Bloomberg’s Hometown, Medford, Mass., Struggles to Keep His Attention (original) (raw)
New York|Mayor’s Ties to Hometown Fade, but for a Few, They Are Still Felt
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Mayor’s Ties to Hometown Fade, but for a Few, They Are Still Felt
Medford is a middle and working-class suburb of 55,000 people, about six miles northwest of Boston.Credit...Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
- March 18, 2012
MEDFORD, Mass. — David Honeycutt stepped into John Brewer’s Tavern, his family’s sports bar just outside this blue-collar Boston suburb, days before the start of his senior year at Columbia, tipped off that the mayor of New York was eating lunch beneath a wall covered with Red Sox pennants and big-screen TVs.
Mr. Honeycutt, like Michael R. Bloomberg, had grown up in Medford and moved away for college, seeking a job in finance. Mayor Bloomberg, recognizing a kindred spirit, offered the young man his card; weeks later, in fall 2009, he greeted Mr. Honeycutt at City Hall and arranged an introduction to an executive at a major Wall Street bank.
“It was a pretty cool thing,” recalled Mr. Honeycutt, who eventually took a job at a Boston investment firm. “He didn’t have to do that.”
Mr. Honeycutt is among several residents here whose lives have been directly touched, in modest but often significant ways, by Medford’s best-known, and somewhat reluctant, celebrity. Over the years, Mr. Bloomberg has hired a local policeman as a chauffeur, arranged for a music group to meet the conductor of the Boston Pops and paid for a modern, airy redesign at his mother’s synagogue.
Yet the mayor’s ties to Medford are starting to fade. His mother, Charlotte, whom he visited frequently via private jet, died last year at 102, after living for decades in Mr. Bloomberg’s childhood home. He has not been back since, and some here, while grateful for his generosity, wonder whether a man who has long since transformed himself into a New Yorker will now maintain any connection to their town.
“The general take on Mayor Bloomberg and Medford is that Mayor Bloomberg made his money in New York and is very focused on that,” said Tom Lincoln, a local historian. Benjamin Averbook, 90, a longtime friend of Charlotte Bloomberg, put it more bluntly: “His mother is gone. He won’t be back.”
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