Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayors…
By Philip Newman
Abraham D. Beame, mayor of New York City during the financial crisis that pushed the city perilously close to bankruptcy in the early 1970s and who many years earlier taught school in Queens, is dead at age 94.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayors Edward Koch and David Dinkins, along with other government leaders, friends and Beame’s survivors, paid their respects at a funeral service on Tuesday at the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan.
Beame died early Saturday, Feb. 10, after a long hospitalization following two open-heart operations, the most recent in December.
Beame, whose wife, Mary died five years ago, lived in Manhattan but had lived for more than 40 years in Brooklyn.
Prior to his political career, Beame was on the faculty of Richmond Hill High School in Queens, teaching accounting during the Great Depression and through World War II.
Beame had been widely praised for his refusal to declare bankruptcy during the city’s financial crisis in his 1974-1977 administration.
