I met Mayor David Dinkins in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina at the annual Professional Tennis Registry symposium. It was during the early part of President Obama's administration. I was at breakfast, and Mayor Dinkins was on his own, and I sat with a friend when we spotted him getting up from his table. We knew that he was a regular attendee of the annual symposium, so we approached him. My friend from Jamaica told him about the tennis scene in Jamaica before she left for her first workshop. And that left me standing with Mayor Dinkins, so I broached the topic of Barack Obama, and Mayor Dinkins spoke at length about the progress of the President's administration. Mayor Dinkins was thoughtful and soft-spoken, and whenever I have seen him on TV, I remembered my quiet conversation with him very fondly.
David Dinkins was an avid tennis fan, and as Mayor of NYC, he negotiated a 99-year lease with the United States Tennis Association that brought the US Open to NYC to boost the economy, a move later hailed by one of his successors, Michael Bloomberg, as "the only good athletic sports stadium deal, not just in New York but in the country." Dinkins also helped establish the order to re-route planes from flying over the US Open as they took off from La Guardia Airport. And Dinkins served on the board of the USTA for many years. He also founded the David Dinkins Tennis Club at "The Jungle," a set of tennis courts off Harlem River Drive.
While in office, Dinkins expanded affordable housing to combat homelessness, pushed for measures to tackle the HIV/AIDS crisis, and took several steps to address the city's high crime rate, which reached its nadir in 1990 when the city recorded roughly only 2,200 murders that year.
Also, Dinkins pushed for a major expansion of the NYPD, dubbed the "Safe Streets, Safe City" program, and by the time he left office, the city's crime rate had already begun to drop, a trend that lasted for nearly three deca
Speaking frequently of what he called New York's "gorgeous mosaic" of racial, ethnic and religious diversity, Dinkins championed economic equality and education for people of color, and offered the city a calming alternative to the brash leadership of Ed Koch.
David Dinkins wrote A Mayor's Life which you can find on our Library's eSource NoveList Plus.
David Norman Dinkins, the genteel first and, to date, only Black mayor of New York City who dedicated much of his public life trying to improve race relations in the nation's largest city, has died at age 93. Dinkins died Monday evening at his residence on Manhattan's Upper East Side in Manhattan.