Is John Lindsay Ungovernable?

If the typical New Yorker’s nightmare were a one-act play, the script might run something like this. A monstrous bulldozer chugs and clanks to the edge of the tar pit and pushes New York City over the brink. The driver sits atop the machine, the same one he rode through Queens last winter, and stares off at nothing in particular. He shakes his head slowly, then opens a paper bag from which he takes a blintz, a slice of pizza, a ham hock, and a jug of Irish coffee. He is a handsome man. His hair is John Kennedy’s through which millions of American women once yearned to run barefoot. The face is leaner now, deeply creased and tired. And the eyes, especially at first glance, are fine, something of Paul Newman in them, perhaps some deep but evasive pain lingering from boyhood as they look at you, the real you. But there’s a flaw. The wrinkled brow, the pursed lips, a hint of vacuity behind those appealing eyes, almost as if it weren’t soulfulness at all, just myopia. It’s not Jack Kennedy or Paul Newman. It’s Huntz Hall, the dense Bowery Boy about whose head Leo Gorcey used to rain blows. He tosses aside the remains of his ethnic lunch, climbs off the bulldozer, and stares at New York City sinking slowly into the tar pit. It’s John Lindsay, and he seems to be speaking: “I guess it’s ungovernable after all,” he mumbles in his curiously prissy voice. He moves closer, slips on the half-eaten blintz, and follows the City to extinction.

ONLY A DREAM, of Course, but like all dreams it has its objective correlative. For a funny thing happened to John Lindsay on his way to the White House. He tripped over Fun City, and as a result his aspirations for national office may have gone the way of the Dodo. New York is, as everyone knows by now, an appalling mess, the most unattractive place this side of Minsk. And it is getting worse, not the least credit for which must go to Mayor Lindsay and his inept administration.

JR

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John R. Coyne Jr.

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If the typical New Yorker’s nightmare were a one-act play, the script might run something like this. A monstrous bulldozer chugs and clanks to the edge of the tar pit and pushes New York City over the brink. The driver sits atop the machine, the same one he rode through Queens last winter, and stares off at nothing in particular. He shakes his head slowly, then opens a paper bag from which he takes a blintz, a slice of pizza, a ham hock, and a jug of Irish coffee. He is a handsome man. His hair is John Kennedy’s through which millions of American women once yearned to run barefoot. The face is leaner now, deeply creased and tired. And the eyes, especially at first glance, are fine, something of Paul Newman in them, perhaps some deep but evasive pain lingering from boyhood as they look at you, the real you. But there’s a flaw. The wrinkled brow, the pursed lips, a hint of vacuity behind those appealing eyes, almost as if it weren’t soulfulness at all, just myopia. It’s not Jack Kennedy or Paul Newman. It’s Huntz Hall, the dense Bowery Boy about whose head Leo Gorcey used to rain blows. He tosses aside the remains of his ethnic lunch, climbs off the bulldozer, and stares at New York City sinking slowly into the tar pit. It’s John Lindsay, and he seems to be speaking: “I guess it’s ungovernable after all,” he mumbles in his curiously prissy voice. He moves closer, slips on the half-eaten blintz, and follows the City to extinction.

ONLY A DREAM, of Course, but like all dreams it has its objective correlative. For a funny thing happened to John Lindsay on his way to the White House. He tripped over Fun City, and as a result his aspirations for national office may have gone the way of the Dodo. New York is, as everyone knows by now, an appalling mess, the most unattractive place this side of Minsk. And it is getting worse, not the least credit for which must go to Mayor Lindsay and his inept administration.