G.O.P. CITY.(The Talk of the Town)

The Republicans are coming, and it isn't easy to tell who's more jittery--the visitors or the natives. On billboards and television, Ed Koch admonishes everybody to "make nice." ("anarchy threat to city"was the two-inch front-page headline over a News story about cops and protesters.) The Republicans' decision to hold their Convention in New York, along with its late date, provoked grumbling that the anniversary of the terror attacks would be exploited for political gain, a complaint that then seemed to cause the Convention's planners to nervously distance themselves from all Ground Zero symbolism. Even so, for a campaign built on presenting George W. Bush as a "war President," New York seems a perversely logical Convention-site choice. "republicans venture behind enemy lines" is the way a Financial Times headline put it, over a story about how incorrigibly Democratic this town is.

Not that the Republican Party and New York City are strangers. It's true that Democrats have always outnumbered Republicans here--the current ratio is five to one--and that the last G.O.P. Presidential candidate to carry the city was Calvin Coolidge. But the Party's destiny has often been shaped in New York. There was Abraham Lincoln's breakout performance at Cooper Union during the 1860 primaries. And, a hundred years later, the now obscure but then famous Compact of Fifth Avenue (known among some conservatives as the Sellout of Fifth Avenue), when Richard Nixon met with Nelson Rockefeller in the latter's palatial apartment and agreed, in exchange for Rockefeller's endorsement, to support the civil-rights movement.

Governor Rockefeller was one of the most formidable in a line of local G.O.P. establishment giants which goes back at least as far as 1862, when George Opdyke became the first Republican mayor of New York, unseating a Democrat who had proposed seceding from the Union in order to continue trading with the Confederacy. (He wanted to take Long Island with him, and to call his statelet the Free City of Tri-Insula.) The draft riots of 1863 are remembered chiefly for their massacre of black New Yorkers, but Republicans are entitled to take pride in having been secondary targets of the racist mob. The mansions and businesses of prominent Republicans were burned. The mayor's house was threatened. Brooks Brothers was sacked. The big Republican dailies, Horace Greeley's Tribune and Henry Raymond's Times, were besieged. At the Times, Raymond and one of his chief shareholders (Winston Churchill's grandfather, it turned out) personally manned Gatling guns in the newspaper's windows to keep the mob at bay. (Nowadays, the Times supports gun control and endorses mainly Democrats.)

New Yorkers still regularly elect Republican mayors--the incumbent and his predecessor, to take two examples. And many of the city's great reformers and crime-fighters have been Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, Thomas E. Dewey, John V. Lindsay, Rudolph Giuliani. The local advocates of Good Government, tilting against Tammany Hall and other patronage machines, have tended Republican, too. In 1948, a moderate New York City Republican actually came within hailing distance of the White House, and if Governor Dewey had managed to win his eminently winnable race against President Truman perhaps the decline of the East Coast Republican establishment would have been averted, or at least delayed.

Remnants of the old patrician tradition live on, and many of New York City's Republican leaders remain ...