Rich Man, Poor City From, It's My Party by Peter Robinson

Walking around Jersey City before meeting Bret Schunlder, I found one block on Grove Street that shows how the city looked before Schundler became mayor. A decade ago a developer made a bid for the properties on the west side of the block (the east side is occupied by city hall). Then the developer ran into financial trouble, tying the properties up in legal proceedings ever since. The properties are dilapidated buildings of brownstone and brick. At ground level several of the buildings contain small businesses -- Grove Liquor and Deli, Olympic Cleaners, Tangles Hair Studio, Carlascio Orthopedic ("Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Footwear Prescriptions Filled"). Above ground level, however, most of the buildings are unoccupied, their windows smashed or boarded over. A scant decade ago all of Jersey City was just like this -- derelict and half deserted.

Jersey City still isn't a garden spot, but it is visibly a city that works. On the blocks surrounding the dilapidated buidlings, I found well-maintained grocery stores, drugstores, and restaurants lining every street.The upper stories of buildings were occupied, curtains fluttering in the windows. The sidewalks were crowded with African-Americans, Hispanics, Indians, and Pakistanis, all of whom seemed at ease in each other's company and all of whom walked purposefully, like people with jobs. The long economic boom of the 1990s of course played a role in Jersey City's revival. But if the economy were entirely responsible, then nearby towns should have changed for the better just as dramatically. They haven't. The difference is Mayor Schundler.

Schundler, 41, works in a small office on the second floor of city hall. His office has a vault built into the wall. "The mayor's office used to be on the other side of the building," Schundler explained with a smile. "Then one of my predecessors realized it would make life simpler if he just worked next to the money." In 1991, Mayor Gerald McCann, who controlled Jersey City's Democratic machine, was convicted of defrauding a Florida savings and loan. Three months later, in 1992, a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling forced McCann from office. Schundler won the special election that followed. He immediately embarked on half a dozen initiatives, first using skills he had learned on Wall Street to monetize the city's tax receipts, bringing in desperately needed cash. His most dramatic initiative involved city hall itself. A large, handsome granite buyilding dedicated in 1896, city hall had been one of the proudest structures in Jersey City until 1979, when a fire burned out the roof. The government of Jersey City then did just what residents of burned-out homes throughout Jersey City had gotten into the habit of doing -- it had learned to live in a decaying hulk. Schundler renovated city hall, rebuilding the roof and cleaning the place up. It was his way of letting people know that Jersey City was going to become a self-respecting municipality again.

Schundler grew up in Westfield, a middle-class, suburban New Jersey town, one of nine children whose father made an impression on all of them. "My father would say, 'Of him to whom much has been given, much is expected,'" Schundler told me. "He would ask questions at the dinner table. 'The middle class has moved out of New York City. Is that good or bad?' "There's litter on the streets. What can be done about it?' He was always pushing us for ways to make thge world a little bit better." For all his high-mindedness, Schundler is relaxed and engaging. He has bright eyes set in a face that, even though his sandy hair is already flecked with gray, is round enough to make him look younger than he is. He smiles easily. He laughs a lot. Even when he is talking about his aspirations for making the world better, which he does constantly, it is a pleasure listening to him.

Schundler obtained his first exposure to politics after graduating from Harvard. Convinced that he wanted to become an urban minister, he moved to Washington, D.C., to write a thesis about an inner-city church. A Democrat -- he believed that Democrats cared more about the poor than did Republicans -- Schundler found that he had enough free time to take a job in the office of a Democratic congressman. On Capitol Hill he met people close to Senatory Gary Hart,and soon Schundler moved to Iowa as a voluntgeer on Hart's 1984 presidential campaign.

Schundler found Hart disappointing. While the candidate's elevated ideals may have looked admirable to people outside the campaign, to people inside the campaign they looked arrogant. "We were there, sacrificing like crazy, working like dogs," Schundler said. "But Hart had the sense that all he was going to do was think some good ideas, and it would be up to everybody else to achieve them. We'd ask him to sit on a bale of hay for a photo op. He wouldn't do it. We'd ask him to call up a contributor to say thank you. He wouldn't do it. If you're going to move the country forward, it's worth paying some price."

(When photographs of Hart frolicking on a cabin cruiser with a young woman were published four years later, during Hart's 1988 presidential campaign, the incident struck Schundler as merely one more example of Hart's self-indulgence. "Our call is to try to think about others and make this a better society. If you're going to accept that responsibility, it's going to involve some sacrifice. Some men died in battle for a better world. All Hart ahd to do was remain faithful to his wife.")

When Hart lost the 1984 Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, a politician that Schundler considered as in thrall to the unions, Schundler was left without a candidate. Wondering whom to support, he found himself listening to the speeches of the presidential candidate that he had heretofore ignored, Ronald Reagan.

Schundler still believed that Republicans cared only about the haves, not about the have-nots. Yet Schundler noticed a strain in Reagan's message that he found appealing. "Reagan gave people a sense of personal responsibility," Schundler said. "I believe in telling people they have not just the ability but the obligation to overcome the obstacles in their lives. If you sit around and wallow in self-pity, you're going to be perfectly useless to others. Reagan was communicating that message."

Disheartened with Democratic politics and broke after paying his own expenses while he volunteered for Gary Hart, Schundler sat down with a pen and a pad of paper to think about what he needed to do next. After listing the characteristics he wanted in a job, including "something that keeps me in touch with what's happening in the world," "being entrepreneurial," and "working with sharp people," Schundler decided to go into the securities industry. An intelligent, ambitious young man, Schundler joined Salomon Brothers in 1984, landing on Wall Street at the precise monent when intelligent, ambitious young men could make more money than ever before. In 1987 Schundler left Salomon Brothers for C.J. Lawrence Securities, to switch from selling bonds, which he found boring and lucrative, to selling equities, which he found fascinating and lucrative. In 1990, with millions of dollars in the bank, Schundler retired. He was thirty.

During his brief Wall Street career, Schundler and his wife had lived in Jersey City. They had done so for the sake of convenience. From Jersey City, Schunlder's wife had an easy commute across Newark Bay to Newark proper, where she was attending law school, while Schundler himself had an easy commute across the Hudson River to Wall Street. Yet Schundler had soon made the derelict city the object of his altruistic impulses. He had helped to operate a food pantry at the Old Bergen Church and became president of the Downtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. Thus when Mayor McCann was indicted in 1991, Schundler found the prospect of running for Mayor himself irresistible.

Before ententering the race, Schundler had one matter to tidy up. He was still a registered Democrat. In a city in which more than 80 percent of the voters were themselves registered Democrats this hardly placed Schundler at a disadvantage. Yet some time ago -- he couldn't say just when -- he had recognized that on the big issuess the Republicans were right. Cutting taxes really did promote economic growth. Economic growth really did mean more jobs for everybody, including the poor. "It was guys like Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich who were talking about rolling up our sleeves and actually trying to address poverty," Schundler explained. The Republican registration of Jersey City was then just 6 percent, even lower than today's 9 percent. But if he was going to be honest with Jersey CIty's voters, Schundler had no choice but to change his registration. He did so, ran for mayor as a Republican -- and to his surprise, won.

Schundler has replaced a political machine with a municipal government of utter rectitude. He has expanded the tax base, presiding over a projecct in which half a dozen attrative new skyskrapers have gone up on the edge of the Hudson, thereby expanding the waterfront's share of Jersey City's tax revenues from a tiny portion to 30 percent. He has cut taxes and reduced the welfare rolls. He has established good relations between the police and the populace -- Schundler presides over a city, indeed, that appears to be positively glowing with good race relations. One reason is that the mayor has used tax revenues from the waterfront, which is largely white, to redevelop Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is almost entirely black. Twenty blocks of abnadoned buildings when Schundler took office, today Martin Luther King Plaza is thge center of a thriving neighborhood with a new supermarket, new restaurants, a new auto supply store. "And all these are African-American-owned businesses," Schundler told me proudly.

Schundler has even addressed Jersey City's spiritual life. Originally pro-choice, after taking office Schundler became pro-life. "I used to believe that fetuses weren't human because we's all feel worse if we were actually taking human lives. Then a friend said, 'People had a way of defining away the humanity of African-Americans during the Civil War. Feelings are cultural constructs. You shouldn't let them be a guide to what is moral or not.'" While Schundler was thinking over the best way to express his new pro-life conviction, the sanitation department found a dead baby in the seage system. "You'd be surprised how many bodies turn up in a city like this," Schundler said. "Lots of times, no one can identify them." In a public ceremony, Schundler joined the city's ministers, priests, rabbis, and Islamic clerics in dedicating a memorial to all those in Jersey City who die forgotten or unknown.

How has Schundler compiled such a remarkable list of achievements? The answer is simple. He saw what needed to be done -- really, when you listen to him, you come to believe that all it took was a man of goodwill with a decent head on his shoulders -- and he did it. Of course, he had to win approval for each of his initiatives from his city council. But that never proved much of an obstacle. The city council expected him to lead. How different is the life of a Republican who finds himself as an executive from the life of a Republican who finds himself as an executive from the life of a Republican who finds himself merely one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

I asked Schundler what he would do after stepping down as mayor. It had crossed my mind that he might run for the House. "I'm planning on running for governor of New Jersey in 2001," Schundler replied. Governor. An executive position, not a legislative one. Of course.

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Hudson County, New Jersey is a place of many firsts - including genocide and slavery.
Political corruption is a tradition here.
First in a series by Anthony Olszewski – Click HERE to find out more.

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