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On Monday morning, Mayor David N. Dinkins and his top aides will transport the nerve center of New York City government to Brooklyn Borough Hall for a week of political theater aimed at putting the Mayor of all of the people in closer contact with some of them.
For five days -- at a time when New York's municipal bindings, and his own mayoralty, seem especially frayed -- Mr. Dinkins will use an empty ceremonial office whose last mayoral occupant was Seth Low, Brooklyn's chief executive when the modern city came together in 1898. He will visit neighborhoods so far from lower Manhattan that Mayors usually reach them only by helicopter, and then not too often these days.
Mr. Dinkins could be forgiven for wanting to get out of City Hall, where he has been dogged in recent days by a pair of ethical embarrassments. First, his former campaign finance chairman, Arnold I. Biegen, admitted stealing $158,000 from the Mayor's war chest. Now, the Mayor is struggling to justify keeping his Housing Authority chief, Laura D. Blackburne, amid allegations of lavish spending of public funds. [ Page 26. ]
It is hardly likely, of course, that these problems will simply stay back on the west side of the Brooklyn Bridge. But the Brooklyn road trip was planned long before these newest troubles began. It is to be the first in a series of weeklong visits in the coming months to boroughs outside Manhattan and to a Manhattan neighborhood beyond City Hall, all intended to counter the boroughs' sense that this particular Mayor is too isolated from them, too much the Mayor of the Manhattan that he once led as borough president.
Or as Mr. Dinkins put it this week with his trademark understatement: "At the very least, symbolically, we will demonstrate an awareness that this city, of course, consists of five boroughs. In a very material, concrete way we are going to focus on that borough during that period."
Continue reading the main storyOf course, simply moving his office to Brooklyn is no guarantee that Mr. Dinkins will understand Brooklyn better or be more sensitive to Brooklynites' concerns, though he will undoubtably see more of them. His past pledges to visit neighborhoods more frequently have sometimes gone unfulfilled, but his aides say they plan to make him a visible presence throughout the borough.
The experiment comes at a critical moment for both the boroughs and the Mayor in the nation's only five-county municipality. At least two boroughs, Queens and Staten Island, are pursuing the idea of secession with varying degrees of seriousness. Leaders in all of them fear that recent changes in the City Charter that shifted power from the borough presidents to the City Council have diminished government's recognition of the sense of identity that leads people to say they live in the Bronx, and to describe visiting Manhattan as "going to the city."
For himself, Mr. Dinkins is gearing up for re-election and trying to rebuild an electoral coalition that has been shaken by the accumulated vicissitudes of two years in office, and by the fiscal problems that have so thoroughly dominated his attention. In both black neighborhoods that voted for him in record numbers and white ethnic enclaves that gave him no support, there is restiveness.
"The Mayor's very ingratiating, and if he'd done this in the beginning, and gone into neighborhoods more, he could have done himself a lot of good," said Councilman Herbert E. Berman of Brooklyn, whose district includes Canarsie and Mill Basin. "Now, I don't know. I think people would just be antagonistic. But he has an obligation to be there, and hopefully this'll prompt a change."
Mr. Dinkins insists that he spends time all around the city, and indeed, he spent hours on the streets of Crown Heights during the racial violence there last summer. But the main complaint of a group of young people with whom he met to discuss the crisis was that they had never seen him before. Efforts to hold "Town Hall" discussions in neighborhoods sputtered last year after only three meetings, a casualty, aides say, of the time spent dealing with the fiscal problems and of Mr. Dinkins's own unease in engaging large groups in unstructured settings.
So next week, the Mayor will go walking in Brighton Beach and eat lunch in a Russian restaurant, spend part of an afternoon with a community police officer in Sunset Park, visit students at the violence-scarred Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York and have coffee with selected families.
Of course, he could do all those things without taking more than 30 aides, three telecopiers, a score of telephones, and secretaries, press aides and reporters across the East River amid fanfare. More than a few mayoral aides are rolling their eyes and crossing their fingers at the logistical headaches and public relations pitfalls involved in what some City Hall wags have dubbed "government in exile."
But past Mayors have made similar nods to the boroughs, though for different reasons. Fiorello H. La Guardia moved City Hall's operations to the Bartow-Pell Mansion in the Bronx to escape the summer heat, and John V. Lindsay set up a network of "Little City Halls" in several communities to dispense help and advice.
"I think it's a pretty good idea," said Borough President Claire Shulman of Queens, who has invited Mr. Dinkins to share her office suite in April. "It depends, of course, on how it's implemented. But I think it's important that the Mayor recognize that Manhattan is not the only borough and that the other boroughs have needs and problems, too." The Brooklyn Shuttle
All six deputy mayors, not always known for their comity, are to join Mr. Dinkins, and work together with their staff chiefs and secretaries in one 2,500-square-foot former courtroom in the newly restored Borough Hall.
The Mayor's office will run an hourly shuttle van across the Brooklyn Bridge, and he will hold news conferences, staff meetings and all routine activities in Brooklyn, riding to Borough Hall the first day on the subway from the Upper East Side.
"Look, there are people that are always going to be cynical," Ms. Shulman said. "But you can work it to your advantage. I can take the Mayor to see things he wouldn't know about otherwise."
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