A Mayor Who Puts Wall Street First Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a cafe to highlight his big-soda ban. On March 15 of last year, at a moment when many New Yorkers found themselves increasingly disturbed by revelations that the Police Department had conducted constitutionally suspect surveillance of Muslim communities, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made an unplanned visit to the offices of Goldman Sachs. The mood had grown sour among some of the city's most amply compensated plutocrats. The day before, Greg Smith, an executive director in the company's equity derivatives business, announced his resignation, in an Op-Ed page article in The New York Times, declaring that the previous decade had left Goldman's culture so steeped in avarice and self-interest, so utterly disdainful of its clients, that he no longer found it morally tenable to work there. Outraged by the attacks on Goldman that immediately followed - a "piling on," as the mayor put it, that he found "ridiculous" - Mr. Bloomberg arrived to heal and absolve. Do any wounds require avuncular tending quite like those of an investment banker? Staying for an hour, Mr. Bloomberg shook hands with employees and sat down to hamburgers with Goldman's chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the son of a postal clerk whose trajectory from the East New York housing projects in Brooklyn to Harvard to the management of one of the world's most powerful banks could hardly seem less plausible now, amid the realities of millennial New York. Among the various enduring images of the Bloomberg years, many are positive and some perhaps even blessed: bike lanes, smokeless restaurants, new expanses of green space, the increased presence of ferries on the city's waterways. But to my mind, this gesture of therapeutic outreach to an institution that defrauded its own clients is unmatched in its symbolic weight, so clearly encapsulating the mayor's most devoutly held allegiances and the civic repercussions accompanying them, the tireless coddling of the overclass. No mayor in New York's history has done more to consolidate the city's identity with Wall Street. Mr. Bloomberg obviously does not bear responsibility for the creation of the indecipherable, huckster financial instruments that resulted in our economic crisis and the litany of personal miseries that followed, but he was one of the country's most impassioned and nurturing supporters of Wall Street during its most ethically unhinged hour. It was not simply that he was such an obvious champion of the financial industry, but also that in the city he ran he could barely brook any dissent of it. This was apparent in the way his police force greeted the arrival of Occupy Wall Street, with Mace and pointless arrests, ultimately clearing Zuccotti Park, where the protesters had encamped, with the aid of sirens and riot gear, as if Manhattan had been taken over by the Shining Path. A political figure rarely afraid of expressing reproach - someone whose administration stigmatized fat people, poor teenage mothers, members of the teachers" union - Mr. Bloomberg seems to imagine that any impulse short of adulation will shoo Wall Street away. Several weeks ago he publicly denounced Eliot Spitzer, not for his domestic failings but for his wish to curtail the worst instincts of the banks and to maximize their utilitarian value. ("This is our industry," the mayor said. "We'd appreciate it if someone recognized that this is our tax base.") Presumably, in Mayor Bloomberg's most terrified imagination, the true agenda of someone like Mr. Spitzer is to bundle up Wall Street in Bubble Wrap and send it to Connecticut, leaving in its place only a bottomless container of Pepsi. Wall Street has benefited under Mayor Bloomberg much more than other industries, as evidenced by the pronounced inequality felt all over the country and experienced most dramatically here. The average salary in the securities industry in 2011 was $362,900, according to the state comptroller's office, an average higher than before the financial crisis and more than five times the average in the rest of the city's private sector. As a share of private sector wages, the securities industry grew from 21 percent at the beginning of Mayor Bloomberg's first term to 28 percent early in his second, while never accounting for more than 6 percent of jobs. The top 1 percent of earners in New York make nearly 40 percent of the total income of city residents, nearly twice the national figure. This number has grown. At the beginning of Mr. Bloomberg's tenure in 2002, the top 1 percent of earners in New York made 27 percent of the income. It is worth considering these numbers in the context of the previous gilded age, the era of Oliver Stone's first "Wall Street," in 1985, when the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers made 15 percent of the city's income, virtually in line with the national figure at the time. During a presentation to the American Sociological Association last week, James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit research and education group, offered a look at income polarization in the city that included this startling statistic, culled from census data: while real median family incomes were flat from 2000 to 2010, median family incomes rose an average of 55 percent in eight high-income neighborhoods, including TriBeCa and the Upper East Side, the home ZIP codes of the financial industry. E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com