Abraham D. Beame

Abraham D. Beame (right) on a tour of the Bronx with President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of Construction Patricia Roberts Harris (1977)

Abraham David Beame (born March 20, 1906 in London , †  February 10, 2001 in New York City ) was an American politician and mayor of New York City from 1974 to 1977.

Origin and education

Beame was born in London in 1906 to Polish - Jewish parents who had fled the pogroms from Warsaw , which was then Russian . His father Philip Birnbaum, a socialist revolutionary, emigrated directly to the United States, while his mother Esther Goldfarb Birnbaum in London waited for the child to be born and did not follow until three months later. In New York the family name was changed to Beame. Beame was New York's first Jewish mayor.

Beame graduated from City College as an accountant in 1928 and then went into business for himself. He also taught accounting at Richmond Hill High School in Queens from 1929 to 1944 and at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1944 and 1945 . 1930 he and his wife were the Democratic Party in Crown Heights ( Brooklyn at), where he lived with his family.

Political career

In 1946 he was appointed deputy budget director of the City of New York under Mayor William O'Dwyer and in 1952 budget director under Mayors Vincent R. Impellitteri and Robert F. Wagner . In 1961, at the age of 55, Beame ran for the first time for political office and was elected City Comptroller , the chief auditor.

After the resignation of Mayor Wagner, he applied for his successor, but was defeated by his Republican challenger John Lindsay . In 1969 Beame ran again as Comptroller and won by a large margin. Lindsay's second term was overshadowed by soaring social spending, racial unrest, rampant crime and budget difficulties. In this situation, Beame was able to present himself as a clever, responsible accountant against Lindsay and was elected as his successor at the end of 1973 and introduced into his office on January 1, 1974.

Term of office as mayor

Beame inherited a desperate budget situation from his predecessor and was forced to take painful austerity measures. He cut the city's workforce by 65,000, reduced hospital beds by 3,000, and introduced tuition fees for City University . In 1975 and 1976, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy after the federal government under President Gerald Ford initially refused to provide guarantees for the city. The city's rock bottom came in 1977 with a blackout and serious unrest in the Bronx . In the meantime extremely unpopular because of his austerity measures in a city that was stumbling on the brink, Beame was defeated in the democratic primary elections in 1977 by his inner-party challenger Ed Koch , who succeeded him as mayor. One of his last official acts on the last day of his tenure was the first tax exemption ever granted to a private entrepreneur in New York. The beneficiary was Donald Trump , a young newcomer to the real estate business whose father Fred C. Trump Beame was long friends. According to current estimates, this has saved Donald Trump about $ 400 million in taxes.

Beame died in 2001 at the age of 94 from complications after heart surgery in New York.

Web links

• Abraham Beame in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Obituary , New York Times, February 11, 2001
• List of mayor of New York City since 1898 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher: Trump Revealed . Simon & Schuster, London 2017. pp. 75–78.

predecessor	Office	successor
John Lindsay	Mayor of New York City January 1, 1974 - December 31, 1977	Ed Koch