From Success magazine, March 2012 issue
As he stood on the rooftop of the Z NYC Hotel, with the iconic Manhattan skyline glistening in the afternoon sunlight behind him, Michael Bloomberg deftly fielded questions from a group of journalists.
The 108th mayor of New York City was clearly in his element: confident, persuasive, in command of the facts, comfortable dealing with topics ranging from the troubled presidential campaign of Herman Cain to the Occupy Wall Street encampment to the intricacies of the city’s budgetary process.
Bloomberg had come from City Hall to Long Island City, Queens, to celebrate the opening of Z NYC, a boutique hotel built by real estate developer Henry Zilberman (hence the “Z” in its name). It was Bloomberg’s second scheduled media stop on a surprisingly balmy Monday in November. At 7:30 a.m., encircled by a media throng, he had greeted commuters at a bus stop on 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, where he touted the city’s new curbside fare payment machines designed to get riders aboard the bus faster.
The Queens event that afternoon provided Bloomberg a chance to promote his administration’s record on economic development. While city officials, local hotel executives and Queens politicians looked on, Bloomberg rattled off the impressive statistics: New York’s tourism industry now represented a $31 billion-a-year industry employing an estimated 323,000 workers; a boom in hotel construction meant a record 90,000 rooms would be available by the end of 2011, a 24 percent increase since 2006.
Bloomberg also took the opportunity to argue that his pro-growth policies and fiscal prudence had helped New York City emerge from the national recession faster than the rest of the country.
“If you look in all four directions,” he said, “the city is booming.”
Continue reading here