By Michael Powell and Michelle Garc?a
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 20, 2006

NEW YORK -- Banker Ernest Aning has grabbed a sandwich and he's in a hurry to get back to his office and -- what? He should walk to the corner and wait at the light?

Right.

Aning cuts across the middle of 34th Street (four lanes, lots of trucks, buses and maniacal taxis, accompanied by recreational beeping) without a backward look. Four jaywalkers pass him going the other way.

"Rules like no jaywalking don't work," Aning explains without stopping. "It's the nature of this city -- you're in a rush, the cabdrivers are in a rush, everyone's in a rush."

The uncivil city roars, and somewhere a New York mayor shudders. For a decade Rudolph W. Giuliani and his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, have tried to tame the raucous city. They've thrown up concrete barricades to stop New Yorkers from jaywalking and tried banning vendors of hot dogs and assorted mystery meats from 44 blocks of Midtown, outlawed smoking in bars and cracked down on cellphone-carrying middle-schoolers and beer-guzzling gents at the beach. Once Giuliani even sent his personal police bodyguards scampering after marijuana smokers (the stoners got away).

And what's happened?

If eyes, ears and a twitching nose are correct, the jaywalking, hot-dog-munching, cellphone-talking-while-driving, pot-hoovering masses are holding their own. Marijuana-possession arrests have dropped by nearly half from a Giuliani-mandated high in 2000, the concrete barriers are gone, and taxi drivers and passengers persuaded the Taxi and Limousine Commission to drop those infernal recordings of celebrity voices -- Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Jackie Mason, Judd Hirsch, et al. -- commanding everyone to buckle up.

Standing at the more or less gridlocked corner of Eighth Avenue and 54th Street, a reporter counted 14 out of 20 car and truck drivers on cellphones. And that's not counting the two bicycle riders running red lights while chatting on phones.

Bloomberg is no softy in the field of mayoral-driven behavior modification. His cops once handed out a blizzard of tickets for beer drinking at a party on the beach in the Rockaways (as it turned out, it was a fundraiser for World Trade Center victims). A few days later, he was photographed sitting in Central Park listening to the New York Philharmonic as fellow concertgoers sipped chardonnay.

Bloomberg, however, did allow Giuliani's "decency commission" to sunset in 2003. The former Hizzoner appointed that commission to monitor and perhaps revoke public funding from museums that exhibited too much risqu? art.

" Decency? No j aywalking ? C'mon, this stuff just boomerangs," said Norman Siegel, a civil liberties lawyer and lifelong New Yorker. "The worst thing that can happen to an authoritarian personality is to have people laugh at him."

So New York's inner anarchist smiles. Speaking of which, in the evening on East Ninth Street, self-described 44-year-old anarchist Juan Gone takes a lonnnnng drag on something that looks illegal and smells rather sweet.

"I wouldn't say New York's as cool as the old stoner days, uh-uh," says Gone, who works as a bike messenger and "world-change activist." "But you need a little weed? Maybe the cops have become a little more understanding."

Now, in truth, much has become pasteurized in New York. Chain stores and banks proliferate like urban kudzu (Manhattan has 25 percent more banks and 80 percent more national pizza chains than it had five years ago). Surveillance cameras are everywhere, and cops conduct bag checks in subways and handed out 1,697 jaywalking citations last year, up from 59 in 1995.

Bloomberg has his own crusades, including a not-noticeably-successful charge against noise. Citations for excessive noise jumped from 4,866 in 2000 to 19,234 in 2005, but a reporter suspended two interviews for this article as a quartet of jackhammers and a car radio with a very insistent bass line threatened his eardrums with implosion. Of late, the mayor has tangled with public school parents, as his officials have wheeled portable scanners into middle schools to search children for cellphones.

"The whole crackdown approach to policing has carried over to more and more aspects of life in the city, even routine school discipline," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Then there's the mayor's crackdown on smokers in bars, which was effective but perhaps with unintended side effects. "The police are too busy going after the cigarette smokers," said Patrick Markee, who works with Coalition for the Homeless. "It's a boon for pot smokers."

Some New Yorkers, perhaps even a majority, actually seem to enjoy a vaguely quieter, slightly more law-abiding city. And it's possible that the cumulative effect of all this legal tightening of screws allows for some loosening.

"I know this is a very strange concept for New Yorkers, but there's been an increase in civility," said Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an influential conservative think tank. "Some specific initiatives and crackdowns might fall away or lose their sense of urgency as the city settles down."

Still, the notion of a settled-down New York City strikes many of its more hard-core partisans as oxymoronic. You want to wait at a red light? Move to Los Angeles. New York's a step-into-traffic sort of place.

"The worst of Rudy's prudery has passed, but large areas of Manhattan became very vapid," says Bill Dobbs, a longtime downtown resident and confirmed New York partisan. "If that kept up, New York City was going to be as dull as D.C."