Fiorello La Guardia, mayor from 1934 to 1945, had a Jewish mother, but Beame was the first mayor of New York City who was an observant Jew. The Mayor of New York City is the executive director of the New York City Government, as stipulated in the New York City statutes. The current incumbent of office, the 110th in the sequence of regular mayors, is Eric Adams, a member of the Democratic Party. The Consolidated City Statute of 1897 stipulated that the mayor should be elected for a single four-year term.
Despite his extensive financial experience, Beame could not prevent a catastrophe at City Hall in 1975, when banks refused to buy more municipal bills, claiming that New York had not provided adequate information on real estate taxes that had not been collected. Taxes and public transport fares increased, free tuition at City University disappeared, an army of municipal workers was left out of work, municipal services were reduced to the bone, some agencies passed into the hands of the state, and the mayor was forced to give up his autonomy in relation to budgets, expenses and employment contracts. Also lurking around the corner was the most serious fiscal crisis the city had ever faced: a lack of trust in municipal credit and recurring problems with bankruptcy that would jeopardize the structure of life in New York. Beame, who was New York's first Jewish mayor, died at the New York University Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since July, said spokesman Howard Rubenstein.
Beame, an accountant and Democrat from the headquarters of a club who climbed the gray ranks of municipal accounting and confused bettors to become mayor of New York in the mid-1970s, only to spend his term fighting the worst fiscal calamity in the city's history, died yesterday at the New York University Medical Center in Manhattan. Brooklyn elected a mayor from 1834 until its consolidation in 1898 in Greater New York City, whose second mayor (1902-190), Seth Low, had been mayor of Brooklyn from 1882 to 1885. As if the day of judgment never came, Mayor Wagner, to a certain extent, and Mayor Lindsay, had largely ignored fiscal reality and had led New Yorkers to believe the elegant fiction that their government could afford whatever they considered appropriate in the richest city in the world. In 1976, New York was the center of the euphoric celebration of the nation's bicentennial and, after considerable pressure from Mr. Basically, the banks and the bond market that lent money to New York to pay the bills decided in 1975 that the city's spending binge had finally posed a serious risk and cut off the faucet.
Beame, the former accountant and head of the municipal budget who in 1975 presided over the worst budget crisis in New York City as mayor, died on Saturday in New York due to complications from open heart surgery. New York had already experienced a painful year of staff cutbacks, and Congress was growing in the view that the city needed to be rescued. Beame was a Jewish candidate for mayor of a city that had more Jews than Tel Aviv, but 25 percent of the Jewish vote went to the victorious Mr. Direct.
The mayoral elections of the unconsolidated New York City began in 1834 for a one-year term, which was extended to two years after 1849. In New York, poverty, unemployment, and crime were rising; the city was losing industrial jobs that had long supported the municipal tax base; and there was a huge exodus of middle class taxpayers.
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