In 1989, our headline was “For the Democrats: Dick Ravitch” in endorsing the businessman and former MTA chair for mayor as a highly qualified contender when our indecisive forebearers couldn’t pick between frontrunners Ed Koch and David Dinkins. Ravitch got clobbered, winning 4% in his only bid for elected office, but he did more for his city than just about any elected pol during a life that lasted almost 90 years and ended on Sunday.
May his memory be a blessing.
Ravitch saved the subway, the electric spine of New York, for the first time when he took a wheezing, dirty, dangerous system and bent to his will the Albany politicians, including the governor who appointed him, Hugh Carey, to impose a series of dedicated taxes in 1981. That was after Ravitch righted the state Urban Development Corp. (now called the Empire State Development Corp.)
Years later, as head of a gubernatorial-appointed special panel, he saved the subway a second time, proposing and pushing through to passage a new dedicated payroll tax for transit in 2009. In January, he wrote in these pages that post-COVID, the trains again needed added funding, which they got.
In between he served for a bit as lieutenant governor, less for ambition (he hated the powerless job), and more for duty when New York was at the mercy of a band of criminals in charge of the state Senate and one the gangsters could have become governor.
We would talk often with him, his gravelly voice arguing for or against something. He was mostly right, such as championing congestion pricing and for regular, inflation-based transit fare hikes every other year. He fought to stop the stupid plan for Penn Station favoring Vornado. Even as he exits, Dick is winning a lot, as congestion pricing received its last federal signoff on Friday, the final fare hearing for inflation-based fare hikes was last night and the Vornado plan has been dropped.
Back in 1989, Ravitch would have been a good mayor. But he did so much more.
