Cranes drop Bloomberg in it

Capricious fortune may have caught up with New York's Mayor Bloomberg. For six years the short, brainy, slightly nerdy Mayor has kept the peace while transferring his Midas touch from his own multi-billion dollar business to the City's economy, and New Yorkers have come to love him for it.

He cut the perfect figure for Boris Johnson's first official guest, lending the gaffe-prone new London mayor a measure of credibility. (He even manages to fly his private jet to his homes in London and Bermuda for regular long weekends without being accused of running his city from a Turkish boat.)

In short, Bloomberg was seen by many Americans beyond New York as not only the calm managerial mayor they wished they had, but also as a man they wished would run for president. But the lethal crash of a construction crane in Manhattan on Friday - the second within three months - looks like it could change that almost overnight.

Over the weekend, the mayor who could do no wrong was humiliated first by New York State Governor David Paterson announcing a state investigation into his city's building codes and safety standards, and then a City councillor demanding another from Washington. As if Bloomberg couldn't tell both Washington and New York State how to run their offices: both of them are broke while Bloomie has taken New York City from a $6 billion deficit to a $3 billion surplus.

For once, the sanguine little guy was testy. "There's nothing wrong with the Department of Buildings," he snapped at Governor Paterson's back-stabbing initiative. "The Department didn't crash. The crane crashed."

There lies the rub: to New Yorkers there is special significance to cranes falling out of the sky. They have been looking heavenwards since the days of Superman and Metropolis when Manhattan became the first city to have its global power measured in skyscrapers. That is one reason why the Twin Towers terrorist disaster of 9/11 struck so deep into the city's already-neurotic psyche.

Cranes have a symbolic role. When they swing through the sky, the city is booming. When they are still, or gone, hard times are here. This has never been more true than in Bloomberg's golden times. The average number of new building projects has risen by 26 per cent a year, and these are not family homes. They are the mighty office blocks of New Times Square and the glittering condominium towers of the West Side and Down Town.

The construction boom is Bloomberg's signature, the engine of his city's growth. He has not done it by smiling. He has not done it by replacing his predecessor Rudolph "Nasty Man" Giuliani's penchant for vendetta and racial division with Bloomie pragmatism. He has done it by throwing out planning restrictions and cutting New York's cats-cradle of red tape.

Has he also abandoned the codes and regulations that keep his citizens safe from the corner-cutting, cost-saving of the super-rich who build these things for profit, and whose nature Bloomberg the self-made billionaire understands all too well? The falling crane could prove to be the most appropriate possible signal of the end of the Bloomberg Era. ·