The Nation: Should New York City Be the 51st State?

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The political connection between the people of the city and the state has been used by the latter to our injury. Our burdens have been increased, our substance eaten out and our municipal liberty destroyed. Why may not New York disrupt the bonds that bind her to a corrupt and venal master?

THAT bitter justification for demanding that New York City seek statehood carries the contemporary flavor of Mayor John Lindsay's continuing crusade for municipal independence. Yet it was offered more than a century ago by a Lindsay predecessor, Mayor Fernando Wood, in 1861. More recent mayors, including Jimmy Walker and Robert Wagner, have sought similar escape from the political shackles imposed by a state that the city dominates in almost every other way. In 1959 the New York City council approved creation of a committee to study secession, and a bill calling for a referendum on the establishing of a city-state was introduced in the New York legislature about the same time. Both efforts died from lack of interest. Mayoralty Candidate Norman Mailer revived the idea in 1969 when he made the 51st state his key campaign issue.

The idea is still something of a pipedream. But as New York City's problems multiply, its residents increasingly resent the spectacle of their elected officials pleading with smalltown legislators for permission to change the shift schedules of city patrolmen, retain rent control or decentralize schools. Albany's death grip over how the city raises and spends its own money is an even more serious matter. Thus the merits of independence cannot be airily dismissed. Lindsay's appointment of a commission to study statehood is not really as "childish" as Governor Nelson Rockefeller suggests.

No one is certain how statehood could be achieved. New York City's impetuous Congresswoman Bella Abzug has opened a drive to ask the city's voters in November to approve a resolution petitioning Congress to admit the city to the Union as a state. The New York legislature would also have to give its approval, a most improbable happening since the state would lose roughly half of its annual revenue. On the other hand, Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton contends that the rest of the state would say "good riddance" to the city and its troubles. Sutton suggests that the November referendum should also authorize the election of delegates to a City-State Constitutional Convention. They would submit a constitution at the next city election; if it is approved, statehood bills would then be introduced in the legislature and Congress. But there is no certainty that city residents would buy the concept, much less the constitutional details. Staten Island President Robert T. Connor has already said that his borough would not go along and recalled that borough officials recently studied "how to get the hell out of New York City."