The municipal building at 1 Centre Street is now named for former Mayor David Dinkins. Mayor Bill de Blasio arranged the dedication and said his former boss deserves much more credit than he's received for his four years at City Hall. NY1's Grace Rauh filed the following report.
An imposing landmark at 1 Centre Street, just down the road from City Hall, will now be known as the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building. The former mayor worked out of here when he was the city clerk and Manhattan borough president.
At a ceremony to name the building after him, former Mayor Dinkins, who is 88 years old, reflected on his life, invoking a description of the city he made famous as mayor.
"The older I get, the more convinced I am that our city is, in fact, a gorgeous mosaic," Dinkins said. "I am but a single tile in that thrilling exhibition of humanity we call New York City.
Mayor Bill de Blasio was a young aide in Dinkins' City Hall. It was there he met his future wife.
"I didn't need online dating," de Blasio said.
De Blasio used his time on stage to argue that Dinkins, the first and only African-American to win City Hall, is underappreciated.
"History still doesn't accurately identify what this mayor did for this city," de Blasio said.
De Blasio praised Dinkins for boosting the size of the police department.
"We are now on an almost quarter-century-long path of progress towards a safer and safer city, and it started with David Dinkins," de Blasio said.
Dinkins led New York during a period of racial strife and rampant crime. He was widely criticized for bungling the city's response to the Crown Heights riots in 1991. It was an event that haunted him during his failed re-election bid, when Rudolph Giuliani beat him.
The event was a reunion of sorts for officials from the Dinkins administration, and plenty of other politicians came out to honor the former mayor as well. Some notable absences, though: Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Giuliani. All of them were invited, but none attended.