New York August 2001 (Central Park 3)

Concerns About Maintaining accesses of the Giuliani Era

By ADAM NAGOURNEY of the New York Times

TALKING POLITICS - Greenwich Village and SoHo

Richard Fitzgerald, a 49-year-old chauffeur who lives in Greenwich Village, was settled on a bench on a hot and muggy morning in Washington Square Park the other day. A police officer on a horse clip-clopped up a path to the side. Children crowded a playground, while dog owners ran their unleashed pets through a fenced-in field. And there was barely a drug dealer or homeless person in sight, an absence that Mr. Fitzgerald, who has been spending afternoons in the park since he was a teenager, noted with fresh approval and lingering astonishment. "Oh, God, there is almost no way to measure how much improvement he has done," Mr. Fitzgerald said, the unnamed "he" being the city's soon-to-depart mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. "I've lived here for 30 years, and I've hung out in this park for 30 years, and I feel so much better than I did 10 years ago," he said. "This park has really turned around. It's gotten cleaner, it's gotten safer."

In the view of advisers to the mayoral candidates, there are few neighborhoods in New York where the quality-of-life improvements of the past eight years can be better measured than in the 66th Assembly District. It is a middle-class, mostly low rise downtown patchwork that includes some of New York's most picturesque neighborhoods: Greenwich Village; SoHo, TriBeCa, Chelsea, and Battery Park City among them. Its residents voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Giuliani when he was first elected mayor In 1993, and then voted to re-elect him in 1997. It was a Democratic district settling in behind a Republican mayor, in one sign of how politics in New York were changed over those eight years. These days, voters in the 66th are pleased about the health of their City and the vibrancy of their neighborhoods, a reflection of the sentiment found in much of New York in a poll taken last week by The New York Times. They talk of tranquil parks, anxiety-free strolls at night, a bustling local economy, cleaner streets and a city that they seek to enjoy, rather than escape on summer week ends. And while Washington Square Park may still have its ragged edges, many of the residents who use it say the improvements over the past eight years are striking. But with three weeks to go until the mayoral primary, there are signs of anxiety as voters begin to consider the imminent departure of a mayor whose interest seemed so closely tied to middle-class neighborhoods like these.

"I am worried about the future," said Steven Man, 55, an optometrist who is a registered Democrat. "I don't know what will happen from here. It could go back to,the way it was. I'm really not sure, and that troubles me." And there is some concern about whether the next mayor - who will come from what remains, for most people, an unfamiliar cast - will, by choice or ability, continue the priorities that Mr. Giuliani has embraced. "None of the guys out there are qualified to do it; everybody out there is scary," said Andrew Nathan, 37, the former owner of a restaurant on Prince Street, Frontiere, which he closed a month ago as he prepared to move out of the city. (Mr. Nathan, a strong Giuliani supporter and a Republican, said the timing of his own departure had nothing to do with the change at City Hall.)

There are more than a few people like Marianne Salerno, 60, a medical assistant who lives in the West Village, who said they would vote for Mr. Giuliani again, were he not barred from seeking reflection by term limits. "I'm a little apprehensive," she said. Still, this is the part of New York where the Reform Democrat movement came alive, and that produced Edward 1. Koch (he still lives just off Washington Square Park), Bella S. Abzug, and the birth of the modern gay rights movement, at the Stone- wall Inn on Christopher Street. Thus, if there is something approaching an approving consensus on some of Mr. Giuliani's policies, the mayor him- self is another matter: many people do not seem unhappy that the city's first Republican mayor in 20 years is about to leave the stage.

"I think the city is a little bit safer - and that's good," said Lisa Gilbert, a writer of librettos, poetry and short stories, who lives in the West Village. "But I'm wondering at what cost. So I'm going to be glad that someone else is going to be mayor." And if some voters are not upset at Mr. Giuliani's departure, they are nonetheless judging his successors by the benchmarks that he set for his government.

When asked the problems they wanted the next mayor to focus on, voters more often than not pointed to the kind of second-tier governmental functions that implicitly suggest an overall satisfaction with the way New York is delivering such basic services as police protection and garbage pickup. They talked about the park system - which Peter F. Vallone, the City Council speaker and a Democratic mayoral candidate, recently identified as the one governmental department he would never cut as mayor - or noise on the street, or municipal recreation programs, or cleaning up graffiti, or widening the new bicycle path along the Hudson River....