Fog hovered over Jamaica Bay that morning, November 12, as dozens of grieving families gathered for the memorial service in Rockaway Park, along the water in a far precinct of Queens. They had come to mark the 13th anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, a flight headed to the Dominican Republic that instead ended up in flames in Far Rockaway, killing 260 people on board, as well as 5 on the ground.
Mayor Bill de Blasio was scheduled to arrive at 9:05, 11 minutes before a uniformed officer was to ring a silver bell noting the exact time of the crash. But at 9:05 there was no sign of the mayor, who was on a police launch en route. For several minutes family members stared in disbelief, some shaking their heads; the previous mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had always come early and taken his time speaking with them. When 9:16 came with still no sign of the mayor, the police officer with the bell stood motionless, unsure what to do.
Finally one of the mourners, Miriam Estrella, stepped to the podium. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she said. “Sorry our mayor’s not here.” The officer rang the bell. Nine minutes later de Blasio arrived, strode to the podium, and made a speech that did little to calm the furious families.
The mayor’s staff blamed the fog. But confronted by reporters later that day, de Blasio admitted he simply hadn'’t gotten out of bed in time. “I had a very rough night, woke up sluggish, and I should have gotten myself moving quicker,” he explained. “I just woke up in the middle of the night, couldn'’t get back to sleep, and felt really sluggish and off-kilter this morning.”
It wasn’'t the first— or the last —time de Blasio was late for an official function. In December he showed up two hours late to a murdered police officer’s wake, arriving as it ended. During Saint Patrick’s Day festivities he achieved the trifecta of being late for three events in a row: a celebratory breakfast and reception at Gracie Mansion—“his own house,” The New York Times noted in italics; a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which Cardinal Timothy Dolan started without him (“Mayor de Blasio, we’re happy you’re here,” Dolan said when the mayor finally arrived); and a parade in the Rockaways, which the mayor missed half of. The crowd booed when he arrived. A few chanted, “Worst mayor ever.” “I’m not hired by the people to go to parades,” de Blasio said grumpily afterward.
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How far left is de Blasio? This is a man who cut his teeth during the 1980s raising money and distributing food for Nicaragua’s Communist Sandinista government, who later married an African-American woman who once identified as a radical lesbian, and who honeymooned in Cuba. A speaker at his inauguration memorably called New York a “plantation,” referring to inequality in the city.
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By far the roughest moments of de Blasio’s first year involved the police. The “Black Lives Matter” movement, which caught fire in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, sent crowds of protesters into New York City’s streets. De Blasio pointedly refused to condemn their accusations of routine police racism, infuriating the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch. When a mentally troubled man shot and killed two policemen last December, Lynch memorably told reporters de Blasio had “blood on his hands.” Much of the N.Y.P.D. went on a kind of work strike and seemed to be refusing to make minor arrests or write tickets; only the hard lobbying of de Blasio’s heralded police chief, William Bratton, a veteran commissioner of the Giuliani years, managed to bring matters to an uneasy truce. While Lynch and other union officials declined comment for this article, their hatred of de Blasio, —there’s no other word for it—, has clearly not gone away. “He is not running the city of New York,” Lynch told one group earlier this year, according to Capital New York. “"He thinks he’s running a fucking revolution.”"
Worse was yet to come: also in December, near the height of tensions, de Blasio told a press conference how, as the father of a black teenager, he had several times cautioned Dante to be careful when dealing with the police. “We’ve had to literally train him,” he said, “as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.” Lynch responded by saying de Blasio had thrown the N.Y.P.D. “under the bus.”
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Talk to many political pundits in New York and they will say, off the record and under their breath, that de Blasio favors the needs of blacks and Latinos over whites, the have-nots over the haves. And yet, despite the fact that he carried 96 percent of the black vote, relations between de Blasio and the city’s black leaders have steadily deteriorated. Part of it was de Blasio’s refusal to clean house at the N.Y.P.D.; part of it was that early on he consulted with the Reverend Al Sharpton, who is openly hostile to many of the city’s longtime black leaders, some of whom now feel de Blasio is taking them for granted. The city’s most prominent black leader is the Reverend Calvin Butts, of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. When I talked to him in July and mentioned the mayor, he was breathing fire.
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The mayor and the Reverend Al Sharpton attend Sharpton’s 60th-birthday celebration at the Four Seasons restaurant, October 1, 2014.
BY DONALD TRAILL/INVISION/A.P. IMAGES.
"De Blasio, in the words of the Stevie Wonder song, ‘'you ain'’t done nothing,' "’ ” the reverend said barely 30 seconds into our conversation. "“I can’t even get in to see his commissioners. I’'ve built thousands of units of affordable housing. I think I met with his office of economic development once. I’'ve created the first high school in the black community in 50 years, in Harlem, and I can’t even meet the [schools] chancellor. His administration is disorganized. You hear these complaints from other people, not just me. I think he feels comfortable in whoever is advising him that the black community is in his pocket. It’'s not. If he’'s really with us, stick with us. I need a John Brown [the white abolitionist who advocated armed insurrection] type. I feel strange saying this, but ‘'People in the black community, please, don’t be taken for a ride by this man.’' "”
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De Blasio with, from left, New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray, son Dante, and daughter Chiara, on the back porch of Gracie Mansion.
Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.
