Hotels Pictures Maps Restaurants Music clubs Nightlife Health & Beauty Attraction Tickets Weather  

New York City Government and Politics

Each borough has an independent government headed by a president. Many services are provided through these local governments. Above the boroughs are the full City Council , which passes all municipal legislation, and the Board of Estimate , which approves the city's annual budget.

In practice New York is run by its mayor. The city has elected a number of colorful and charismatic chief executives, prominent among them Jimmy Walker , a high-living symbol of the Jazz Age, and Fiorello ('the Little Flower') La Guardia of the Depression era. One resigned over charges of corruption, and the other reformed the city government; typically, the lives of both inspired popular Broadway musicals.

During the 1980s the brash style of Mayor Edward I. Koch seemed to personify the city, but eventually his outspoken comments alienated voters and fueled racial tensions. He lost the 1989 Democratic primary to David Dinkins , who became the city's first African American mayor. Former United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani , a Republican, became mayor in 1994.

These mayors presided over an unwieldy bureaucracy. In the mid-1990s city employees numbered more than 400,000. The annual city budget in the mid-1990s totaled more than 32 billion dollars, and the city was running a deficit of more than two billion dollars. Much of the budget is spent on the growing numbers of homeless and others living below the poverty line.

New York also has a dark political tradition of machine politics and powerful bosses. The most arrogant of these machines, the Tammany Hall ring of William Marcy (Boss) Tweed , built ward organizations among the swelling immigrant population in the years before the American Civil War. Tweed and his cronies dispensed pork-barrel patronage and spoils, gaining thereby a stranglehold on city government, the courts, the police, and even the state legislature. For five years after the war, the corrupt bosses glutted themselves at the public trough. High-minded reformers and muckraking newspapers ultimately combined to expose their misdeeds and drive them from power and, in several cases, into jail.

In each generation power brokers men like Robert Moses , the legendary commissioner of parks from 1933 to 1959 have used patronage and money to create personal empires within city government.