By Kerry Howley on 10.20.03 @ 12:02AM
Welcome to Mayor Bloomberg’s New York.
New York -- Spend a day touring the headquarters of Bloomberg
L.P., the media empire built by the city's current mayor, and
you'll be impressed. However, at about the one week mark, things
start to get a little creepy.
The seven massive floors, housed at 499 Park Avenue, initially
come across as a high-tech funhouse. The place is rife with color
and irreverent design, a workspace more likely to house
anti-establishment dot.com kids than Wall Street veterans. Flat
screen TVs are built into the floors, the ceilings, the bathroom
walls, all tuned to Bloomberg TV, all the time. The elevator stops
at one floor only -- the high-traffic middle floor -- and to get
from there to anywhere else requires a sherpa-like knowledge of the
building's floor plan.
Every other floor offers a kiosk brimming with free food, from
fresh-brewed coffee to boxes of Honeysmacks. The place pulsates
with young energy and hurried conversation. Most everyone has a
humble cubicle, and the few offices are small, translucent glass
boxes. Security is tight; even Bloomberg himself wore an I.D. tag
before he moved from Park Avenue to City Hall.
It's all very impressive -- and very intentional. The free food
keeps employees from staying home for breakfast or leaving for
lunch. The single elevator forces everyone to come and go through
the same doors -- no sneaking out the back when the boss leaves
early. The cubicles foster an illusion of equality among employees,
while keeping everyone in sight of the boss. Far from a haven of
spontaneity, Bloomberg created a tightly ordered productivity
machine. Seven days after I started interning for a Bloomberg
subsidiary, I had the uncomfortable feeling of being watched,
monitored, and controlled in some sort of maximum security toy
store.
This brand of studied control made Bloomberg a billionaire, so
it isn't hard to understand his motivation as he takes on a city
infamous for disorder. To date, Bloomberg's most publicized act has
been to banish smoking from the city's bars.
"I think anyone who smokes is crazy," he is widely quoted as
saying, and there will be no craziness in Bloomberg's New York, at
least not in places where the city can legislate it out of
existence. In Albany, a bill is currently being considered that
would restrict lighting up in the car. If passed, the new
regulations would make New York, by Bloomberg's standards, the
least crazy metropolis in the country.
Like his predecessor, Bloomberg has put quality of life issues
at the forefront of his agenda. But when Rudy Giuliani decided that
eradicating sex shops from Times Square was high on the to-do list,
he did so in a pre-9/11 atmosphere. Before New York incurred a
staggering deficit and businesses began fleeing a scarred downtown,
New Yorkers could blow off the mayor's invasive initiatives.
Bloomberg, by contrast, looks irresponsible when he invests energy
in programs like "Operation Silent Night," which targets loud
neighborhoods, in a city billions of dollars in the hole.
Bloomberg may or may not be trying to turn New York into a
sprawling version of 499 Park Avenue, but he certainly wants more
power to monitor the activities of New Yorkers than any recent
predecessor. Under Bloomberg, laws restricting the New York Police
Department's right to spy on citizens have been eased considerably.
As a result, the nation's largest police force no longer has to
establish criminal activity before surveilling its constituents.
The Surveillance Camera Players, a surveillance watchdog group,
claims that by 2002 the city was monitoring the public with twice
as many surveillance cameras than in 2000.
It would be a mistake to characterize Bloomberg as a
power-hungry tyrant or a weak-willed panderer. His desire for
control is firmly rooted in child-like zeal for positive reform and
the genuine belief that he can make the city a better place to
raise a family. The best way to help his constituents, he assumes,
is to watch them closely, to obtain ever-more control over their
school system, and to keep the streets quiet at night. But his
reforms demonstrate a profound lack of understanding about a city
rooted in chaos. New York is a city where freaks blend in, sex
shops abound, and people do crazy things simply because they can.
The city that never sleeps isn't supposed to have silent nights.
That's what the suburbs are for.
I rooted for Bloomberg because he wasn't beholden to anybody,
including the city's powerful unions and the massive municipal
workforce. But once elected Bloomberg became almost fanatically
attached to something nearly as bad -- his own personal vision of
perfect order, realized in miniature at 499 Park Avenue.
topics:
Business, Law, Energy, Unions
