Industrial vitality. Desirable quality of life. Low crime rates. The spoils of past administrations drew a record 56.4 million visitors to the city last year, supporting 359,000 tourism-related jobs, and generating a staggering $61.3 billion in revenue — the same as oil-rich Oman’s gross domestic product in 2014.
But just how comfortable tourists would feel coming to a Gotham where it was no big deal to booze, wizz, litter, and commit other corrosive crimes in public is up there with week-old constipation and Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s plan to decriminalize low-level, non-violent breaches that can act as incubators for more serious crimes and problems.
Her policy hemorrhoid, if passed, would topple the gains of previous administrations to take back the city from the druggies, criminals, race rioters, hostile gangs and wolfpacks, and other malevolents once allowed to hold it hostage with impunity:
• The notorious 1980s began with a year that racked up 1,814 murders.
• Remember the squeegee men who held motorists hostage at red lights, waving filthy rags in intimidation and demanding a buck?
• Remember the “no cassette player” and “no radio” signs in cars during the 1980s and early 1990s, as street crooks ran rampant until broken-windows policing set them straight?
Tourism — what was left of it — diminished. New Yorkers stopped riding subways and visiting parks for fear of being mugged by emboldened thugs and louts, who found supporters in the war-on-poverty crowd that blamed a vast, conspiratorial, external force for the obnoxiousness.
It took the determined Giuliani-Bloomberg mayoralties to transform the appalling urban landscape and turn storied institutions that had become begging and crime galleries, and flophouses for drunks and destitutes — including Bryant Park, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and Grand Central Terminal — into places that New Yorkers wanted to embrace again.
Speaker Mark-Viverito’s plan to decriminalize minor offenses saves the harshest penalty for New Yorkers who do not want a return to the type of urban decay, economic stagnation, and high crime that history shows are more than capable of rotting the Big Apple to within an inch of its core.
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