Nation: From Tammany to Tiffany

In electing Republican John Lindsay mayor of their city last month, New Yorkers responded to a promise of youthful dash and imagination in a city government that had long made a virtue of timorous mediocrity. Last week, as he completed his first round of appointments, Lindsay, 44, seemed intent on honoring that promise.

As his two deputy mayors, Lindsay picked his astute, longtime campaign strategist, Robert Price, 33, and Liberal Party Chairman Timothy W. Costello, 49, an articulate professor of psychology and management at New York University who had been the mayor-elect’s unsuccessful running mate for the city council presidency.

Assigned the task of ferreting out municipal corruption as investigation commissioner was Arnold G. Fraiman, 40, a former assistant U.S. attorney who served as court-appointed lawyer for Soviet Spy Colonel Rudolph Abel in 1957. Robert O. Lowery, 49, an up-the-ladder career fireman who voted for Lindsay’s Democratic mayoral opponent Abraham Beame, became the city’s first Negro fire commissioner. The oldest and most widely known appointee was J. Lee Rankin, 58, Solicitor General under President Eisenhower and indefatigable counsel to the Warren Commission, who became New York City’s corporation counsel.

Another promising choice was Thomas Hoving, 34, as the new parks commissioner. The appointment was announced, à la Lyndon Johnson, against the appropriate backdrop—the boathouse in Central Park. Hoving, curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum and son of Tiffany’s Chairman Walter Hoving, prescribed a whole new approach to parks; he plans to put them on rooftops and river barges, hopes to beguile children with “adventure” playgrounds (TIME, June 25) where they can build their own slides, swings and jungle gyms.