Funny Times story today about New York mayors and their love-hate-indifference relationship with the subway. Of course, there’s Mayor Koch, stepping out of the 1/9 at Sheridan Square, muttering “How’m I doing? How’m I doing?”
There’s John Lindsay, taking City Hall reporters along for mobile press conferences (not exactly Lyndon Johnson taking reporters into the White House bathroom while he did his business, but still). And there’s David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, who rarely rode the subway; perhaps because of their working-class roots, posits reporter Michael M. Grynbaum, they didn’t feel the need to pretend to mingle with the working class.
The Times unearths this minor gem about Mayor Bloomberg, who made quite a to-do about his insistence on riding the subway to work every day, despite his gazillionaire bank account. Bloomberg’s typical commmute consists of a chaffeured giant SUV ride to a midtown express stop 22 blocks from his Upper East Side home, then a shorter subway ride from there.
Keeping it real, Bloomberg-style.