Smile! One of You Will Be the Next Mayor of New York

Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

Top row: John C. Liu, Sal F. Albanese, William C. Thompson Jr., Joseph J. Lhota. Middle row: Anthony D. Weiner, Christine C. Quinn, Adolfo Carrión Jr., Bill de Blasio. Bottom row: John A. Catsimatidis, Erick J. Salgado, George T. McDonald, Jack D. Hidary. More Photos »

Postscript Appended

The last honest-to-God election in New York City began on the day the World Trade Center towers fell: 9/11 was Primary Day, till the voting booths shuttered that morning. And in the dozen years since, New Yorkers have witnessed a great buckling of the political landscape: three terms of Michael Bloomberg, coming after eight years of Rudolph Giuliani. Even if you stipulate, as the G.O.P. kingmakers know, that Rudy and Mike are not real Republicans, the fact remains: the most progressive city west of Amsterdam and east of San Francisco has not elected a Democrat since 1989.

New York City stands at a crossroads. Things are good for many, but not for all. The balance between the positives and the hazards could swing either way. In the first couple of years after the Great Recession, the economy's growth, nearly 3 percent per year, outpaced the rise in national G.D.P. In 2011, 6.6 percent of the city's households had income greater than $200,000 a year, while a third of the city's population survives on Medicaid. Manhattan has become a tech rival to Silicon Valley, and bike lanes have come to Brownsville — a Brooklyn neighborhood where 4 out of 10 residents live below the poverty line. Wall Street, Midtown and the N.Y.P.D. are happy. Crime continues to decline: only one precinct, in East New York, has more violent crime than the Upper East Side faced two decades ago. And the population is growing. For all the fears of jihad, the end of capitalism and the advent of superstorms, the years since 9/11 have witnessed the arrival of a new generation. Perhaps as many as a third of the city's residents did not live here a decade ago. And all those newcomers have contributed to the prize of this electoral season: the minority majority.

I followed the campaign for eight months, as the pack running for City Hall grew to a dozen. In pain and sympathy, I watched the marathon of mayoral forums — there have been more than a hundred this year alone. And I've seen each of the candidates up close. I watched them on the stump, listened to them go off the record, observed them endure tales of complaint. They heard about the rise in racial profiling, public-school field tests, utility rates, pushcart-vendor fees and fatal subway pushings. They've debated the wisdom of punishing johns, deploying police drones and massacring rats. And they've vowed to wage war on post-Sandy mold, the inequality of garbage-removal services and the sufferings of Central Park carriage horses. Witnessed up close, the campaign engenders a creeping unease: the discomfort of watching an anesthetized body politic struggling to revive itself.

You feel it in the mounting groundswell of angst and aspiration: the palpable sense that, as Anthony Weiner told me, "a pressure valve's being released." On the rarest of occasions, the candidates might even address the issues that are unlikely to gain headlines but that will pose urgent challenges to the victor. The list is long and growing: the public-employee unions — 147 bargaining units — working without contracts and hungering for retroactive pay; the rise in city pensions and health care payouts (pension obligations are projected to be more than $8 billion a year — more than the city's combined operating budget for police, fire and corrections annually); the mayor's plan to rezone East Midtown (among other things, opening up 73 blocks around Grand Central to super-skyscrapers); the first phase of the emergency measures needed to harden the city ahead of the next Sandy (projected cost: $20 billion); the mess that is public housing (approximately 400,000 New Yorkers trying to survive in 334 developments, another 225,000 in Section 8 housing and the all-but-orphaned-by-Washington New York City Housing Authority, which has a backlog of 220,000 repairs and faces $6 billion in unmet capital needs, a black hole expected to more than double in five years).

And now a great wave of change is set to break over the city. Voters must choose not only the mayor but also the comptroller, public advocate, the borough presidents and nearly half of the City Council come this fall. The campaign is a carnival, and yet in rare bright moments, it can seem a hopeful, ennobling, pluralistic spectacle. For all the pandering and patronage, you also see flickers of unfashionable civic spirit, of New Yorkers devoted to their city. As much as he loved to be the engineer in charge, Bloomberg also took the two-steps-forward-one-and-a-half-steps-back gains of the Giuliani years and recast the city's image: from ungovernable to improvable. The worry that hangs over the longest race for City Hall in New York history is whether any of these 11 men and 1 woman can keep that prospect alive.

A NEW DAWN FOR THE DEMOCRATS

Postscript: July 27, 2013

The cover article this weekend, on the candidates for mayor of New York City, went to press before the campaign of one candidate, Anthony D. Weiner, was engulfed by a new scandal involving explicit online messages. The online version of the article includes a Postscript addressing the latest developments.

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