent New Yorkers, including Chuck Schumer, Marty Markowitz, and (of course) Mayor Bloomberg. The reaction is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's clear that much of the sputtering is driven by a specific sort of New York City chauvinism : the idea that New York is the biggest, the best, and the most grand (if not grandiose), city in the country if not the world. That is to say, that New York City's identity rests on its larger-than-life characteristics. There's something to this. Clearly, it's New York City's size and diversity that gives it many of its distinctive characteristics and which makes it a draw for people of all sorts from around the country and the world. But is the growth of New York City's population beyond its already large size necessarily a g...

Welcome to Part 3 of the Bloomberg Way, guest-blogged by author Julian Brash : In my first two posts, I said that the Bloomberg approach to urban governance is both deeply ideological and about class rather than about one extraordinary individual. If we put those things together, we see a third key aspect of this approach, one that contradicts the conventional wisdom that Bloomberg's mayoralty embodies a rejection of politics. In fact, the Bloomberg Way is deeply political. It may be non-partisan, in the sense that the mayor and many of his fellow postindustrial elites are neither loyal to nor advancing the interest of a major political party. But the Bloomberg Way is a class project with two clear aims, both of which had profound implications for politics (and life) in New York City . First, the Bloomberg Way aims to legitimate the leadership of the postindustrial elite , especially those of its members drawn from the highest levels of global business. Essentially, the corporate a...

Welcome to Part 2 of the Bloomberg Way, guest-blogged by author Julian Brash : Central to the political mythology of Michael Bloomberg is his supposed rejection of ideology. The Bloomberg administration, we are told, represents a new and pragmatic approach to urban governance, one that transcends the old ideological nostrums of both the left and the right. In a partial sense, this is true--the Bloomberg Way can't be neatly slotted into the typical categories of liberal and conservative. Nevertheless, the Bloomberg Way is far from a moderate, pragmatic approach to governance. In fact, it is based on a rather radical set of suppositions that have quite far-reaching and transformative impacts, suppositions that are embedded in the Bloomberg Way's corporate roots. The CEO Mayor As I demonstrate in Bloomberg's New York , central to the Bloomberg approach to governance are the ideas that Mayor is a CEO, city government is a business, residents are customers, businesses are clien...

Welcome to the first guest post by Julian Brash : Thanks to Jeremiah for allowing me to guest blog for a couple of weeks. In my first three posts, I thought I'd briefly summarize the analysis of the Bloomberg administration's approach to urban governance that I lay out at length in my book, Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City . What is this approach to urban governance, which I call "the Bloomberg Way," all about? Well, it's not really about Michael Bloomberg. Or rather, it's not just about Michael Bloomberg. Often when Bloomberg's mayoralty is discussed, the focus is on the man himself: his experience, his personality, his foibles and eccentricities. But the political emergence of Michael Bloomberg and his approach to urban governance are products of a broad transformation of New York City's social structure over the past several decades: as media, financial, and business services have come to dominate the city's econ...

For the next couple of weeks, I'll be featuring posts by guest blogger Julian Brash . You might remember him from an interview here on The Bloomberg Way . Assistant professor of Anthropology at Montclair State University, Julian is the author of a new book entitled Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City . In the book, he describes in depth the Bloomberg Way: "a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good." As a guest blogger, he'll be tackling topics like bike lanes, High line(s), waterfront development, urban sustainability, and other aspects of life in Bloomberg's city.

Julian Brash, Ph.D. , a Brooklyn-born professor of anthropology and urban studies now at Montclair State University, has written a book entitled “ Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City .” As our economy crashes and burns, with the City Council set to vote on term limits tomorrow , I talked with Professor Brash about what he calls the Bloomberg Way and its effect on the city. Doctoroff & Bloomberg What is the Bloomberg Way? It’s a notion of governance in which the city is run like a corporation. The mayor is the CEO, the businesses are clients, citizens are consumers, and the city itself is a product that’s branded and marketed. And New York is a luxury product . This is all about class. Bloomberg and many in his administration are asserting their right to both govern and shape the city into a place for corporate elites and high-level professionals. This is the culmination of a major shift in policy, underway since the 1970s, away from the post-...