HOW far away those dark days seemed in July ’76, as Beame sat in the Rainbow Room with a large party of Democratic well-wishers, the bright lights of the city shimmering in every window, a few hours after that final chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” He couldn’t help showing off the personal letter he’d received from Jimmy Carter, who promised the city complete support from the White House.
New York had been though hell, but in the summer of ’76 there was reason for hope. It was a feeling more than anything, palpable, if not quantifiable, that the embattled city was on the edge of a new day. America’s hostility toward New York had only reawakened the city’s pride, and the bicentennial celebrations had confirmed its preeminence. Washington was the nation’s capital, Philadelphia the birthplace of its independence, but when it came time to commemorate the country’s 200th birthday, no one even gave it a second thought: New York would be the center of the action.
Los Angeles could have The Tonight Show; New York now had Saturday Night, a subversive ninety-minute sketch comedy show that had debuted less than a year before and was already capturing more than twenty-two million viewers a week. The counterculture was starting to migrate from San Francisco to New York, a trend evidenced by Rolling Stone’s plan to relocate from Haight-Ashbury to midtown Manhattan in the summer of ’77. And just as America’s bicentennial celebrations had awakened a nation’s interest in its history, so one of the surprise best sellers of 1976, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, had rekindled nostalgia for a critical chapter of that narrative, the immigrant experience on New York’s Lower East Side.
Bold new restaurants were opening, including the extravagantly refurbished Tavern on the Green. The food was forgettable—“Took home a doggie bag,” wrote one critic. “The dog refused it.”—but the vote of confidence in the future of Central Park wasn’t. (Take that, Johnny!) The new Tavern was the brainchild of a man-child, the 264-pound Warner LeRoy, who had grown up in Hollywood on the back lots of Warner Brothers, which his maternal grandfather had founded. (One of LeRoy’s earliest childhood memories was of skipping along the yellow brick road; after the filming had been completed, he got to keep Toto as a pet.) When the time came, though, LeRoy declined to take over the family business, and moved to New York instead. He had his own passion for entertaining and transporting that needed cultivating.
The downtown crowd had its place, One Fifth, so named for its Fifth Avenue address, a former NYU dormitory at the corner of Eighth Street. Its proprietor, George Schwartz, had opened the place in January ‘76, envisioning it as New York’s La Coupole. In a sense, it was. “It started with fashion people and a woman named Larissa who made furs for rock stars,” Schwartz recalls. “Suddenly all hell broke loose, and we were the ‘in’ place.” Nineteen-seventies New York was not 1930s Paris, but the restaurant’s decor—cruise ship art deco—provided a whimsical diversion from the dirty, deserted streets outside. Schwartz had picked up all the furnishings a few years earlier, when a 1930s Cunard liner washed up in the New York Harbor with a broken engine. Rather than foot the bill to have it repaired, the ship’s owner auctioned off its contents. Schwartz bought the lights, chairs, port windows, and German brass sconces that had filled its first-class smoking room and reassembled them in his new restaurant. The wait staff was gay and gorgeous; the maître d’ wore tails, a lorgnette, and heavily gooped slicked-back hair. The food was continental American. No one knew who the chef was; no one cared who the chef was.
Still farther downtown, on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, the two inarticulate towers that had received such scathing notices two years earlier, was Windows on the World. New York magazine’s food critic, Gael Greene, couldn’t resist the symbolism when the restaurant opened for business in the spring of 1976. “Suddenly I knew, absolutely knew—New York would survive,” she wrote. “If money and power and ego could create this extraordinary pleasure … this instant landmark … money and power and ego could rescue this city from the ashes.”
The next president was going to help too. When Carter launched his general election campaign in September, the city’s subway cars and buses were festooned with posters of his smiling Southern mug and his solemn vow, “I GUARANTEE THAT IF I GO TO THE WHITE HOUSE, I’LL NEVER TELL THE PEOPLE OF THE GREATEST
CITY ON EARTH TO DROP DEAD.” On his final swing through the Northeast two months later, Carter showed up at a rally in the garment center with Beame by his side. Clasping the mayor’s hand, Carter proclaimed, “Together, we can do anything.” Two days before the election Beame summoned seventy New York City Democratic district leaders to Gracie Mansion and told them to make sure that everyone who was ambulatory got to the voting booths: New York could put its faith in J. C.
And so it did.
Without the impressive turnout in the city, Carter would not have won New York State, and without the state’s forty-one electoral votes, Carter would not have won the election. The president-elect wasted no time inviting Governor Carey, Felix Rohatyn, and Mayor Beame to his plantation on a little island off the Georgia coast to express his gratitude.
As for Beame, the pained expression that he’d worn for the better part of the last two years was finally giving way to something approaching a smile. “I think we’ve turned the corner and seen the light at the end of tunnel,” the Mighty Mite told reporters in the fall of 1976. By now the city had an election of its own approaching, the ’77 mayoral election. Beame sent the word around City Hall that, expectations to the contrary, he’d be running again after all.