Fiorello La Guardia

His father was an Italian immigrant who led United States Army bands, his mother a Jewish woman from Trieste, and the boy grew up on frontier posts in Arizona Territory — Whipple Barracks, Fort Huachuca — about as far from Greenwich Village, where he was born, as the country went. At 21 he held an American consular commission at Fiume, on the Adriatic. He came home in 1906, took a job as an Ellis Island interpreter certified in Italian, German, Yiddish and Croatian, and studied law at New York University while he worked. Admitted to the bar in 1910, elected to Congress in 1916, he left his seat empty to fly Caproni bombers on the Italian front and came back a major.

A Fusion ticket of Republicans, reform Democrats, Socialists and Italian voters put him in City Hall over Tammany in 1933, and he won it twice more. Roosevelt handed him a fifth of the national work-relief budget in his first months, and federal money — 1.1 billion dollars between 1934 and 1939 — bought parks, highways, the Triborough Bridge, public housing, two airports and a unified subway. He took the city payroll away from the machine and gave it to the civil service. Robert Moses built much of it, and the two could not stand each other.

He was a performer, and he knew it. He swung a sledgehammer at Frank Costello's confiscated slot machines while the newsreel cameras ran, then dumped them off a barge into the water. He conducted orchestras. In July 1945, with a deliverymen's strike keeping the papers off the stoops, he read the Sunday comics aloud on WNYC and explained the plots to children. He was also thin-skinned, autocratic and close to impossible to work for, and his certainties cut in every direction: he shut the burlesque houses because they offended him, and banned pinball as a gambling racket. On race the record is harder. Harlem rioted in 1935 and again in 1943. The commission he appointed after the first blamed police aggression, job discrimination and segregation, and he shelved its report — the Amsterdam News printed it anyway, in installments.

His sister Gemma came home from Ravensbrück in May 1947, four months before he died — while the Gestapo held her he had refused to seek an exception, writing that her case was the same as that of hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Pancreatic cancer killed him at his house in Riverdale on September 20, 1947, at 64. The name went onto an airport, a community college, a performing arts high school and a street, and a Broadway musical about him opened in 1959. In 1993 a panel of 69 scholars ranked him the best big-city mayor in American history. His biographer Thomas Kessner adds the awkward part: no American city now would hand one man that much power.

Fiorello La Guardia's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Norris-La Guardia Act law
  Ended federal court injunctions against strikes and killed the yellow-dog contract 1932
• High School of Music and Art building
  Now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts 1936
• New York City Charter of 1938 law
  Rewrote the structure of city government and retired the Board of Aldermen 1938
• New York Municipal Airport No. 2 building
  Renamed for him within a year and known ever since as LaGuardia Airport 1939
• Subway unification other
  The city bought out the IRT and the BMT and took the whole system public 1940
• New York City Center of Music and Drama building
  He saved the Mecca Temple and reopened it as a public arts house 1943

• February 8, 1904 aged 21 Commissioned a United States consular agent at Fiume He was 21 and had been running the agency on the Adriatic since 1903.
• November 6, 1907 aged 24 Starts work as an interpreter at Ellis Island Certified in Italian, German, Yiddish and Croatian. Felix Frankfurter, who met him there, called him a gifted interpreter.
• December 12, 1917 aged 35 Qualifies as a pilot while holding a seat in Congress He trained Italian fliers at Foggia, commanded Caproni bombers on the Italian-Austrian front, and finished the war a major.
• November 29, 1921 aged 38 His wife Thea dies, six months after their infant daughter Fioretta died on May 8 of the same year. He remarried in 1929.
• 1932 aged ~50 The Norris-La Guardia Act passes, and he loses his House seat The anti-injunction law was the biggest thing he did in Congress. The same year the Democratic tide took his district.
• January 1, 1934 aged 51 Sworn in as mayor of New York City His first official act was to order the arrest of Lucky Luciano.
• 1935 aged ~53 Harlem riots, and he shelves his own commission's report on why The report named police aggression, employment discrimination and segregation. The Amsterdam News published it in serial form.
• July 1945 aged 62 Reads the comics on the radio during a newspaper deliverymen's strike The single most repeated story about him, and the reason a generation of New Yorkers could do his voice.
• September 20, 1947 aged 64 Dies of pancreatic cancer at his house in Riverdale He had spent 1946 running UNRRA relief for the refugees of Europe.

• Robert Moses 1888–1981
  Master builder whose roads, parks, and public works reshaped metropolitan New York while displacing communities and entrenching car dependence. appointed
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. allied with
• Boss Tweed 1823–1878
  Boss of Tammany Hall, whose ring looted New York City while it fed and naturalized the city's immigrants. opposed the machine of
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. New Deal ally
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. served beside at civilian defense
• A. Philip Randolph 1889–1979
  Labor and civil-rights leader who pressured presidents to desegregate defense work and the armed forces. took a case for