As in: 40 years ago, 1969. Richard Nixon had been elected president with bullet-headed, venom-spouting know-nothing Spiro Agnew as his vice president; the war in Vietnam was in full throttle; New York had lost its Senator Robert F. Kennedy; America’s cities were on the precipice of destruction; New York itself was churning as the white working class rose up, black communities roiled and city services creaked to a halt. The impossibly handsome mayor, blue-eyed, crooked-toothed WASP Republican John Lindsay, who had been elected as the white knight of urban politics in 1965, was running for reelection and had lost his primary to Senator John Marchi of Staten Island. He was suddenly a man without a party line.

The New York Yankees were playing without Mickey Mantle for the first time since 1950.

New York City, exhausted, filthy, hot, wheezing, broke and worn out, had gone from being the greatest city of winners in the world to looking like a grimy city of losers. The next mayor of New York was about to be an angry tough conservative Democrat with a pencil moustache named Mario Procaccino, who was pictured on the cover of Time leading the white working class as they stormed the Bastille of New York power.

And then history sneezed. For one weird, hot summer, events became a mad spasm in New York City.

There was, of course, the fact that man was about to drop his first boot on the moon. There was the massive, naked, muddy majesty of Woodstock, which was a cultural shock to the American consciousness.

But mostly the story of New York City in 1969 was the mysterious convergence of two weird partners: the scampy New York Mets and the aristocratic prep-schooled, Yale-educated, baseball-innocent mayor, John Lindsay. 

The New York Mets, managed by the former Brooklyn Dodgers all-star first baseman Gil Hodges, began winning games, led by their two young starting pitchers, Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. And John V. Lindsay began to gain in the polls as the New York tradition of white limousine liberals, working-class voters and the black community began to assert itself.

“Locally, the city is being torn apart,” said Jay Kriegel, then a driven, black-spectacled aide to Mayor Lindsay in his City Hall Camelot. “Conflicts are raging. You go through a transit strike, three teachers’ strikes, the teamsters are opening up drawbridges so people can’t cross them by day. It was crazy!”

“I was chief of staff to Senator Jacob Javits and I knew John Lindsay from a few meetings at state caucuses,” said Richard Aurelio, Mr. Lindsay’s campaign manager that year. “He asked me, I guess, in the spring of ’69 to run his campaign. He showed me the polls, which had him at a very low margin.”

Mr. Aurelio immediately recommended that he forgo running from the Republican primary—he felt there wasn’t a chance he could win. But the base of Mr. Lindsay’s home district—the so-called Silk Stocking 17th Congressional District—insisted he run. He lost to John Marchi.

“Primary night when it was announced Marchi had won, it was one of the most dispiriting nights in my life,” said Sid Davidoff, the deputy campaign manager. “We had come in there as the first Republican mayor in forever and then we lost that primary.”

“The polls asked: What do you most dislike about John Lindsay?” said Mr. Aurelio. And the polls said “he was too preferential to the blacks, to minorities. That struck me as being just as something we could turn around. My experience in New York was that New Yorkers had a social conscience, and this to me seemed a little bit bizarre and atypical of the real New York that I knew. And so I agreed to take it on.”

“I thought there had to be three elements to our campaign:

“One he had to acknowledge mistakes in his first term in a way to humble himself; we had to bring him down to size,” he said. “You know, he was a huge in a kind of high-class elegant way and he was tall, handsome. We had to bring him down to size and show a little bit of humbleness.”

“One of the knocks on Lindsay was that he was an elitist and a tall guy in a suit who was out of touch with us,” said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who was then a speechwriter for Democrat Howard Samuels. “Then he was in this ad where he appeared facing the camera, which was unusual then, with his sleeves rolled up, and he apologized and he was talking about the mistakes he made. It was a very compelling ad.”

“Two, his campaign had to be based on confronting the hostile neighborhoods, not his base,” said Mr. Aurelio. “We weren’t going to spend any time at rallies where he was going to be cheered. We were going to go to the boroughs where most of the hostility occurred. We were going to confront the people in Queens who were angry about the snowstorm and the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhoods that were angry about the decentralization ideas and his preference for the black neighborhoods. We needed to prick their conscience.

“Three, was his willingness to come out against Vietnam, which was unpopular in New York.”

But most of all, John Lindsay benefited from his competition.

There was Mario Procaccino, the Akim Tamiroff look-alike, a Bronx-native who was the city comptroller.

“The setup encouraged me the day after the primary,” said Mr. Aurelio. “We were essentially running against two conservatives. We had Procaccino and Marchi, two Italians, and they were kind of splitting the Italian-American vote and they were splitting the conservative vote, and splitting the anti-Lindsay vote. Procaccino … was linked to the old Democratic organizations and the so-called Democratic bosses, which were gradually losing their power. Marchi was a clear conservative and endorsed by Bill Buckley and that crowd.”

“Procaccino didn’t fit the occasion!” said Jimmy Breslin, the journalist who wrote New York magazine’s epochal piece “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” that summer. “He’s your mayor? That fucking midget Procaccino would have said something crazy.”

“Procaccino was a funny-looking man and he was a total joke,” said Ronnie Eldridge, now married to Mr. Breslin, and a point person in recruiting Democrats to Mr. Lindsay’s campaign in the summer of 1969.

“Procaccino was a blustery guy and he had an attitude about other Democrats: fuck ’em,” said Mr. Auletta. “He didn’t reach out to Democrats. He was short, but he was also a very small man. Lindsay immediately had the sympathy of Democrats everywhere.”

One of those Democrats was Mr. Auletta’s boss, Howard Samuels. Mr. Samuels, along with a handful of others, like future Congresswoman Bella Abzug, defected to support Mr. Lindsay. Meanwhile, Mr. Aurielo secured Alex Rose, the man who ran the Liberal Party—the still-powerful vessel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New York—to give their nomination to Mr. Lindsay.

“We had Democratic support, even though there weren’t a lot of them, and we scheduled their endorsements on almost a daily basis,” said Mr. Aurelio. “You got the impression that they were all supporting him even though there were 20 to 30 figures who backed him.”

“Somebody asked Frank Hogan”—the almost-permanent district attorney of New York—“at Gracie Mansion, at some freakin’ meeting, about John Lindsay,” said Jimmy Breslin, “and he said in the parking lot that Lindsay was the best mayor for the law enforcement we’ve had. Hogan’s name at that time was priceless. He was the big name in law enforcement in fucking America for crying out loud!

“It shut up a lot of people at once. Anybody that thought he was the limp-wristed John Lindsay, who won’t protect you from the blacks, the crimes, this and that, it shut everybody up.”

Then Golda Meir visited. The American-raised Israeli had become prime minister on St. Patrick’s Day and was a New York folk hero in the greatest Jewish city in the world. “The event that meant most to me was when Golda Meir came to New York City,” said Mr. Kriegel. “She is the pope for the Jewish community.”

Mr. Lindsay and his staff knew that she was set to come to the city. She would be coming in the early fall, right after Yom Kippur, and he wanted to plan a Sukkoth.

“Golda Meir is coming, we should build a sukkah and welcome Golda Meir to a state dinner run by John Lindsay,” said Mr. Davidoff. “So I’m looking at John Lindsay, this big WASP, and I’ve got to go and explain a sukkah to John and Mary Lindsay. Mary was very formal in a lot of ways, but when it came to stuff like that, she was like a diplomat’s wife. She understood that a state dinner should be at Lincoln Center.”

The Lindsay people understood that the Jewish middle-class Brooklyn and Queens base that felt so alienated by Mr. Lindsay, could be turned around. They would throw a lavish dinner for Golda Meir and it would be hosted by Mr. Lindsay. But Mr. Davidoff knew that if it were indoors at Lincoln Center, significant Jewish leaders wouldn’t come. So they planned a lavish affair in the parking lot behind the Brooklyn Museum.

“Every prominent and influential Jew from New York was there,” said Mr. Aurelio.

More than 2,000 people were invited to the event; Mr. Lindsay walked in wearing a yarmulke. He stood right next to her.

“There were thousands and thousands of people outside the Brooklyn Museum that night,” said Mr. Davidoff. “Afterwards, the sukkah was available for the public, and we put out a booklet explaining the sukkah … and we had John Lindsay write the prologue.” 

Ms. Meir was up on the dais and did everything but endorse John Lindsay. “They didn’t say it, but they didn’t have to say it,” said Mr. Davidoff.

A few days after she spoke, the Mets would play their first playoff game.

THE METS WERE born in 1962, the laughably disastrous team that tickled the broken heart of New York National League baseball after the Dodgers and Giants moved west in the late 1950s. They lost and lost and lost.

“Being traded to the Mets in those days was not a good option,” said Al Weis, a Mets utility infielder who became a hero of the ’69 series. “I was with the White Sox and we were always in contention. The Mets were a last-place club.”

“In ’69, I thought we would take the next step forward,” said Ron Swoboda, the Mets right-fielder. “I thought we’d be a little better than we were in ’68 … around .500, a little above, a little below.”

And for the most part that’s how the Mets played for most of the year, around the .500 mark. But on June 15, the Mets brought in a veteran first baseman.

“Donn Clendenon was a lawyer who engineered a deal that got him traded for the Mets,” said Ron Swoboda. “He physically engineered the deal. There weren’t many baseball players who were lawyers! The Pirates were trying to trade him to the Expos, and he told them that ‘I’ll give you a couple teams I’ll go to, but one of ’em ain’t the Expos; otherwise, I’ll go be a lawyer.’ And they believed him and traded him to us.

“When he walked in, everything changed,” said Mr. Swoboda. “He was a veteran thumper, a real hitter. He rode everyone in the clubhouse, he could get everyone in the clubhouse. … He was to me the missing link. When he came in here, everything changed.”

The Mets surged in the summer. They had Tom Seaver, the Mets Franchise, who had a career-high 25 wins; Jerry Koosman became one of the most sure-handed No. 2 men in baseball. And Gil Hodges, the manager, was a cool hand who, like Joe Torre  now, had universal respect.

“Gil was a very good manager, an honest manager, I’ll tell ya,” said Yogi Berra, who was the Mets first base coach in 1969. “When we started in spring training and we were doing signs, I said to Gil, ‘Want me to help them teach the signs?’ He said, ‘No, if they don’t know the signs by now, they get fined. And if you give them the signs, I’ll fine you.’ But everyone appreciated it, I’ll tell you. He did a great job and he was a good manager.”

When September rolled around, the Mets had a two-game series with the Cubs at Shea, and they were trailing by 2.5 games. People began to say that the Mets had magic.

“Everything didn’t come to a head until the latter part of the season,” said Al Weis. “We were plodding along winning a few ball games, and then all of a sudden we got into a hot streak.”

“The turning point was when we played the Cubs right there at the end,” said Wayne Garrett, the Mets red-headed rookie third baseman. “It was a series that really meant something. That’s when we really played well.”

They also had Black Magic. During one of the games, a black cat came out from the stands at Shea, circled the Cubs’ third baseman, Ron Santo, walked in front of the Cubs dugout, and then ran back underneath the stands. The Mets never looked back and took the division.

“There were cats all over that stadium,” said Mr. Garrett, the Mets rookie third baseman. “It was a freak accident. It happened to be a black cat, too! There were probably a few rats underneath that stadium, a few cats. They would come out on the field once in a while. They would come out momentarily and run back underneath he seats. It happened half a dozen times.”

The New York Mets clinched the division, swept the Braves and went to the World Series. The city was in disbelief.

Above all, there was the one magical moment that symbolized the Miracle Mets. In Game 4, with the Mets leading the heavily favored Orioles two games to one, the Mets had their ace in the hole: Tom Seaver. And, after a rough start in Game 1, he was brilliant again. Through eight innings, he was pitching a shutout. But there was trouble in the ninth.

There were runners at the corners. The Orioles’ superstar Frank Robinson was at third, and the Orioles tank of a man, Boog Powell, was at first. This was before the days of bringing in the closer; it was the era when the starter, an ace, was his own stopper. And the Mets were coming dangerously close to disaster. If the Orioles could bring home two runs, they would take the lead, the Mets momentum would be dead, and they wouldn’t be able to clinch the Series at Shea Stadium.

With late-afternoon shadows eating up home plate, Tom Seaver delivered a beautiful pitch to Brooks Robinson. It was a two-seam fastball, and it sank hard. But Robinson, always known for his glove, was a man who knew how to hit in the clutch. He hit a screaming liner to right center field. It was hit with such laser-beam precision, it looked like it could go into the gap, and if Mets center fielder Tommie Agee didn’t cut it off, it could score Boog Powell. 

Worse, it was going in the direction of Ron Swoboda, a solid hitter who was a mess in the outfield. He went in the wrong direction. Balls bounced over his head. He’d twist his body left and right, head pivoting and twirling like a screw top. Robinson hit his liner to right.

For years, Swoboda had been practicing fly balls. He was learning when a ball was hit and you couldn’t judge it, you waited a second. He learned which way to put out his glove, and which way to turn his head.

He cleared his mind, he conjured up nothing, he didn’t think, he reacted.

“I just broke immediately and I had a great jump on it,” said Mr. Swoboda. “When he hit it I said, ‘Oh shit! I got nothing to do but to run after this one.’ You want to intercept the ball at the earliest point. I realized I’m going to have to lunge at this sucker and it hit right in the web of the glove, which is the best place. I made a perfect break, I never stopped, I never faltered and I caught it back-end, fully laid out and kept rolling and I came up and threw into the infield.”

All who saw it agreed: one of the great catches ever. By the time Swoboda wound up, his cap fell off, and he got the ball into the infield, Frank Robinson tagged up and had scored the tying run. But it didn’t matter. Anyone who saw that play knew the Mets were going to win the game.

By the time the bottom of the 10th inning rolled around, the Mets had it won, and the next day, Cleon Jones fell to one knee and then bedlam broke loose. The New York Mets were the World Champions of baseball.

“I was running in clear space, and I was never sure I was going to get there,” said Mr. Swoboda. “I dove at it. It was clearly an example of your reach exceeding your normal capabilities—your reach exceeding your wildest dreams. Wasn’t that true of 1969 in every way?”

“I’ve seen replays of Cleon dancing up and down and all the players jumping up and down, but I got into that dugout and the clubhouse as fast I could,” said Al Weis. “Most of the players got off that field fast.”

“Anytime you win, boy, there’s commotion, I’ll tell you,” said Yogi Berra.

JOHN LINDSAY was dumbfounded.

“John Lindsay knew nothing about baseball, and he didn’t like it,” said Richard Reeves, the biographer and author of the forthcoming history of the Berlin Airlift, who was the New York Times City Hall bureau chief in 1969. “Literally at the end of each inning, he’d pop out of his seat and ask, ‘Is this over?’ And then he had to be pulled back down.”

“In one of those playoff games, he said, ‘If the game stays tied, then what happens? Who wins?’” said Shelly Brosoff, a member of the mayor’s staff who was sitting with him at Shea Stadium.

“He was crew in college, his twin brother was a boxer, and baseball was not his game of choice,” said Mr. Davidoff.

As Shea Stadium’s field was mobbed with delirious Mets fans, Mr. Brosoff guided Mr. Lindsay from their seats behind the dugout, onto the warning track, into the clubhouse.

Mr. Lindsay didn’t look much different from former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was standing inside the Mets clubhouse with his arms crossed and a stoic, somewhat bewildered look on his face. Mayor Lindsay didn’t know what to do.

“Tom Seaver was sitting on a stool and guys were around all around him and Champagne was flying everywhere,” said Mr. Brosoff.

“I gave the mayor a bottle of Champagne and I said to him, ‘You see that guy on the stool?’—he didn’t know anybody, he wasn’t a baseball fan—and I said,  ‘See that guy over there? Go over there and pour this bottle of champagne on his head.’

“He looked at me and said, ‘Shelly are you crazy?’ I said, ‘No, no, go over there and pour on its head! Go and do it!’

Then Champagne was everywhere, and suddenly the tall dry mayor was in the middle of the wet Mets melee.

“It wasn’t something that was totally spontaneous,” said Mr. Aurelio, the campaign manager. “In the locker room, we kind of urged them to soak Lindsay. Here’s this patrician-type guy who some people, some of the ethnics, had turned against in the city, and now these white ethnics suddenly are seeing him being doused with Champagne over his face.”

Suddenly John V. Lindsay was a man of the people, a baseball fan, drenched in Queens, beloved in Brooklyn, the cross-cultural political phenomenon that he had been when elected in 1965. 

“I remember John Lindsay was in political trouble and he had this complete embrace of the team,” said Mr. Swoboda, the Mets right fielder. “He came in the clubhouse and he had himself doused in Champagne and he used all of it for the campaign: ‘The Mets can do it, I can do it! The Mets are an underdog, I am, too!’

“He even had guys on the team doing commercials and doing personal appearances for him. He totally used that whole event as a trigger for a campaign that was in big trouble.”

Then the Mets had a ticker-tape parade, the first time it happened for a World Series champion.

“It was touch-and-go until the last three or four weeks of the campaign,” said Mr. Aurelio. “In October, after the Mets victory, in the three weeks before the election, we felt the momentum going our way. Up until then, while I was hopeful and optimistic, I thought I was prepared to lose by a small margin.”

“I don’t know if he picks up a single vote for being at Shea and being in the locker room with Champagne,” said Mr. Kriegel. “This is a city that is very beaten down and just endlessly consumed in racial conflict and tension and recrimination. What the Mets do is create some sense across the city of a breath of fresh air, they feel good, a relaxer. It relieves the tension. It cuts it like a knife.”

“There was anger, a lot of anger,” said Mr. Davidoff. “The snowstorm, the teacher’s strike, the claim that Lindsay was giving away the city to minorities, there was decentralization—how many things do you have to go through! And with the Mets the city felt better, and when there’s a better feeling about the city, there’s a better feeling about the mayor.”

“The city went from being anti- this tall, handsome, WASP, debonair patrician,” said Mr. Aurelio, “into seeing him as a guy that was fighting the bosses and was attracting Democrats and fighting the radical right and who was fighting against the Nixon Vietnam policies and his insensitivity to the plight of the city,” said Mr. Aurelio. “And then with the Mets, it just was this dramatic change. A lot of it we were lucky to have happen to us, and a lot of if we inspired ourselves in clever ways. It was a lot of things coming together in a way that created the perfect comeback campaign.”

“Everything came together for that one shining moment,” said Mr. Reeves. “It was our Camelot. It all came together. And even with all that union and racial stuff, the Mets pulled those people together, and to a lesser extent, the Jets and the Knicks. It pulled together for that moment. The fact is Lindsay was a lousy mayor and the recession began in 1970, and Ford told the city to drop dead and then people abandoned the city. It was this kind of peak.”

So attention, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Paterson, Fred Wilpon and the Steinbrenner Boys: Don’t worry about the banks and Tim Geithner, pay no attention to the subways and the Fed. Give us a little magic. It doesn’t need to last forever. Just a few innings. For this summer and for this fall, if you want to save your butts, give us a few wins.

We’ll love you for a month or two.

jkoblin@observer.com

The event generated speculation that Fossella may seek to run for office again in the future, and demonstrated that yes, he’s still popular with in his district. Local elected officials who spoke–City Council members Jimmy Oddo and Vinny Ignizio, plus State Senator Andrew Lanza–all said they’d like to see Fossella in public service.

The mayor didn’t go that far in his remarks, but Bloomberg was one of the only elected officials from outside Staten Island to attend the event. (Another was Representative Peter King from Long Island, one of the last remaining Republicans in the New York congressional delegation; and John Catsimatidis, a long-shot Republican mayoral candidate.)

It's notable that Bloomberg, who's running for re-election next year, showed up at the event. Fossella was arrested for drunk driving this year, admitted later to fathering a child with the woman who bailed him out of jail, was recently sentenced to serve five days in a Virginia prison, and for that matter, never fully recovered from earlier allegations that he misused campaign funds for a Colorado ski trip.

But Bloomberg isn’t just running next year--he’s running for re-election next year,  Lindsay-esque, without belonging to a major party, and it's likely that he's looking to secure a ballot line. As evidenced by the turnout yesterday, Fossella still holds a great deal of clout with city Republicans (the remaining few, anyway).

When I asked Fossella if he’d like to see Bloomberg as the Republican candidate in next year’s mayor’s race, he said, “I will support the mayor 100 percent in whatever he runs for.”

"We can improve our schools, but we can do better," Mr. Bloomberg told The Observer during a press conference in the zoo's misty jungle world wing, where staff filled the empty seats between a handful of reporters. "We can diversify our economy, but we can always do better. We can help people get a job and have the dignity of being self-supported, but there's always more to help."

"We can always do better," he added, in a municipal echo of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" refrain. "So the basic answer to your question is, that's what the campaign is all about, but we should never think what we have done is enough. Hopefully, it will be the prelude to doing an awful lot more."

Having dispensed with the pesky detail of referendum-approved term limits, Mr. Bloomberg will almost certainly get the chance to do more.

What Mr. Bloomberg will also get is a four-year stretch that bears no resemblance whatsoever to all the big, wondrous things imagined for him by some of his senior political aides who are, by most accounts, far less enamored with the prospect of staying in City Hall than the mayor is.

In this Bloombergian bargain, the mayor has traded the status-enhancing (if entirely theoretical) notion that he could be president, vice president, Treasury secretary, overseer of a historic bailout or sitting national financial oracle in exchange for the grim near-certainty of continuing on as a bad-times mayor.

"You know one in the hand is worth two in the bush?" said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College, explaining the mayor's calculation. "One in the hand is worth all those in the bush."

It should be said that it's not entirely clear what national jobs, if any, Mr. Bloomberg actually gave up to be mayor again. The administration-generated rumors about Mr. Bloomberg's presidential (and then vice presidential) ambitions achieved press attention and some laudatory name-checking from the actual candidates, but the idea never went past the hype stage.

And as for a financial-guru role in the incoming administration, sources close to Mr. Obama made it clear during the search for a Treasury secretary that Mr. Bloomberg was not in consideration for that or other top jobs, especially after the mayor moved to overturn the two-term limit that would have ended his time in office.

But to hear Mr. Bloomberg's present and former aides tell it, the mayor's decision was a selfless one, necessitated by a sense of duty rather than a lack of options.

He willingly sacrificed a legacy of unprecedented competence and popularity in order to continue to serve the city. He could have gone back to his company and expanded his empire, they say, or flown into Washington like a financial Superman.

"The easiest thing would be to leave and rest on those laurels," said Bill Cunningham, a longtime adviser to Mr. Bloomberg and his former communications director. "He looked around at what's looming for the city and made the decision that he would try to change the law."

"He knows what it is like to be booed in the parades," said James Anderson, the mayor's director of communications. "Popularity doesn't do you any good unless you use it to make the city better."

Another aide to Mr. Bloomberg, speaking on background, recalled how Mr. Bloomberg, a multibillionaire, has often professed a you-can't-take-it-with-you philosophy, intending to give all of his money away and believing that one can be considered a financial success only if the check to the undertaker bounces.

"Why should it be any different with political capital," asked the aide. "He would want his check to the political undertaker to bounce. What good is it if you step away from this?"

Perhaps the most immediate beneficiaries of Mr. Bloomberg's decision to try and stick around for another term are his commissioners, who essentially get an extension for their long-term efforts to implement reforms.

"The potential of the mayor having a third term could ensure that these projects actually come to fruition, which is something we always worried about," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. "We can get these projects off the ground, but what happens if another mayor says we have other priorities?"

Kate Levin, commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, said a prolonged Bloomberg presence strengthened her hand against the agency's antagonists.

"When they think they can wait you out," she said, "it means that they can't wait you out."

Ever since Mr. Bloomberg reached the point of no return and pushed to overturn the term-limits law, the administration has fallen into line behind the idea of a third term. But before he tipped his hand, some of his key aides, including his political right hand and deputy mayor for government affairs, Kevin Sheekey, and his former communications director and now deputy mayor for operations, Ed Skyler, argued against it, according to several City Hall insiders. Mr. Skyler, as recently as a June 26 interview with The Observer, was talking in the soon-to-be-past tense about the mayor's time in office.

"I think one of the challenges, one of the reasons people are struggling with the question of what his legacy is," Mr. Skyler said, "is because unlike some mayors who were known for one or two things, Mayor Bloomberg has a ton of accomplishments behind him."

Mr. Skyler, who did not return requests to comment for this story, is said by people in the Bloomberg orbit to be exhausted and eager to leave City Hall. And several present and former advisers to Mr. Bloomberg said that other aides would leave the administration in the event of a third term.

"Eight years is pretty exhausting, it's grueling," said Jay Kriegel, who served as a chief of staff in City Hall under John Lindsay.
Mr. Sheekey, the architect of some of the most fanciful national fantasies for Mr. Bloomberg, replied in typically un-earnest style to a request for an interview about the deferment of those dream scenarios by writing, "I'm living the dream."

A third key aide who has been with Mr. Bloomberg throughout his transition from businessman to politician, Patti Harris, would only say that she loved her job.

"This would not be the first time that Kevin, or others, might have had an idea on what Mike should do and in fact that's not what Mike ended up doing," said Mr. Cunningham. "And, in fact, Mike ends up doing something perhaps against the advice of people around him."

It's not hard to imagine the pitch against a third term.

For people with ideas of moving onward and upward with the mayor, the creamy yellow walls, blue carpets and portraits of long-forgotten municipal executives can begin, after eight years, to seem somewhat confining. The sights, over time, become remarkably familiar: There's Eric Gioia shaking hands again! There's Christine Quinn, who backed the mayor's overturning of term limits despite her own mayoral ambitions, popping out of her office in a long winter coat and calling "Hola!" to a friend. There's Councilwoman Melinda Katz leading about a dozen demonstrators in a press conference on the steps, for the benefit of one print reporter, and declaring that she had started a Web site called "WhereIsMyTARP.com."

More importantly, though, the politics of a third term-to the extent that politics were a factor in the decision-simply don't compute.

The economy is going to stink, forcing the mayor to execute an unending stream of painful and unpopular budget-balancing maneuvers. The strong-arm move to avoid a referendum and overturn term limits in the City Council has injured, perhaps irreparably, the extra-political brand Mr. Bloomberg had built.

The prospective campaign against Representative Anthony Weiner, who plans to run as a loud defender of the middle class and outer boroughs against an out-of-touch billionaire, will be an irritating grind.

On Friday afternoon, across the hall from the mayor's offices where the ever-fashionable Ms. Harris flitted past the small glass conference rooms decorated with antique pictures of the city, Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, stood in front of Room 9 informing reporters that the mayor's popularity had dipped from 68 percent to 59 percent, and that a downturn in the economy might ultimately do more damage to Mr. Bloomberg's standing than the controversial term-limits move.

"Bloomberg is clearly banking on the idea that he is a financial guru and that he will be somewhat immune to the downturn," said Mr. Miringoff.

Some of the few people who have been in Mr. Bloomberg's shoes said they understood the reservations of his aides, but also the mayor's decision to plow ahead.

"In terms of the problems that would ensue, they were right. If you wanted to avoid the problems," said former Mayor Ed Koch. "They wanted to avoid the pain. His position, I think, is 'Pain be damned; I'm going to do what I want to do and do best.' That is to say, if the people want him. And in my own view, if they don't want him, they are fools."

Mr. Koch didn't think the mayor was necessarily foreclosing the possibility of a grander future, because, he said, expectations for New York in the near future are so bleak that the mayor could get massive credit if the city gets through the crisis close to intact.

And as for the fact that mayors simply tend to have miserable third terms, the former mayor thought that Mr. Bloomberg might be able to get around that, too. The current mayor has a less expansive personality than he did, Mr. Koch explained, and so people would tire of him less easily. Plus, he was "a young man with $20 billion," a numerical fact that tends to "open doors."

Former Mayor David Dinkins also thought that Mr. Bloomberg had a trying time ahead.

"It's always been difficult for everyone in the third term," said Mr. Dinkins. "But he's good, he's gifted. There are many things he might do."

Asked whether he thought Mr. Bloomberg was passing up on any more exalted alternatives in order to serve another term, Mr. Dinkins said, "It gets to be a function of what those other choices are, doesn't it? And I don't know what those other choices are. All I know is, he knows and has made this judgment."

Mr. Muzzio, who worked as a campaign adviser to Mr. Dinkins, characterized Mr. Bloomberg's decision as a choice between "buying the mayoralty and all that comes with it against a crap shoot that he has got to know in some way is the Wizard of Oz. Mike Bloomberg is too smart. He is betting on the sure thing, and he is getting a big payoff with almost a 100 percent certainty he gets it."

As for the aides who pushed for national office, Mr. Muzzio had the following recommendation.

"Get over it and get off the pipe; this is the real world," he said. "This is the real Mike Bloomberg. This is the way he was. This is the way he is. This is the way he will be. What you were thinking was fairy tale."

Hours after the mayor stood in the sweltering jungle world at the Bronx Zoo-the event was meant to showcase some of the low-cost cultural activities available to New Yorkers; one citizen speaker referred unironically to Staten Island as a "Cultural Mecca"-he showed up wearing a more formal tie for a charity event at the Plaza.

Mr. Bloomberg sat with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson while he waited to receive an award from the Randall's Island Sports Foundation.

SNL comedian Darrell Hammond warmed up the crowd of wealthy donors and ended by saying, "As Mayor Bloomberg told me, always leave them wanting more. And then if they do want more, stay on for another four years."

Mr. Bloomberg laughed and applauded.

When it was his time to speak, the mayor paid tribute to Mr. Paulson, saying there was no "magic wand" to fix the crisis and that "everyone in this room knows how tough it is and you are sewing the seeds of recovery in this country." He then said that he assumed Hillary Clinton, who would show up about a half an hour later, would be the next secretary of state and "do another great job for this country."

The next morning the mayor presided over a press conference announcing a light bulb initiative, "Broadway Goes Green."

-Additional reporting by Azi Paybarah

The eight-year term limits on the City Council, she says, are distracting the members, whose meetings she gavels into session and watches from the highest seat in the Council’s chamber.

“I see people who are so desperate,” Ms. Gotbaum said in an interview this week in a diner on the Upper West Side. “They don’t know what they’re going to do. And they’re all running. Look at the Council—they’re all running for office. And, you know, I think it’s wrong. I think it’s a mistake. I think they should be focused more on what they’re doing right now.”

Ms. Gotbaum also has problems with the Tweed Courthouse, where the Department of Education is headquartered.

“Tweed is lawyers and consultants and kids,” she said. “And nobody has educational, real background.”

“I hope he can turn it around,” she said of City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. “I don’t wish him badly, and I think his motives are good. I just don’t think he knows how to manage anything. I mean, he’s never managed anything. He hasn’t.”

Ms. Gotbaum, who is interested in running for Mayor in 2009, was trying to make a point here: She has experience. In her late 20’s, she advised Mayor John Lindsay on education and women’s issues; then she was parks commissioner for Mayor David Dinkins in the 1990’s, and was elected to her first office in 2001.

She certainly has long-term policy goals: tweaking Mayoral control of schools, reviving parental involvement, extending term limits to 12 years for City Council members.

But for now, she’s not saying what comes next for her.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I’m not being sarcastic. I’m not going to retire. I’m not going to leave city government.”

Why not?

“I love it,” she said, smiling.

Technically, Ms. Gotbaum is next in line to take over City Hall should anything happen to Michael Bloomberg.

But actually getting elected mayor is another story, with an already crowded field of outspoken candidates who are cranking up their own campaigns and raising money. And they’re younger. At 68, Ms. Gotbaum could wind up on the receiving end of the campaign slogan that her old boss, John Lindsay, once employed: “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.”

“I have as much energy as Anthony Weiner, and Bill Thompson, and Christine and Adolfo and Tony Avella, all put into one,” said Ms. Gotbaum, who recently stopped wearing her signature bifocals when she’s not reading.

And also: “Fund-raising has never been a problem for me.”

Mr. Bloomberg has begun high-profile hiring in preparation for a campaign and has resigned as chairman of his company’s board and has been talking with academics and political insiders about public policy and the mechanics of a citywide race. But some of the most important consultations are taking place not in back rooms, but in a small auditorium on lower Fifth Avenue. There, on a recent afternoon, three dozen New Yorkers gathered to watch a videotape of Mr. Bloomberg as he explained his electoral rationale. Sitting in a comfortable armchair in front of a calming backdrop of books, he answered questions from an off-camera interrogator. As he spoke, each focus-group participant used a small dial to register moment-by-moment reactions—approve, turn right; disapprove, turn left—to Mr. Bloomberg’s performance.

These sessions provide a glimpse of Mr. Bloomberg’s strategic deliberations as he weighs a run for City Hall. The question at the core of Mr. Bloomberg’s quasi-candidacy is this: Can he be the Jon Corzine of New York City? Is it possible to do in New York what Mr. Corzine did in last year’s New Jersey Senate race—that is, spend gobs of personal wealth on a campaign without being tarred as a vanity candidate?

At the Fifth Avenue focus-group session, which took place in mid-February, Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers test-marketed responses to the questions he will inevitably face about his wealth, which is estimated at $4 billion. According to a participant who reconstructed the scene for The Observer on condition of anonymity, Mr. Bloomberg’s off-camera inquisitor asked whether he thought New Yorkers would vote for a businessman-candidate for Mayor.

Mr. Bloomberg’s answer suggests that he’s trying to frame his Horatio Alger personal story—he is a bookkeeper’s son from a blue-collar suburb of Boston who went on to build an immense media empire—to show that he is not out of touch with the everyday concerns of voters. On the videotape, Mr. Bloomberg discussed his modest background, his hard-working father, his early struggles to make money even after being denied a credit line, his identification with struggling New Yorkers and his belief in New York as a city of limitless opportunities. The audience listened respectfully, dialing in their reactions for possible future use by Mr. Bloomberg’s strategists.

At another point, the participant recalled, Mr. Bloomberg was asked to reveal his net worth. He said he wouldn’t divulge an exact figure, but the question was moot because he intended to leave his fortune to charity—save for small trust funds for his two children.

“They have a candidate who’s reluctant to announce his net worth, and they think it will be raised against him,” Republican consultant Roger Stone said of Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers. “The conventional wisdom is that Corzine’s money hurt him. They’re trying to formulate a response.”

The session was revealing in other ways. The focus-group participant who spoke with The Observer said that in the video, Mr. Bloomberg sounded conciliatory in talking about the Reverend Al Sharpton; offered several ideas about keeping trucks out of midtown during peak traffic hours; and recounted the history of several sexual-harassment lawsuits against his company. (Two lawsuits were dismissed; the other was settled.)

On the latter issue, Mr. Bloomberg must have acquitted himself well, because the audience apparently reacted positively to his explanation. “When that segment was over,” the focus-group participant recalled, “a guy came in and said, ‘I can’t believe you guys didn’t react negatively!’”

William Cunningham, a veteran of New York’s political wars who serves as a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, would not discuss the focus group, which was conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Mr. Bloomberg declined an Observer request for an interview.

Mr. Cunningham said that Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth, far from being a political liability, would be an asset. As a self-financed candidate, he would not be indebted to traditional interest groups and power brokers. He added that Mr. Bloomberg’s lack of experience in city government was similar to that of outgoing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was a federal prosecutor who had never held elective office before becoming Mayor in 1993. “One guy was a career federal prosecutor; the other guy built a business,” Mr. Cunningham said. “They were both successful at what they did. If voters see that you’re successful, they will listen to what you have to say in a Mayoral race.”

At the very least, Mr. Bloomberg will command attention because he is an entertaining character. He is a self-described liberal Democrat who changed his registration to Republican rather than deal with a bruising, crowded Democratic primary. The 58-year-old Mr. Bloomberg flies his own plane and helicopter and has gained a reputation as a man about town and a patron of the arts. The headquarters of his media empire, at East 59th Street and Park Avenue, resembles the deck of a busy space station. More than 2,000 employees buzz around the building constantly, eating for free in the company’s food court or sitting in glass-enclosed conference rooms. The building has no traditional, walled-in offices; even Mr. Bloomberg’s desk is out in the open on the 15th floor. The 7,000 employees who work in the company’s 79 offices around the globe carry electronic identification cards that make it possible for managers to determine, with the click of a computer button, their exact whereabouts.

The company keeps the work environment verbally clean by filtering curses and racial epithets out of internal e-mails between employees. If you try to send an e-mail with a prohibited word—such as “asshole”—the computer instantly shows a message: “The following word is considered to be inappropriate in the context of business correspondence.” (“Dick” is permitted because it’s a name, “wop” because it’s a stock-ticker abbreviation for Woodside Petroleum, and “bimbo” because it’s the symbol for Grupo Bimbo, a Mexican pastry company.)

Mr. Bloomberg has hired a team of well-known advisers to help him if he decides to emerge from these high-tech surroundings into the grubby world of New York politics. In addition to Mr. Luntz, he has enlisted pollster Doug Schoen; Maureen Connelly, a onetime adviser to former Mayor Ed Koch; Kevin Sheeky, a onetime adviser to former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; and David Garth, the legendary consultant.

“The first time I met with Bloomberg, close to a year ago, he asked me whether he had a chance,” said Mr. Koch. “I said no. But now, based on the way the other candidacies are going, I think he has a good chance. He can run as a businessman who is going to keep the good things that Giuliani and Koch did, and not let the city revert to the days of spending and radicalism.”

Mr. Koch, who is supporting City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, also told The Observer that he would be open to supporting Mr. Bloomberg in a general election should Mr. Vallone lose the Democratic Primary. “I’m not making any commitments,” he said.

No Great Issue?

Not everyone agrees with Mr. Koch’s assessment of Mr. Bloomberg’s chances. “I don’t see him connecting with the public,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, who advised Mr. Giuliani during his successful 1993 Mayoral run. “I don’t think he knows much about the city. Why would we turn to someone not involved in city government? There’s no great issue right now that could propel an outsider candidate into Gracie Mansion.”

If history is any guide, Democrats lose control of City Hall only in the wake of major demographic shifts or amid severe crises of Democratic leadership. Mr. Giuliani won because the city seemed to be collapsing amid disorder and civil unrest; the youthful John Lindsay won because of population shifts that swelled the rolls of young and minority voters; and Fiorello La Guardia rode to power amid a wave of revulsion at the corruption of Tammany Hall. And neither La Guardia nor Lindsay—the only two Republican Mayors besides Mr. Giuliani in the 20th century—groomed a Republican heir-apparent. Lindsay, in fact, became a Democrat before leaving office.

Mr. Bloomberg’s chances could be further complicated by political machinations unfolding far away from Mr. Bloomberg’s midtown redoubt. Conservative Party chairman Michael Long, who owns a liquor store in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, told The Observer that he is talking with several possible candidates interested in running for Mayor as a Conservative. Mr. Long said that one of the people under consideration is a conservative political pundit who “has been on TV a number of times and who has some celebrity status.”

Mr. Long declined to name his mystery candidate, but the New York Post reported on March 6 that National Review editor Richard Lowry is considering a run. In past Mayoral elections, the Conservative Party candidate has won up to 30,000 votes—a small number, considering that Mr. Giuliani collected nearly 800,000 votes in 1997, but certainly enough to cut into Mr. Bloomberg’s support among Republicans. Mr. Long’s opposition may have cost Mr. Giuliani the extremely close 1989 election against David Dinkins, when the Conservatives ran cosmetics heir Ron Lauder for Mayor. Mr. Giuliani overcame opposition from the Conservative Party in 1993 thanks to overwhelming support from disaffected outer-borough residents—a crowd that may not connect with Mr. Bloomberg.

“I don’t know if he embraces Republican values,” Mr. Long said of Mr. Bloomberg. “I don’t know if he possesses any core values. I would hope you possess some of the values of the party you converted to. If he converted just for political expediency, it will haunt him.”

Perhaps not, because Mr. Bloomberg most likely will run as a pragmatic, non-ideological Republican, one who will keep government clean and continue Mr. Giuliani’s managerial successes. He may try to run on both the Republican and Liberal Party lines, as Mr. Giuliani did, so he can position himself as a centrist even as the Democrats compete for the left in their own hard-fought primary.

“I think that there’s a center-right Giuliani constituency that’s still up for grabs—blue-collar ethnic Catholics, conservative Jews, law-and-order voters—but it’s more center than right,” Mr. Stone, the Republican consultant, said.

Mr. Bloomberg’s quasi-candidacy is not about sounding grand ideological themes so much as selling himself as a manager, as someone who wants to offer incremental solutions to niggling, prosaic urban problems. For instance, the focus-group participant said, Mr. Bloomberg talked about relieving traffic congestion by imposing fees on trucks that come into the city during peak traffic hours. On education, he suggested several novel, if sketchy, ways for aggrieved parents to share their opinions of the school system with education officials.

For his part, Mr. Bloomberg seems to have little patience with the view that being Mayor is, as John Lindsay’s re-election campaign of 1969 stated, the second-toughest job in America. Not long ago, he described the job this way:

“It’s getting everybody, explaining it to them, holding their hands while they do it; it’s picking the right people, attracting good people; it’s delegating to them; it’s making sure that they’re coordinated and work together.”

Nothing to it.

What can I say? Some thrill to the antiquity of Thebes or Florence—for me, the seminal moment was that first glimpse of the apparently eternal architecture of the Bethesda fountain. Would it be giving the sentimental game away to admit that every time I come to New York, I make a pilgrimage to the fountain? I spend an hour or so reflecting on the long, strange trip from that single still glimpsed decades ago.

I suspect that Scenes from the City may have a similar effect on many people. The cover features the iconic Brian Hamill photo from Manhattan: Woody Allen and Diane Keaton on a park bench just before dawn gazing at the Queensboro Bridge. The shot has lost none of its ravishing power. (If only the same could be said of Woody Allen.)

The essence of New York is that it’s too big to be one thing—it’s the city as schizophrenic, with something for everybody, in any mood. So it’s appropriate that Scenes from the City is sufficiently varied, and luscious enough, to melt the heart of the fiercest partisan of pastoral pleasures.

The book takes as its start date 1966, when John Lindsay established the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting—one-stop shopping that cut a Solomonic swath through what had been an impossibly complicated sequence of permissions, a labyrinth that kept filmmakers from working easily in New York. (The bureaucratic hurdles never stopped the good people who populated the Biograph, Vitagraph and Astoria studios, or filmmakers like Rouben Mamoulian—but none of them are featured here, because this is a book that carries the imprimatur of the Mayor’s Office, which apparently wants to give the impression that hardly anybody shot films in New York before John Lindsay smoothed the way.)

Attention is paid to Jules Dassin, who shot The Naked City all over town, and to Billy Wilder, who filmed Ray Milland’s harrowing walk in The Lost Weekend under the Third Avenue el on New Year’s Day 1944. Abraham Polonsky went to the trouble of coming to New York for some key shots for Force of Evil. And there’s the great opening sequence of West Side Story.

But—and I find this extremely odd—only cursory attention is paid to Sidney Lumet, the patron saint of New York film production, who began his love affair with the place tangentially in 1957 with 12 Angry Men, his first movie, and comprehensively the next year with Stage Struck. But then, nothing is said about other New York–centric movies like Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie.

Scenes from the City is organized by area, which is as good as any other principle. This is a coffee-table book, and coffee-table books live or die by the pictures, the meat for which the words are only seasoning.

Editor James Sanders, a practicing architect and the author of Celluloid Skyline (2001), lets the pictures take flight while he supplies the information that makes the book a useful reference tool. (I spotted one error: Abraham Polonsky wrote Madigan, a good 1968 policier, but he didn’t direct it—the director was Don Siegel.) Mr. Sanders documents where the stills—and scenes they represent—were shot.

For the dedicated cinephile, these are Stations of the Cross. Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing up over the subway grating in The Seven-Year Itch was shot along Lexington between 51st and 52nd streets. (Mr. Sanders proceeds to ruin our re-enactment fantasies by telling us that the scene was reshot back at the studio.) Dog Day Afternoon was shot on Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th streets, just south of Park Slope in Brooklyn. The chase in The French Connection was shot in 30 blocks of 86th Street in Brooklyn, ranging from the Bay 50th Street Station to the 62nd Street Station of the D line. The delicatessen scene in When Harry Met Sally … was shot at Katz’s Deli at 205 East Houston Street. And that bridge shot from Manhattan was taken at the foot of 58th Street on Aug. 14, 1978, at about 4 in the morning.

Beyond the cold, hard facts, there’s the intrinsic romance of the images: Albert Finney and Diane Venora—clearly unaffected by vertigo—climbing to the top of the Manhattan Bridge with the World Trade Center towers in the background. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, again, silhouetted in the old MoMA garden. (“If you don’t get good stills on a Gordon Willis movie,” Mr. Hamill observes, “then you’re not doing your job properly.”)

No differentiation is made between the sainted and the shonda: Hudson Hawk gets a still, as does Annie Hall, and the strange, forlorn Vanilla Sky—remember Tom Cruise running through an eerily beautiful, abandoned Times Square? (We get a background primer from Lt. John Battista, former commanding officer of the city’s TV and movie unit: The Times Square scene was shot in about an hour and a half on a Sunday morning, beginning at first light. No C.G.I.—a real actor in a real location. Pure magic.)

As lagniappe, there’s a Q&A with Martin Scorsese, and also a short piece by Nora Ephron. But again I say: Where’s Sidney Lumet, who was making movies in New York when Mr. Scorsese was a kid watching punks blow up mailboxes in Little Italy?

Scott Eyman, a film historian and biographer, reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Now, it turns out there is a difference in planning-speak between a "master plan," which is how Lindsay referred to his oeuvre and a "strategic plan," which is the term Bloomberg has used, and which planners say denotes a more flexible, broad-brush approach. Let's hope the Mayor knows the difference.

-Matthew Schuerman

The bigger problem is that the state Republican establishment can’t even get the feud thing right. For connoisseurs of political combat, the battles between party stalwarts are little more than political pigtail-pulling. The real thing is less petty, more film noir. And it takes a bunch of young G.O.P. Gothamites to get it right. To wit: Here in New York City, two Republican houses—each alike in dignity? That depends on whom you ask—have been fighting over turf, title and patrimony for more than a decade.

The two factions share one name—the New York Young Republican Club, Inc.—and one logo: a bald eagle grasping a lightning bolt. Each club claims around 500 members, ages 18 to 40, and meets once a month on a Thursday, supplementing the monthly gatherings with a calendar of speakers and social events. Both groups say that they were founded in 1911, and both claim the mantle of America’s Oldest Young Republican Club.

Thankfully, there’s a bit of shorthand that observers use to tell the two clubs apart: One is affiliated with the state and county arms of the Republican Party, and the other is not. Not surprisingly, however, past and present officials of both clubs cast that distinction in slightly different terms.

“Their group was founded in 1991. They’re now claiming to be us, basically,” said Robert Hornack, who, at 40 years old (“I’m in the process of aging out,” he explained) is the not-particularly-young chairman of the New York Young Republican Club, which is not affiliated with the state and county party. “We’re more ideological; we don’t bend as easily on matters of convenience,” he added. “They take their marching orders from the party leadership: Whatever the party says, goes.”

Thomas Robert Stevens, an attorney and past president of Mr. Hornack’s club, suggested that his former rivals are legally, if not morally, in error. “They got the color of authority by getting recognized by the formal structure of the state, but they don’t have the legal authority,” he said, referring to the other club’s use of the club name and logo. Mr. Stevens added that during his tenure, he and his colleagues often referred to the other group as the “puppet club.” Or, in more sinister tones, as the “puppet regime.”

That doesn’t make Dennis Cariello, the president of the affiliated club, very happy. “I dispute that, and I take great offense to it,” he said. Barbs aside, however, Mr. Cariello would rather be diplomatic than disparaging. “I never say a bad word about them. It’s my hope that they’ll still join us,” he said.

It’s baffling to see New York’s young Republicans so Balkanized. Shouldn’t the party’s next generation of partisans—young, energetic and vastly outnumbered in the city—begin their political lives on common ground?

Alas, their resentment is hereditary. The history of the two clubs reads like Hitchcock on acid, complete with an attempted frame-up for murder, a private detective, an episode on Phil Donahue’s talk show and even a bit of … dwarf bowling.

In the beginning, there was peace. The city’s first Young Republican Club was an effort at like-minded community, founded by 32 enterprising young men in 1911, with an inaugural dinner at which President William Howard Taft was the guest of honor. Over the following decades, the club built a roster and deepened its political influence, seeing dividends in the 1940’s, when several onetime club members were elected to prominent offices, including Jacob K. Javits and Thomas E. Dewey.

The seeds of acrimony were sown a few decades later, when the club’s former president, John V. Lindsay, ran for a second term as New York’s Mayor in 1969. Originally elected as a Republican, Mr. Lindsay lost the 1969 party primary to State Senator John Marchi of Staten Island. Lindsay ran on the Liberal Party line and won. His acolytes in the New York Young Republican Club stood behind him, failing to support Mr. Marchi, the party’s nominee. Republican elders were furious with the young whippersnappers, eventually leading to a schism between the club and the official G.O.P organization.

But the real break came in 1991, according to Mr. Stevens, who served as the unified club’s president from 1982 to 1988. At that time, the club had begun to splinter between young Republicans who sought a return to the official party, and a group led by Mr. Stevens, which favored the status quo. In the background, resentment simmered over Mr. Stevens’ public profile, which included an appearance on Donahue, during which he argued the merits of male virginity and touted his role as a leader of New York’s Young Republicans.

The rival factions wound up splitting into two separate clubs, one affiliated with the official party and the other independent.

The sharpest knives came out several years later. In 1993, after Mr. Stevens had been reinstated as president of the independent club, he was charged with conspiring to kill a leader of the rival group. Federal prosecutors had tapes of Mr. Stevens talking to a presumptive hit man— part of the deal involved laundering money through the bank account of his Young Republican club.

Mr. Stevens said he was framed by members of the other club, who had arranged his introduction to what turned out to be a phony hit man. To learn the truth, he said, he had hired a private investigator and began playing along with them.

The charges were dropped in 1994. Mr. Stevens had already moved on by that point. Earlier that year, he’d been making unlikely news as the legal counsel to Baird Jones. Mr. Jones, a Manhattan impresario and self-proclaimed king of the urban avant-garde, was fighting for his legal right to run dwarf-bowling events in bars.

Mr. Stevens’ tenure as president of the nonaffiliated Young Republican Club ended in 1998. In 2003, he left the G.O.P. altogether to become a devout Libertarian. Still, he sighed, “it would be wonderful if the two clubs got together and make peace.”

Three years ago, they tried. Leaders of the two clubs were negotiating a merger, but the agreement broke down. Officials from both sides remain tight-lipped about the details.

Name Tags, Anyone?

So nowadays, how can an armchair activist tell the two clubs apart?

Among some party officials, Mr. Hornack’s nonaffiliated club has earned a reputation as a conservative band of Republican renegades. Tempers have flared over that club’s endorsements, which included Herman Badillo rather than Michael Bloomberg for Mayor in 2001.

“The Hornack group, I guess, are considered the bad boys of the Young Republican Clubs by the establishment, because they’re very activist,” suggested Assemblyman Patrick Manning, a dark-horse candidate in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Mr. Manning added that, while Mr. Hornack’s group “treated me like family,” the state-affiliated club hasn’t returned his phone calls, even though it recently hosted one of his rivals, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, for an evening at the Harvard Club.

Mr. Cariello, the president of the state-affiliated club, bristles at the idea of an ideological distinction between the clubs and said that his organization welcomes Republicans of all stripes. “While perhaps the market can bear two Young Republican Clubs, I think we’d be much stronger if we were working in unison,” he told The Observer.

They’d also bicker less. In 2004, members of the affiliated club were welcomed as volunteers for the Republican National Convention. According to Mr. Hornack, his group was denied access. They watched the opening night from the depths of an Irish pub in Brooklyn and, later that week, held court in a Manhattan hotel.

Even minor slights can inflame tensions between the two clubs. During her recent campaign for City Council, Democrat Jessica Lappin sent out a mailer attacking her opponent, Republican Joel Zinberg, with a quote from Mr. Hornack. The quote, which was pulled from a political blog, accused Mr. Zinberg of cloaking his Republican affiliation to deceive voters, attributing that sentiment to “Robert Hornack, Chairman, NY Young Republican Club.” Needless to say, the state-affiliated Young Republicans were not pleased.

Considering the clubs’ contentious past, such squabbles seem petty, but they still bewilder a new generation of G.O.P. partisans.

“The story of the two Young Republican Clubs in New York reminds me of the story of the two Jews in Kabul after America invaded Afghanistan,” mused Karol Sheinin, a local blogger and Republican activist who attends both clubs’ events.

“The story came out that there were only two Jews living in Kabul, and they hated each other and wouldn’t walk on the same side of the street,” she continued. “There’s like 12 Republicans in New York. How come we can’t get along?”

Yet despite the barrage of all things Bloomberg, the Mayor has failed to make any indelible mark on the city he has governed for nearly four years.

Facing a legacy of anonymous efficiency, Mr. Bloomberg’s ego, fed for decades on a steady diet of Wall Street accomplishment and fawning socialites, now wants something more. Defeating his opponent, Fernando Ferrer, in the November election and earning a second term in power is not enough. As he wrote in a revised preface to his autobiography, “Bloomberg by Bloomberg is about becoming the best.”

“I think what motivated him before, was, ‘I’m a manager, I can manage this,’” said Barbara Fife, a deputy mayor under David Dinkins. “But when you get in a second term, it’s ‘What’s my legacy, what am I going to leave behind?’”

And so, all of a sudden, the staid Mr. Bloomberg is talking about “my plans and goals for the city’s future,” or “my vision for New York,” before launching into policy speeches about public safety or education. A recent speech at Hunter College focused on a proposal to expand charter schools. It was a third in a series of speeches designed to show the Mayor as a visionary, and not just an efficient technocrat.

Why is the Mayor talking about vision? He is widely credited, after all, with creating a culture of competency and efficiency at City Hall, and he often touts his achievements in wrestling control of the Board of Education from bureaucrats and handing it to a fellow C.E.O. He boasts about extinguishing smoking from restaurants and bars, improving test scores and lowering crime to record levels. Nevertheless, many Mayoral historians found it hard to associate him with one overriding vision or lasting accomplishment.

“He strikes me as an ethereal figure, you can’t pin him down to any ideology or any policies,” said Vincent Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. “Bloomberg seems kind of a blank slate.”

But if Mr. Bloomberg wants to leave a public legacy as grand as the one he secured in the private sector, he better get cracking. His most ambitious building projects lie in ruins and his visions for expanded preschool spots, more charter schools and a more streamlined approach to public safety, all without raising taxes, don’t exactly evoke awe.

That certainly would not be said of some of the city’s most-memorable Mayors.“If you put La Guardia, Wagner, Lindsay, Koch and Giuliani with Bloomberg in a room, Bloomberg is the most effaced, least charismatic, least likely to take over. That has to do with personality,” said Thomas Kessner, a history professor at CUNY and the author of Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York. “His conception of the Mayor is dealing with the day-to-day management of the city, and to do it with a level of competence. There is no radical rethinking of the city’s possibilities.”

Indeed, New Yorkers responded to the massive building projects and cigars of Fiorello La Guardia, the charm of John Lindsay, the zaniness of Ed Koch and the zealousness of Rudy Giuliani.

The most ambitious city-planning undertaking in Mr. Bloomberg’s first term, the West Side stadium, died an ugly death at the hands of Albany powerbrokers. That leaves only his personality—and that, at least publicly, isn’t much to build a legacy on. His monotonous voice, wooden demeanor and tin ear when it comes to connecting with average New Yorkers leave him at a disadvantage.

Instead of spicing up his milquetoast style, it may just be easier for the Mayor to change the city into the type of place that better appreciates his talents and temper.

“Manhattan feels more corporate,” said Fred Siegel, author of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life, who argues that Mr. Bloomberg will inevitably be remembered for “wrinkles of what Giuliani achieved.”

A considerable amount of Mr. Bloomberg’s energies at the end of his first term have been dedicated to persuading Goldman Sachs to build its $2 billion headquarters near Ground Zero. The passing of an 18.5 percent increase in property taxes reflects his view that New York City is a luxury product. “It isn’t Wal-Mart,” he has said.

“Clearly there is no overarching vision, except insofar as he looks at New York as a luxury city. For the world’s cosmopolitans, this is the place, and people should want to pay a premium to be here,” said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch. “It’s the playground and the boardroom of the rich and famous. There is an implicit vision of New York in this, though he may not want to sell it to Staten Island.”

Some political observers have also noted the Mayor’s preference for a corporate management style at City Hall.

Mr. Bloomberg has never been a fan of edicts, and unlike some of the city’s more memorable Mayors, he governs not by personality but by proxy. He emphasizes efficiency over scope, and delegates broadly to commissioners who come up with the big ideas. That philosophy has given him some success, but little glory.

The office, inflated by Mr. Giuliani, has both dwarfed him and shrunk to his modest stature and slight shoulders. After an address laying out his vision for the future of public safety in New York, he walked through the expanse of Grand Central Terminal without causing much of a stir.

Hands-Off Approach

But there are those who say that this downsizing of the office is in itself a legacy. Under Mr. Bloomberg, commissioners have almost unprecedented autonomy, and some of the most ambitious ideas of his first term originated from his aides. The doomed West Side stadium and Olympic bid of Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Daniel L. Doctoroff, the successful smoking ban drafted by Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden, and the restructuring of the Police Department after Sept. 11 by Commissioner Raymond Kelly all seem to have come from the bottom up.

“He has a hands-off approach; he lets you do your job,” said one city commissioner, who asked not to be identified. “Don’t knock this whole independence-of-commissioners thing. The way it has always been done before is to carve out a base and placate that base. It’s very difficult to articulate that to the average person. The average person doesn’t work in government.”

Indeed, Mr. Bloomberg still hasn’t captured the average New Yorker’s imagination. Despite a record of building more affordable housing, improving public-school test scores and quickly snuffing out the sparks of potentially explosive racial conflicts, Mr. Bloomberg’s name doesn’t get the visceral reaction that it does in the private world, where his financial-information system revolutionized the way market business was done.

His problem may have less to do with his record than his money.

All those millions of dollars that Mr. Bloomberg has personally spent, first to become a household name and then a trusted leader, have perhaps acted as a buffer between him and the average New Yorker.

When the city faced the threat of a transit strike in 2002, he attempted to provide a sensible example by buying a bicycle. It cost $600. At a recent address to Teamsters, he referred repeatedly—and awkwardly—to “rolling up our sleeves,” and only really relaxed when one woman told him that she was friends with his old personal pilot.

On Monday, after changing out of his suit into khakis, loafers and a beige windbreaker for the Columbus Day Parade, he repeated his new line that “I’d love to have another parade, this one on Broadway in a few weeks. It would be fantastic if the Yanks go all the way.”

The words sounded forced—not so much because of his Boston accent, but because he doesn’t really root and has even admitted, “I’m not a spectator.” (And besides, the dream of a parade up Broadway was a fantasy—the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs several hours after the Columbus Day Parade finished.)

Indeed, Mr. Bloomberg’s tastes tend to run closer to tangibles.

“In the government area, there is a vision—it’s just not something that is easily stated as a message,” said Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “I see it all over, this commitment to technical innovation in policy and management. The smoking change was based on research data.”

But such modest successes aren’t going to install Mr. Bloomberg in the pantheon of New York’s great Mayors. Getting the city back on track after Sept. 11 is a plus, but subject to future crises. His school reforms could have an impact on future generations, but that will take decades to gauge. The city also has plans to eradicate homelessness and to overhaul the current method of getting rid of garbage. The 311 information line is practical, but not epochal.

Mr. Bloomberg needs something big.

Two years ago, he shared his thoughts on managing a city to executives at investment banker Herbert Allen’s annual high-profile conference for media moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“Afterward, some people came up to him and said he would make a great President,” said Mr. Allen. “I hope he stays in public life. I think he is the best Mayor of my lifetime. He’s not dependent. He’s not an ideologue.”

Mr. Bloomberg has for now sworn off seeking higher office, and some argue that for him to ever get the public recognition he so craves, he will have to go back into the private circles where he can lavish his billions on all the causes, schools and buildings he sees fit.

Last November, Mr. Bloomberg told an audience at the 92nd Street Y that he admired Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ enormous charitable contributions. “I want to run a foundation,” said Mr. Bloomberg. “Going out and spending the rest of my life giving it all away would be great.”

He may find a way to leave his name stamped on the city after all.

Yet despite the barrage of all things Bloomberg, the Mayor has failed to make any indelible mark on the city he has governed for nearly four years.

Facing a legacy of anonymous efficiency, Mr. Bloomberg’s ego, fed for decades on a steady diet of Wall Street accomplishment and fawning socialites, now wants something more. Defeating his opponent, Fernando Ferrer, in the November election and earning a second term in power is not enough. As he wrote in a revised preface to his autobiography, “ Bloomberg by Bloomberg is about becoming the best.”

“I think what motivated him before, was, ‘I’m a manager, I can manage this,’” said Barbara Fife, a deputy mayor under David Dinkins. “But when you get in a second term, it’s ‘What’s my legacy, what am I going to leave behind?’”

And so, all of a sudden, the staid Mr. Bloomberg is talking about “my plans and goals for the city’s future,” or “my vision for New York,” before launching into policy speeches about public safety or education. A recent speech at Hunter College focused on a proposal to expand charter schools. It was a third in a series of speeches designed to show the Mayor as a visionary, and not just an efficient technocrat.

Why is the Mayor talking about vision? He is widely credited, after all, with creating a culture of competency and efficiency at City Hall, and he often touts his achievements in wrestling control of the Board of Education from bureaucrats and handing it to a fellow C.E.O. He boasts about extinguishing smoking from restaurants and bars, improving test scores and lowering crime to record levels. Nevertheless, many Mayoral historians found it hard to associate him with one overriding vision or lasting accomplishment.

“He strikes me as an ethereal figure, you can’t pin him down to any ideology or any policies,” said Vincent Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. “Bloomberg seems kind of a blank slate.”

But if Mr. Bloomberg wants to leave a public legacy as grand as the one he secured in the private sector, he better get cracking. His most ambitious building projects lie in ruins and his visions for expanded preschool spots, more charter schools and a more streamlined approach to public safety, all without raising taxes, don’t exactly evoke awe.

That certainly would not be said of some of the city’s most-memorable Mayors.“If you put La Guardia, Wagner, Lindsay, Koch and Giuliani with Bloomberg in a room, Bloomberg is the most effaced, least charismatic, least likely to take over. That has to do with personality,” said Thomas Kessner, a history professor at CUNY and the author of Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York. “His conception of the Mayor is dealing with the day-to-day management of the city, and to do it with a level of competence. There is no radical rethinking of the city’s possibilities.”

Indeed, New Yorkers responded to the massive building projects and cigars of Fiorello La Guardia, the charm of John Lindsay, the zaniness of Ed Koch and the zealousness of Rudy Giuliani.

The most ambitious city-planning undertaking in Mr. Bloomberg’s first term, the West Side stadium, died an ugly death at the hands of Albany powerbrokers. That leaves only his personality—and that, at least publicly, isn’t much to build a legacy on. His monotonous voice, wooden demeanor and tin ear when it comes to connecting with average New Yorkers leave him at a disadvantage.

Instead of spicing up his milquetoast style, it may just be easier for the Mayor to change the city into the type of place that better appreciates his talents and temper.

“Manhattan feels more corporate,” said Fred Siegel, author of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life, who argues that Mr. Bloomberg will inevitably be remembered for “wrinkles of what Giuliani achieved.”

A considerable amount of Mr. Bloomberg’s energies at the end of his first term have been dedicated to persuading Goldman Sachs to build its $2 billion headquarters near Ground Zero. The passing of an 18.5 percent increase in property taxes reflects his view that New York City is a luxury product. “It isn’t Wal-Mart,” he has said.

“Clearly there is no overarching vision, except insofar as he looks at New York as a luxury city. For the world’s cosmopolitans, this is the place, and people should want to pay a premium to be here,” said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch. “It’s the playground and the boardroom of the rich and famous. There is an implicit vision of New York in this, though he may not want to sell it to Staten Island.”

Some political observers have also noted the Mayor’s preference for a corporate management style at City Hall.

Mr. Bloomberg has never been a fan of edicts, and unlike some of the city’s more memorable Mayors, he governs not by personality but by proxy. He emphasizes efficiency over scope, and delegates broadly to commissioners who come up with the big ideas. That philosophy has given him some success, but little glory.

The office, inflated by Mr. Giuliani, has both dwarfed him and shrunk to his modest stature and slight shoulders. After an address laying out his vision for the future of public safety in New York, he walked through the expanse of Grand Central Terminal without causing much of a stir.

Hands-Off Approach

But there are those who say that this downsizing of the office is in itself a legacy. Under Mr. Bloomberg, commissioners have almost unprecedented autonomy, and some of the most ambitious ideas of his first term originated from his aides. The doomed West Side stadium and Olympic bid of Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Daniel L. Doctoroff, the successful smoking ban drafted by Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden, and the restructuring of the Police Department after Sept. 11 by Commissioner Raymond Kelly all seem to have come from the bottom up.

“He has a hands-off approach; he lets you do your job,” said one city commissioner, who asked not to be identified. “Don’t knock this whole independence-of-commissioners thing. The way it has always been done before is to carve out a base and placate that base. It’s very difficult to articulate that to the average person. The average person doesn’t work in government.”

Indeed, Mr. Bloomberg still hasn’t captured the average New Yorker’s imagination. Despite a record of building more affordable housing, improving public-school test scores and quickly snuffing out the sparks of potentially explosive racial conflicts, Mr. Bloomberg’s name doesn’t get the visceral reaction that it does in the private world, where his financial-information system revolutionized the way market business was done.

His problem may have less to do with his record than his money.

All those millions of dollars that Mr. Bloomberg has personally spent, first to become a household name and then a trusted leader, have perhaps acted as a buffer between him and the average New Yorker.

When the city faced the threat of a transit strike in 2002, he attempted to provide a sensible example by buying a bicycle. It cost $600. At a recent address to Teamsters, he referred repeatedly—and awkwardly—to “rolling up our sleeves,” and only really relaxed when one woman told him that she was friends with his old personal pilot.

On Monday, after changing out of his suit into khakis, loafers and a beige windbreaker for the Columbus Day Parade, he repeated his new line that “I’d love to have another parade, this one on Broadway in a few weeks. It would be fantastic if the Yanks go all the way.”

The words sounded forced—not so much because of his Boston accent, but because he doesn’t really root and has even admitted, “I’m not a spectator.” (And besides, the dream of a parade up Broadway was a fantasy—the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs several hours after the Columbus Day Parade finished.)

Indeed, Mr. Bloomberg’s tastes tend to run closer to tangibles.

“In the government area, there is a vision—it’s just not something that is easily stated as a message,” said Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “I see it all over, this commitment to technical innovation in policy and management. The smoking change was based on research data.”

But such modest successes aren’t going to install Mr. Bloomberg in the pantheon of New York’s great Mayors. Getting the city back on track after Sept. 11 is a plus, but subject to future crises. His school reforms could have an impact on future generations, but that will take decades to gauge. The city also has plans to eradicate homelessness and to overhaul the current method of getting rid of garbage. The 311 information line is practical, but not epochal.

Mr. Bloomberg needs something big.

Two years ago, he shared his thoughts on managing a city to executives at investment banker Herbert Allen’s annual high-profile conference for media moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“Afterward, some people came up to him and said he would make a great President,” said Mr. Allen. “I hope he stays in public life. I think he is the best Mayor of my lifetime. He’s not dependent. He’s not an ideologue.”

Mr. Bloomberg has for now sworn off seeking higher office, and some argue that for him to ever get the public recognition he so craves, he will have to go back into the private circles where he can lavish his billions on all the causes, schools and buildings he sees fit.

Last November, Mr. Bloomberg told an audience at the 92nd Street Y that he admired Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ enormous charitable contributions. “I want to run a foundation,” said Mr. Bloomberg. “Going out and spending the rest of my life giving it all away would be great.”

He may find a way to leave his name stamped on the city after all.