Bill de Blasio had his helicopter land in Prospect Park last week -- ruining a fun park day for families and children. Photo: Twitter ; R. Umar Abbasi
New Yorkers enjoying Brooklyn’s Prospect Park late one Friday afternoon this month got a surprise: an NYPD helicopter landing in the middle of a field.
No, they weren’t responding to a terrorist attack or a scary clown. It was just our fearless mayor — hopping the chop because he was late for a Queens event.
De Blasio’s Operation On Time matters beyond being just another flub. It reminds us of lots of things wrong with Hizzoner, from failing to safeguard New Yorkers’ quality of life to fiscal profligacy.
First, there’s the obvious: Helicopter travel isn’t progressive. Unless you travel by coal-fired space shuttle, it’s hard to think of a way of getting around that’s worse for the air.
These aren’t global-warming emissions we’re talking about here, although there’s that. Helicopters spew regular old nitrous oxide and other toxins, the stuff that gives kids asthma. When you walk by the heliport on Manhattan’s West Side, you walk fast — because it smells bad and is deafeningly loud.
Sure, Mike Bloomberg and other mayors used helicopters. But one doesn’t recall them landing in a public park.
No mayor should be using the park as a heliport any more than he should race his SUV motorcade across Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow to cut travel time.
De Blasio’s private need — to avoid the embarrassment of yet another tardy appearance — outweighed the public right of Brooklyn’s kids to use their park without breathing in toxic fumes. Progressive for thee, but not for me.
It would be one thing if the mayor were a hawk on quality-of-life issues, and just being hypocritical here. But he isn’t interested in protecting New Yorkers from the helicopter traffic that continues to plague waterfront New Yorkers, nor is he interested in protecting them from construction noise.
And de Blasio is uninterested in traffic and transit. Well, yes: He can avoid it. Meanwhile, the subways are finally so full that they’re losing riders, as people choose bikes, or, if they’ve got money to spare, Uber, to avoid the rush.
Frustrated drivers block intersections, making both walking and driving worse than it’s been in a decade. It’s dangerous, too: 188 people have died in traffic so far this year, compared to 174 last year.
Plus, de Blasio still doesn’t know how to deal with the police. After the Prospect Park heliport incident, the mayor’s people blamed the NYPD, saying his security detail is in charge of getting him around in whatever way they see fit.
Nonsense. The mayor supervises the police, not the other way around.
De Blasio is also sending a bad message to cops. If the mayor can park his helicopter illegally in Prospect Park, why shouldn’t officers park their private cars in illegal spots all over the city, blocking sidewalks, bike lanes and crosswalks?
The incident also demonstrates the mayor’s fiscal irresponsibility. Helicopters and the police who pilot them and secure their landing spots are expensive. All four of the city’s “rags” — the term the mayor uses for newspapers that report the facts — have written recently that the city’s payroll is at record levels.
This would perhaps be OK if the mayor had worked to reform city workers’ health-care and pension packages, but nope. Progressive means that city workers can avoid the government-retiree safety nets — Social Security and Medicare — that everyone else relies upon.
Finally, the mayor is showing which of the “tale of two cities” he wants to live in. Once you’ve joined the helicopter class, it’s hard to go back to traveling like a commoner. The skies are full of indispensable men.
The mayor fancies himself an important man, and he is: The decisions he makes can save or cost lives.
But he’s not all that important, just as no public (or corporate) official is. If he’s late to give a speech in Queens — or even if he doesn’t show — it doesn’t matter. A waitress who is late for her shift causes more problems than does a mayor who fails to give yet one more workaday speech.
Public officials love to cocoon themselves to revel in how critical they are. Perhaps de Blasio should spend some time walking or taking the subway, to remind himself instead of how the other 99.99 percent lives.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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