‘I’ll do things my way’

In 1973, when he was first elected mayor, Ed Hanna promised to turn Utica, a sooty and disheveled city on the Mohawk River, into “a wonderful and beautiful place to live.” Considering the condition it was in, this would have required something on the order of a miracle. When the knitting mills moved South in the 1930's, jobs became so scarce that nearly 20 percent of Utica's population eventually left town. The rate of unemployment among the 90,000 who stayed was the second highest in the state, with 10 percent of the work force chronically unemployed. Along Genesee Street, the

The phonies and fakers and the blue bloods have been draining this lousy town for too long. It's time for them to wake up and see this is a new day. —EDWARD A. HANNA at his mayoral swearing in. Utica. N. Y. city's main drag, storefronts displayed practically as many “For Rent” signs as ads for merchandise. The one hotel had closed its doors, and outside of a few patrons at the lone movie house and several couples hanging around Critic's Lounge waiting for a 350‐pound stripper called “Elephant Woman,” at night the central city was almost deserted.

Utica did have one of the first urban renewal projects in the country—a 1950's plan to tear down some old buildings and erect a modern office, shopping mall and hotel complex. But after two decades of squabbling and mismanagement, the city had nothing to show for it but a seven‐acre mudhole and parking lot in the middle of its central business district. As for political leadership, the city government had traditionally been a jungle of cronyism and petty graft.

When Utica took to cutting down its dying elms, for instance, the Parks Department listed many of them in its records as “Republican” or “Democrat,” according to whose house they stood in front of. Then, depending on which party was in office, certain trees got chopped down and others didn't.

It didn't take a political genius to see that many voters were ready for something new. But Hanna, the son of Lebanese immigrants and a selfmade millionaire, seems to be the first official on so local a level to exploit the same political disaffection that has made popular figures of other selfstyled mavericks such as Gov. James Longley of Maine and Gov. Jerry Brown of California. “I knew the time was ripe even before I ran,” says Hanna, at 5 feet 7 inches a small man with a speaking voice the consistency of No. 2 sandpaper. “We didn't have to propagandize the people. They were already standing in the bleachers rooting for someone to come in and do something different.”

The question is, just how different? For during his first three years in office, Hanna has shaken city government so vigorously that he has caused many city fathers to wonder whether the bad old days were really not so bad after all. “Because of Hanna,” said one prominent real‐estate developer who did not want his name mentioned, “I've asked myself whether I don't really condone corruption if it makes things work smoothly. And I guess the answer is, ‘Yes.’ In the old days, you could always deal with the politicians. But Hanna doesn't deal with anyone.”

From his first day in office, it wasn't clear whether Hanna was running a government or starring in the remake of a 1940's movie. On the glass doors of City Hall he had a sign painted: “This City Government Belongs to the People.” Aides were instructed to ,answer phone calls by saying “People's Government,” and the police were asked to tip their hats to citizens on the street—a request they refused.

To humanize City Hall, he filled its lobby with cocktail tables and chairs and surrounded them with potted trees. In the trees he put some mechanically tweeting canaries made by a local woodcarver. Then he dragged in parlor stoves, wind‐up telephones and old Victrolas. “It's for the old people who no one gave a damn about before,” the 53‐year‐old mayor tells visitors. “It brings back memories of the good old days. Now when they come down here they don't see a cold government; they're looking at happy memories.”

To encourage people to drop in and watch their Mayor at work, he took his, door off its hinges and put a sign over his couch saying: “The Town's Living Room.” Soon his office was filled all day long with everyone from job seekers, politicians and people complaining about dead dogs to giggling teen‐agers and a wide assortment of the city's eccentrics, including one alarmed‐looking individual dressed in a tattered overcoat who comes in periodically to warn the Mayor of an impending invasion from Great Britain.

Phone calls are frequently plugged into the Mayor's speaker phone so callers may find their inner thoughts being broadcast for the general amusement of perhaps 25 persons. All letters to the city, contracts, legal briefs and memos are carefully laid out on a table for the public to peruse. Even negotiations with unions, businessmen and contractors are done in the open, and anyone can attend.

Confronted his first year with union agreements allowing city employees to work only a six‐and‐a‐half‐hour day, Hanna fired about 20 percent of the public payroll, including two‐thirds of the Public Works Department, and ever since, he has been trying to let out public work to private contractors to save money. In addition, he brought a certain rigor to the city's negotiating style that wasn't there in the days when politicians had close ties to the unions and private suppliers. “He's what we in the real‐estate business call a ‘grinder,'” says Stanley Appel, a New Jersey developer who is interested in building a hotel in Utica. “You talk and you talk and finally when you think you've got a deal and want to sign the papers, he starts turning the screw a little tighter.”

“My God, my God, you should have seen what a cesspool it was around here,” says Hanna, his arms flailing as though he were conducting a symphony orchestra. “All they ever built in this lousy town was roads, and that was because you could make so damn much money that way, putting down two inches of concrete and charging for three, getting change orders approved so you could increase the bid you knew was too low in the first place. It was a case of everyone sticking in their hands and grabbing as much as they could. Grab, grab, grab!”

To cut down on the wholesale theft of gasoline by city workers, Hanna put locks on the pumps at the Public Works garage, which reduced gas consumption his first year from 254,200 to 134,617 gallons. He insisted on personally signing all purchase orders for more than 81, and he told maintenance men to get spare parts from junkyards instead of buying them new.

In these and other ways, Hanna managed to scrounge enough money to lower taxes two years in a row, something unheard of in Utica, where, traditionally, taxes are lowered only a token amount during election years, then raised much higher afterward. What's more, he came up with a surplus both times.

Critics, whose numbers after his first few months began to grow geometrically, like to point out that much of the Hanna style is pure flimflam and that at least some of his “miracles” stem from simple financial manipulation. He achieved the first year's tax cut in part, for example, by transferring into the general fund some $450,000 that had been put in a special escrow account to pay for the possible loss of a long‐term court battle Involving the police pension fund. And when an unusually heavy snow fell on the city last winter, Hanna's severely depleted Public Works De partment was all but unable to cope with it. The roads were so rutted and icy that, in January, Utica drivers suffered four times the average number of smashups expected that month (meaning there will be a significant increase in their auto insurance).

Then, too, Hanna's close attention to petty details would give a systems analyst nightmares. Early on, he moved the city's stamp machine into his office to monitor the postage bill. But at one point he insisted that incoming mail to all 22 departments be funneled through him as well, so he could see if anyone was corresponding with shady characters. “It kept coming in and piling up and piling up,” recalls Ed Byrne, a local newspaper reporter who worked for Hanna six months and ended up, like many others, fighting with him and getting fired. “Pretty soon it was all over the desk and the tables and on the floor. He didn't know where it was supposed to go, and he wouldn't let it out of his office. So there it sat.” Eventually, according to Byrne, Hanna called in some 30 city employees for “a lesson in how their government works” and began opening the mail and reading it out loud. “We were in there for two hours,” Byrne said, “and I figured that, adding up the salaries, the lesson cost the about $2,000.”

Soon the list of Hanna stories was long enough to take up the whole cocktail hour at the Fort Schuyler Club, where Utica's business gentry stop off on their way home to the suburbs after work. (The club admitted its first Jew last year, and then only because the man was on the board of a large bank.) What really began to gall the local establishment was that Hanna refrained from showing it the deference it normally received from city politicians.

When the bankers got together and signed a letter criticizing the mayor's proposed hotel site, Hanna promptly withdrew all the city's demand deposits, gave them to a newly‐opened branch of Chase Manhattan and then took out a newspaper ad urging citizens to do the same.

As the confrontations piled up, the Mayor found himself battling with every power group in the city, from the unions to the League of Women Voters, whose well‐tailored chairman of the city government committee he called “an Old hag” during a chaotic housing hearing. The more people objected to his schemes, the madder he got.

The Common Council voted against “La Promenade,” his grand design to turn the city into a tourist mecca by rebuilding its seedy downtown into a Disneyland version of Old Europe, complete with boutiques, Paris bistros, Belgian‐waffle stands and a full‐scale reproduction of the Spanish Steps of Rome. The city's newspapers—two of the weaker links in the Gannett chain called The Daily Press and The Observer‐Dispatch—editorialized against his ideas to transform the dilapidated Union Station into an “Olympic Hall of Fame” and to put an “American Heritage Museum” into a vacant section of a bankrupt parking garage.

In retaliation, Hanna occasionally banned reporters from City Hall and threatened a $20 million lawsuit against the newspapers for “conspiring to deprive the public of the truth about their government.” The papers did not stop their criticism, but their executive editor grew so edgy that, much to the chagrin of his staff, he ordered every story about Hanna read to him over the phone before he went to bed.

Regularly, at press conferences, council meetings, and almost daily in his office, Hanna would rant against the “Big Boys” who kept thwarting his plans to save the city. “Where were the chamber of no‐commerce and the newspapers and all the smart guys in this town who say they don't like my way of doing things when that urban renewal disgrace of a mudhole just sat there for 15 years?” he shouted at a public hearing, his eyes watering and a vein pulsing in his forehead. “With all the brains in this town, what did they start that I stopped? What ideas did they ever give me? This lousy town was falling apart when I became Mayor, and I tell you now that in two years we'll lose another 3,000 or 4,000 people and pretty soon Utica will be a ghost town.”

As if to goad the “Big Boys” further, the Mayor last year spent $150,000 in Federal funds to erect a 100‐foot clocktower within earshot of the red brick building that houses the Fort Schuyler Club. In the tower, along with the clock, he installed a powerful electronic carillon and set its program so that every half hour the song that reiterates his theme—“I'll do it my way”—reverberates over the rooftops.

(The tower is called the Tower of Hope, not so much to represent the city's longing for a better day as to honor Bob Hope, the entertainer, whom the mayor persuaded to put on a show to publicize its construction. Although the event was billed as a benefit for the local United Fund, most of the benefit seems to have gone to Hope and his troupe, who left town with a check for $30,000, leaving the show's backers with a net of only $163.36 for charity.)

To those who knew Hanna when he was younger, his stance as an insistent outsider is nothing particularly new. “He really believed he would never be accepted by the people in this town, and so he's not,” says Joseph Meelan, a fellow Lebanese who owns a prosperous carpet company in Utica.

Born over a grocery store in the Polish neighborhood of West Utica, Hanna was raised in the Depression. He still likes to tell supporters about how he was sent down to the store to pick up throwaway vegetables and wore six patches on his pants, “each one a different color.” After World War II, during which he was shot in the left leg in the invasion of Guam, he opened up a factory that produced coconut candy bars called “Coconut Treats,” which, with typical Hanna zeal, he filled with pure coconut while, unbeknown to him, his competitors padded theirs with grain. His big financial coup, though, came in the 50's when, as a distributor for automatic photo booths, he came up with a fast‐working developer that went into standard use all around the world.

Independently wealthy ever since, Hanna was appointed a regional state parks commissioner in 1955 through the good offices of the state Democratic chairman, also a Utica businessman. But in his first few months, he made such a pest of himself, complaining loudly of what he saw as corrupt parks management that Robert Moses, then head of the parks system, persuaded Gov. Averell Harriman not to reappoint him. His next public appearance was as a state assemblyman in 1966, and it ended in a similar fashion when he began urging fellow assemblymen in Albany to create a unicameral legislature and, in the process, to abolish their own jobs. Local Democratic leaders did not support him for a second term.

His first election as Mayor of Utica in 1973 was a fluke. He ran as an independent against a Republican and a Democrat, both of whom, fortunately for him, were Italian and ended up splitting the city's large Italian vote. Hanna pulled enough of what was left to win a bare plurality. Last fall, when he ran the second time (on the Rainbow Party ticket), it was a different story. For one thing, he had something to show for his two years in office, things people could readily see. Along with the clocktower, Hanna had filled in about three acres of the downtown mudhole with a grassy park, and in it he built a small copy of the waterfall in New York City's Paley Park so the old folks could come by in the evening and listen to the water.

After initial prodding by the local antipoverty agency, he came up with the first workable housing rehabilitation scheme in the city's history: In its first year, it will provide $2,000 grants to 250 smallhome owners so they can fix up their property themselves. He also demolished 100 abandoned buildings, whereas his predecessors had knocked down hardly any.

His record for Improving the city's general economy is not so bright. In fact, since they came largely at the expense of some 350 discharged city workers, his tax cuts contributed to an increase in unemployment during his term. In addition, local businessmen complain that, because of his penchant for generating turmoil, badly needed industry has been frightened away from Utica.

Considering, however, that the last time a major company relocated to Utica was back in the mid 50's, the failuie to drum up new business can hardly he attributed to Hanna alone. What's more, judging him by conventional standards tends to obscure his real accomplishment, which was to provide a large class of people who had long felt left out of both machine politics and the suburban establishment with a distinct sense that what little his govern ment had to give was all for them. “I don't see a lot of long‐term planning, and I don't think anyone will look back and say he was a farsighted man,” says Stephen Frantzich, an assistant professor of government at nearby Hamilton College, one of whose students polled Hanna supporters during his last campaign. “But the people think the system works for them now.”

In his park, for example, he gave the people what amounted to a free party all year long. He and his wife contributed $2,000 to build a bandstand and during the last two summers provided entertainment every night of the week. He built colorful kiosks and sold hot dogs at 25 cents apiece. At Christmas, he contributed two tons of chestnuts and rounded up Federal money for 80 hibachis to roast them on.

“He thinks he's some kind of emperor,” said Bill Lohden, editorial page editor of The Daily Press. “He's passing out chestnuts and allowing the peasants to enjoy the largesse of the sovereign.”

The peasants, though, came in droves—over the first summer, the park drew more people downtown after dark than had been there in recent years. And when election time came around last fall—and after the papers hopefully predicted a large Hanna defeat—the Mayor won as many votes as the two regular party candidates combined.

“No matter whether what he's done is right or wrong, he's the first guy in Utica who's tried,” said Fred Sadella, 22, co‐owner of the Burrstone Mobil Station off Genesee Street. “Hanna likes something, and bang, he does it.”

“I hate to chalk Hanna up to Watergate,” says Frantzich, “but there's the feeling in people that politics as usual is not working for them anymore. They say, ‘Maybe we should get people in there who are going to break openly with the past.’ And he's certainly proved he can do that.”

The post‐Watergate feeling, of course, exists well beyond Utica. After a few blurbs about him in the national press, Hanna received 6,000 letters urging him to run for Governor—even for President. The clamor was such, in fact, that last spring he was momentarily convinced he should give his talents a wider purview. First, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to run against U.S. Senator James L. Buckley—an announcement he retracted six weeks later when it failed to generate anything resembling a positive reaction from party leaders. Next, he told local reporters he might just quit his job as Mayor if the city would set him up in Washington as a permanent lobbyist for the dispensation of Federal funds. “When I walk into some office down there, they don't see me as just some jerk mayor of some jerk town,” he said. “They all know who I am.”

Much to the disappointment of the newspapers, however, which hurriedly offered helpful advice on how he might best step down, Hanna decided after an exploratory trip to Washington that it was really his title rather than his personality that got him past the Federal receptionists. So he allowed as how he would stay on in the job after all and promptly announced his candidacy for re‐election in 1978.

To at least some of his antagonists this was a clear sign they had better start coming to terms. This summer, representatives of the city's banks, for instance, came to his office complaining that business had not been good lately and implied they would halt their criticism of his administration if only he would put Utica's checking account back in their vaults. “They looked so damn humble standing there,” the Mayor said, “that I just couldn't turn them down.”

Then, the Common Council, some of whose members had a bad scare last fall when their opposition to Hanna nearly lost them their normally safe districts, suddenly began passing the Mayor's schemes as readily as it had turned them down before. Last month, in a complete turnaround, the council voted to approve Hanna's La Promenade project, a vote Hanna promptly carried to Washington as evidence of support, coming back with $2.7 million in urban‐renewal funds for the start of construction.

Just how long the peace will last is anybody's guess. Nor is anyone willing to predict how well the Mayor can restrain himself from once again trying to send his balloon aloft. As he told a press conference last spring, with characteristic modesty: “I have set the pace for the great improvement needed in city government. My landmark accomplishments are here in the open, and now it is time that I pursue a goal of greater acomplishments for New York—and our whole country.” ■