Abraham Beame

Abraham David Beame (né Birnbaum; March 20, 1906 – February 10, 2001) was an English-born American accountant, investor, and Democratic Party politician who served from 1974 to 1977 as the 104th mayor of New York City. Beame presided over the city during the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, when the city was almost forced to declare bankruptcy.

Beame was born Abraham David Birnbaum in London. His parents were Esther (née Goldfarb) and Philip Birnbaum, Jewish immigrants from Poland who fled Warsaw (then part of the Russian Empire). Beame and his family left England when he was three months old. He was raised on New York City's Lower East Side.

Beame graduated from P.S. 160 and the High School of Commerce before enrolling at the City College of New York's School of Business and Civic Administration (spun off as Baruch College in 1968), where he received his undergraduate degree in business with honors in 1928.

While in college, Beame co-founded an accounting firm, Beame & Greidinger. He was an accounting teacher at Richmond Hill High School in Queens from 1929 to 1946 and also taught accounting and commercial law at Rutgers University from 1944 to 1945.

From 1952 to 1961, Beame served as New York City's director of the budget, having also served as assistant director from 1946 to 1952. In this capacity, he "negotiated all city labor contracts without a strike and kept books on city spending and borrowing; he also set up management programs that saved the city $40 million."

Beame was a "clubhouse" or machine politician, a product of the Brooklyn wing of the patronage-oriented "regular" Democratic organization, the borough's equivalent of Manhattan's Tammany Hall and the locus of New York patronage politics following the ascent of Meade Esposito, as opposed to the policy-oriented "reform" Democrats who entered New York City politics, most effectively in Manhattan and the Bronx in the 1950s.

Before being elected to two nonconsecutive terms as city comptroller in 1961 and 1969, he was a longstanding member of Crown Heights's influential Madison Democratic Club and served as political boss Irwin Steingut's personal accountant. Members of the Madison Club, including attorney/fundraiser Abraham "Bunny" Lindenbaum and Steingut's son, Stanley, frequently liaised with real estate developer Fred Trump. The club also played a decisive role in the political ascent of Park Slope–based attorney Hugh Carey, whose tenure as governor of New York coincided with Beame's administration, though Carey eventually broke with the organization by endorsing Mario Cuomo's 1977 primary bid to unseat Beame.

In 1965, Beame was the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Edward N. Costikyan was his campaign manager and James Farley his campaign chair. Despite having Senator Robert F. Kennedy's strong support, Beame lost to the Republican nominee, John Lindsay.