When 39-year-old William F. Buckley ran a long-shot campaign for New York City mayor in 1965, Gotham was an absurdly different place overall:
In the previous 10 years, the city’s annual budget had risen 128 percent. (It was approaching $4 billion.) Business and sales taxes had doubled; real estate taxes had jumped 75 percent. Even so, the Wagner administration was borrowing prodigally to cover a $92 million deficit from 1964 and a $256 million deficit for 1965. And New York had the highest unemployment rate of any metropolis in the nation, with some 250,000 people out of work… In the first three months of 1965, "serious crime" on subways rose 41 percent.
The above statistics are from a 2005 New York Times story.
Buckley, who apparently advocated charging drivers to commute into central Manhattan (sound familiar?), got 13 percent of the vote in 1965, with particularly strong showings in Queens.
