Fireworks over Manhattan - 30 August 2002

I hope I'm not being patronising in reminding you that Manhattan, one of five city boroughs, is an island.

I hope I'm not being patronising in reminding you that Manhattan, one of five city boroughs, is an island.

The great New York composer, Richard Rodgers' first published song called it "an isle of joy".

Well that's a disputable description but anyway it is an island, lying offshore from the mainland of the United States and is enclosed by two rivers - the Hudson and the East River.

My study window, from where I'm talking now, fronts, as you must have heard, on a rolling ocean of foliage called Central Park.

When I retreat to the back of the apartment I can look out towards Long Island.

Last Monday night there was, from our kitchen window, a sudden series of explosions and from our roof, looking out to the suspension bridge that links us to Long Island, you could have seen a jetting fountain of fireworks, with the usual bangings, all ending in a great plume of smoke which nobody - no old person - dare describe as being in the shape of a mushroom.

There was evidently a very fancy ceremony going on out there.

It was, in fact, the opening ceremony of the last of the four major tennis championships - the United States Open.

There's usually a short show and loudspeakers blasting at the 20,000 or so people piled up, layer on layer, to the skies.

By the way, will somebody tell me why people buy seats on the back of the topmost row where Jupiter and Scorpio seem nearer than the two midgets you've paid to see? - and you've paid handsomely - merely to watch two tiny beetles scurrying on a postcard about half a mile down that-a-way.

And you could, for nothing, have stayed at home and watched the sweat on Agassi's eyebrows.

Well, as I say, it's usually a short blaring gung-ho event, more like a cattle auction, with excited announcers introducing that ..."greaayt champion... let's hear it for Jimmy Connors". Loud cheers.

This time it was very different. It was at once rousing, solemn, majestic, moving.

The opening was called a commemorative tribute to the heroes of 11 September.

The band of the Merchant Marine Academy stood erect and played on the stadium court.

They were flanked by honour guards from the New York Police Department and the Fire Department.

Police from the New York Port Authority and a file of marines carried 60 flags representing all the nations whose citizens are playing here.

Tony Bennett, who is a great tennis fan and a fair player, was on hand to sing "America the Beautiful".

And at the end a great flag signed by the families of Twin Towers victims was raised high to heaven.

Discretely hidden from most people's view were several armies of agents, from every city, state and federal department that wears a uniform and some that don't.

They were, you might call them, detectives. And they were at the ready to stop and search every one of the 26,632 fans who passed through the entrance gates.

The fans had been warned to allow an extra hour to pass into the grounds.

All handbags were searched. Every car, truck, van, bus that came through had its passengers scanned and its trunk and undercarriage searched.

Signs at the gates marked the prohibition of all backpacks, briefcases, video cameras, radios, television sets, flags on sticks, all glass containers and tin cans.

You might wonder how you can scan with any confidence the undercarriage of a bus, a van or a truck - well they say officially it's done with mirrors.

What they don't mention is that for all the radios and the sensors and the cellphones and the chips and other communicating marvels of our age, they had one spy who possesses a detective gift beyond the known ability of any human being, be he Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking - neither of whom could smell a bomb at 50 yards or for that matter at two yards.

But Storm can. Storm is a priceless police dog who trailed the agents over and across every yard of the entrances and beyond.

But the finishing touch, the final touch of grandeur, was given to the ceremony by the totally unexpected arrival of his majesty.

Put it this way - who is the most powerful single elected man in the United States?

Answer: George W Bush.

Correct. Who is the second most powerful politician?

Answer: The mayor of New York City.

In some ways the mayor is more powerful than the president.

No president, I believe, dare abolish, say, a cabinet department. He might suggest it.

Mayor Bloomberg, a while back, came into public notice for the first time, by saying he'd thought of abolishing the city school board and taking the schools into his own hands with, at his side, his own schools' chancellor.

Mayor Bloomberg has not, until the past maybe month or so, been much noticed by the average citizen.

Which is a compliment to him. Most mayors come bearing the torch of their campaigns and are ready to do flaming battle for the causes they espoused and of course they soon acquire enemies.

Mayor Bloomberg did not promise Utopia, or even a tax cut.

He's a very rich man who, whatever his old party allegiance, ran as an independent.

He said he'd run on his own money and he had one ambition - to be the mayor of every New Yorker.

He's a handsome man - quiet, he doesn't bellow.

I can't myself think of another politician who moves and addresses people, singly or in the mass, with such ease, dignity and humour.

His election was a big surprise, though there's no question that his warm endorsement by the retiring mayor - Rudolph Giuliani - had a lot to do with it.

For the first few months all we knew about Mayor Michael Bloomberg was low key and admirable.

He'd gone off every day to pay his compliments to every section of the five boroughs and listen to their grievances - the blacks, the Latinos, the Muslims, the Catholics, the conservative Jews, the orthodox Jews, the reformed Jews and of course the veteran traditional New York types - Italian Americans, Irish Americans - and then out to Brighton Beach on Long Island to get to know the community that is as Russian as Moscow.

However, in the past month politics has raised its angry head and enemies, formerly invisible, have come out shouting or complaining into the open.

First, the mayor had to decide what to do about a sudden rise in the homeless - not enough beds, so many had to sleep on the floor of the shelters.

Mayor Bloomberg took over an old, abandoned city jail as a transit stop on the way to something permanent.

Outrage from citizens protesting that to force children to sleep in a jail would make them practically apprentices to crime.

Then the mayor dropped a bombshell: he was going to ask each borough to adopt the California law which bans all smoking - not only in public places, which is nearly universal in America - but in all restaurants and all bars and outdoor cafes.

His aim is to protect waiters, bartenders and the like from passive smoking which the government's Centre for Disease Control says kills just about as many people as AIDS.

About 3,000 restaurant owners protested that he's going to ruin their business.

They said the same in San Francisco and Los Angeles but it turned out not to be so. In a month or two everybody was used to it.

But in the papers and on the telly there have been indignant citizen smokers who probably agree with the man who cried: "I thought Bloomberg was a regular guy who'd make a great mayor. Now if I take a smoke with my beer he makes me feel like a criminal."

I'm sure the mayor's office calculated how many votes he'd lose from the smoking man.

Then somebody, almost certainly the man himself, had an idea.

He would go out to Flushing Bay and attend the opening ceremony of the tennis championships.

Among the 26,000 present, 70% of them, if they follow the national statistic, do not smoke but love tennis and mayors who come to watch tennis - somebody they didn't see through the whole eight years of Rudolph Giuliani's term.

Before him was Mayor David Dinkins who was a tennis nut.

Now the new tennis centre was built on the fringes of La Guardia airport and Mayor Dinkins stopped the aeroplanes from flying over the centre court during the tournament - an act that upset the Federal Aviation Authority and so enraged the succeeding Mayor Giuliani that he never visited the tennis centre.

Mayor Bloomberg has redeemed that omission.

Time to consult an ex-mayor who's become a sort of city sage, who blithely judges, like a show horse judge, how each mayor is doing.

And he is the inimitable Ed Koch, who through eight years strode through mocking crowds, booing demonstrators, arms spread-eagled and crying: "How'm I doin'?"

The rubicund old Mayor Koch was consulted this week.

"Mr Bloomberg," he said, "has done remarkably well.

"The usual honeymoon is six months. He's gone nine months more.

"But when they start booing him it won't mean a thing. This too will pass."

Mr Koch remembered how, one morning, he was just leaving his downtown apartment and he ran into a small troop of people bearing signs saying: "Koch must go!"

He stopped. He cried: "How'm I doin'?"

They put their signs down.

"Oh just fine Mr Mayor, just fine."

He shook their hands then he went on his way.

They picked up the signs and renewed the tramp and the chant: "Koch must go! Koch must go!"

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