It's fascinating, yet frightening, to watch the media transform Rudy Giuliani. In fact, since New York is a media capital, as well as the city in which Rudy created the record the press now mythologizes, it is terrifying.
David Saltonstall, writing in the New York Daily News about former FBI Chief Louis Freeh's endorsement of Giuliani;
Even the setting for today's endorsement -Times Square- is intended to send a message. It is meant to highlight Giuliani's efforts at battling crime and cleaning up a once dangerous and tattered environment, a skill he has suggested could be just as useful in Iraq today as New Yorkof the 1990s.
Times Square was tattered before Giuliani took office. Long before. It's clean up is known to almost every New Yorker as the "Disneyfication" of the area. Because it was a development deal between Disney, Ford and the Dinkins administration, that finally changed Times Square.
The changes had been coming; as you can see from the number of porn shops:
from a high of 147 in 1975. Numbers continued to decline through the eighties. There were forty-seven in 1993--Giuliani took office in 1994--and by the end of 1996, before his zoning law even went into effect--the number had dropped to thirteen.
The memorandum of intent between Disney and the City of New York was signed during the administration of David Dinkins. Giuliani had nothing to do with the clean up of Times Square. Nothing. Absolutely Nothing.
(h/t mememorandum)
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