Mayor de Blasio used a mix of charm and humor to lead the city through the first major winter storm of his new administration.
De Blasio kept his tongue planted firmly in cheek from his pre-snow press conference on Thursday through the worst of the winter blast on Friday — showing more personality than his stiff predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.
“Sometime in the centuries from now, a new civilization will look back and will still find our parking meters are in effect,” he joked while informing the driving public that only alternate-side-parking had been suspended.
De Blasio repeatedly mentioned the predawn conference call during which he decided to close the city’s public schools, saying, “I was one of the most informed people in New York City at 4 a.m. this morning.”
De Blasio also confirmed that son Dante, a junior at Brooklyn Tech, had prodded him to declare a snow day — but insisted it wasn’t a factor.
“I cannot tell a lie,” de Blasio said. “If Dante was not lobbying me, there would be something wrong with him. Of course. He’s 16!”
The new mayor, who spent part of the morning shoveling his Park Slope sidewalk before pawning off the job on his son, also performed a striptease when asked how many layers he was wearing.
After peeling back his royal-blue, mayoral windbreaker to reveal a blue-and-white striped dress shirt beneath, de Blasio asked, “Do you want me to go farther? I have an undershirt, also.”
De Blasio also flexed his Spanish-language skills — summing up his storm warnings with a passable accent that experts said easily trumps Bloomberg’s attempts.
“He could pass for Central or South American,” said Gerson Borrero, a columnist and former editor-in-chief of El Diario newspaper. “He was pretty much right on the mark with pronunciation and conjugation, at least colloquially.”
Juan Pablo Jiménez-Caicedo, who teaches Spanish at Columbia University, said Bloomberg’s Spanish was stiff and sloppy.
“[You] to either had to laugh . . . or ask a neighbor to find out what he meant by a few of those mispronounced words,” Jiménez-Caicedo said of Bloomberg, who’s still being mocked on the @ElBloombito Twitter page.