Posted on October 4, 2017 by Jarrett Murphy in The Nation The Nation, By Jarrett Murphy New York City’s most consequential mayors were all builders. Fiorello La Guardia presided over a massive build-out of the city’s infrastructure, paid for by federal New Deal dollars. Robert Wagner developed a huge amount of public housing. Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg nurtured private construction while engineering the creation of tens of thousands of units of subsidized housing. Each of these mayors served three terms, the only people in city history to do so; together, they ran the city for 48 of the last 84 years. Three of those men are dead, but daily life in the city still occurs in and on their physical legacies.
