A Hero of New York

New Yorkers looking for a symbol of Michael Bloomberg’s failing mayoralty could choose as their hero (or martyr, as it were) the proprietor of an Italian eatery at Staten Island, Charles Hermansen. According to a dispatch in the New York Post, Mr. Hermansen is shuttering his restaurant, Cucina di Napoli, and putting the building up for sale. This is after he was closed by the Mayor Bloomberg’s health department.Mr. Hermansen charges that it raided his restaurant during its most crowded hour, and tagged him with a long list of violations, because at restaurant owners’ meeting he’d spoken out against the way the health department was harassing Staten Island restaurant owners with, as the New York Post characterized it, petty infractions to extract hefty fines for the city’s treasury.That charge rings all too true, as New Yorkers watch the roll-out of a grading system that is meaningless on substance and designed to infantilize the restaurateurs. There was a story that even such a magnificent restaurant as Sardis has not been immune from the city’s thuggery. It was ordered to abandon its bar cheese, without a shred of a public hearing as to whether any one ever, at any restaurant, in any country, on any plant on the solar system ever got sick from bar cheese.The Health Department actually tried to claim to the New York Times that it did not, as the Times put it, cite Sardis for a violation because of the cheese, which is one, if only one, of the features of the storied restaurant that made it so welcoming to so many New Yorkers and tourists for so many years of healthy and delicious eating and drinking. But it turns out, the Times learned from the president of Sardi’s, Max Klimavicius, that an inspector Mr. Bloomberg’s administration had sent over to Sardi’s had seen the cheese in a refrigerator and told the owner he could couldn’t have the cheese out.So whom would you trust — the mayor or the owner of Sardis? It’s certainly hard to read the dispatch in the Times and conclude anything other than that the Health Department is just not being straightforward with the public. The New York Post also carries a dispatch in which the mayor is chortling about the latest statistics on life expectancy, which supposedly show that a newborn in New York City will live more than two years longer — 80.6 years, compared to 78.2 years — than the average for the rest of the country.The Post quotes the city’s commissioner of mental hygiene, Thomas Farley, as taking credit, saying, “The fact that York City’s life expectancy is greater than the U.S. and rising faster than the U.S. means we’re doing some thing or some things right.” We look forward to the deconstruction of that claim by statistical scholars. Meantime we wish that Mr. Hermansen, who stood up for himself, a long, and we hope happy, retirement, at least until a new administration comes in that will permit him to reopen his wonderful restaurant.

A Hero of New York

A Hero of New York

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