Just to make their life a little bit better. His landslide election that fall to a first full term inaugurated a year run as mayor. Throughout his years as mayor, development accelerated as the city added millions of square feet of new buildings. Wielding the power of his office, Mr. Menino could make development deals flourish — or shatter them just as swiftly.
In a statement Thursday, President Obama said Mr. His legacy lives on in every neighborhood he helped revitalize, every school he helped turn around, and every community he helped make a safer, better place to live. For constituents, Mr. Menino was the perennial mayor in their midst, a constant presence at local events. More than half of the Bostonians who responded to a Globe poll said they had met him personally.
Anyone who watched the mayor stroll through neighborhoods from Bowdoin-Geneva to West Roxbury might think that figure far too low. A politician with a flashing temper, whose skin could be as thin as his victory margins were thick, Mr. After that first landslide in , his reelection margins never dropped below 15 percentage points and were as high as 49 points.
His time in office also straddled a significant demographic shift, when the number of white residents in the city fell below 50 percent, and as Boston changed, he built a vaunted Democratic political machine. Reaching beyond his solid base, Mr. Menino also courted disparate constituencies that other candidates ignored or paid too little heed, such as African-Americans, gays and lesbians, and conservatives in East Boston.
As mayor, I intend to continue that. Robert E. Travaglini, a former state Senate president who served with Mr. For years, people were overlooked and underserved. He focused on those portions of the population, and he championed their causes, and they responded. I will never tolerate people being discriminated against. Years later, when the state began permitting same-sex marriages on May 17, , Mr. As lead plaintiffs, they had lent their name to the state Supreme Judicial Court case that legalized gay marriage six months earlier.
Flynn ambassador to the Vatican, Mr. Menino was the City Council president. On July 19, , Mr. Menino was sitting in his council office when an aide appeared at p. The council president automatically succeeds a mayor who departs in the middle of a term. That night, Mr. Nearly two decades earlier, after Mr. Menino said. Plain-spoken sentiments were a trademark of Mr. Menino, who often was famously tongue-tied and prone to malapropisms. Menino told the Globe in July Who have they helped? See more photos of former Mayor Menino.
He handily defeated state Representative James T. Brett in November, ending a run of Irish-American mayors that stretched back decades. Menino received Though hard fought, the campaign was largely amicable, and after it was over, the candidates preserved a strong relationship. As he easily was reelected four times, Mr. Menino kept up a punishing pace, rising early to crisscross the city. Kevin H. White, the four-term mayor who preceded Flynn, pioneered little city halls in outer neighborhoods.
At times, Mr. Menino seemed to embody them. White and Flynn both yearned for the national stature of higher offices. For Mr. Menino, being mayor was a calling of the highest order. On that November morning after he was first elected, the difference from the day before was apparent. And everyone around him quickly learned that no cog in the vast machinery of city government was too small to escape his attention. So far, unsuccessful. March 13, Successfully gets a new school-assignment plan approved after years of criticism and failed plans.
The new plan goes into effect with the — school year. Search for: Search. I'm a scraper This search result is here to prevent scraping. Thomas M. Menino: A Timeline From the early years to the victory lap.
Get a compelling long read and must-have lifestyle tips in your inbox every Sunday morning — great with coffee! He received a certificate in business administration from Chamberlayne Junior College in A former insurance salesman, he caught the political bug while working as a legislative aide to state senator Joseph Timilty.
He first earned elective office as a district city councilor in He went back to school and earned his undergraduate degree in community planning from the University of Massachusetts-Boston in He was never seriously challenged in four subsequent re-election bids, a two-decade period in which the city he governed slowly grew younger and more diverse.
Traditional urban ethnic enclaves in Boston were beginning to give way to a mix of new immigrants and younger professionals. Menino was also among the first big-city mayors to see the opportunities that technology afforded local governments to help solve recurring problems. He set up an office that developed a pioneering smartphone app for residents to report potholes and other apps to report graffiti and other nuisances. He never sought nor showed interest in running for higher office.
Mayor, it seemed, was the only political job to which he aspired. That would not, however, stop him from being at the forefront of major national issues. In , his administration began videotaping the court appearances of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes, promising to show on its cable TV station the arraignments of those convicted. In , he underwent surgery to remove a rare sarcoma on his back.
He spent six weeks in the hospital in for a series of ailments, including a respiratory infection. While he was in the hospital, he suffered a compression fracture in his spine and was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
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