According to City Comptroller William Thompson, the city’s economy is taking a $2 million a day hit as a result of the theatre industry strike; the producers say it closer to $17 million but we know this much: thousands of workers are also taking a hit as the financial well-being of the theatre district goes into a tail spin.

As New Yorkers watched the strike unfold, the mayor –heretofore known as Missing in Action Mike- was busy giving the keys to the city to the singer Fats Domino and dining at a midtown bistro, to help one business owner. Bloomberg has an uncanny tin ear when it comes to those moments that call for decisiveness and ingenuity; indeed, during last summer’s half-hour rainstorm that closed down the city for an entire day, the mayor was very busy honoring a baseball player, Tom Glavine, who also got the key to the city, which won’t help him much in Atlanta as he recently bade Gotham farewell.

Now, the mayor-who is starring in his own production -- the Phantom of City Hall -- claims the strike is strictly a private issue and there really isn’t much he can do as mayor except –ten days after the start of the strike- to offer the services of the city’s labor negotiators after positions have hardened. The public seems to have bought this line, mainly because no one has reminded us that there was a time in our history that we had a mayor who got involved in private strikes and threatened work stoppages.

His name was William O’Dwyer, who died in 1964 and his labor guru was Ted Kheel, still alive and well and practicing law in Manhattan.

It wasn’t always true that New York City mayors “sit in waiting” –in the words of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

O’Dwyer, mayor from 1946 to 1950, believed that the leader of a town like New York had an obligation to get both sides together, precisely so that the private sector’s woes wouldn’t spill over into the public sector (lost taxes on ticket sales, garage fees, restaurant and hotel bills) and lost wages of the city’s private sector workers who depend on a robust theatre industry to pay their bills.

O’Dwyer was of the working class himself; after emigrating from Ireland in 1907, he had a meteoric rise, starting by pushing a vegetable cart trough the cobblestone streets of the South Bronx. He later became a bartender and a trolley conductor; he carried hod on the Woolworth Building, shipped out on a steamship, put in a stint as a doorman on Park Avenue, joined the police force, and became a lawyer, a judge, the District Attorney of Brooklyn, mayor and Ambassador to Mexico.

Nine months after Bill O’ was inaugurated as mayor in January, 1946, he established the Division of Labor Relations. “Its’ job was to birddog potential strikes, to flush them out and to make sure that a work stoppage did not take place,” O’Dwyer wrote later. His actions were applauded by the city’s media. O’Dwyer had learned a lesson when the tug boat workers went on strike early in his term. He closed down non-essential city services, much to the consternation of many but he was lauded by others, including the New York Times which praised his “foresight and wisdom” and the fact that he “worked incessantly” along with his labor advisor to settle the dispute.

That labor advisor was Kheel, now 93, who recalled in an interview today that he and his three team panel were kept busy as unions started to flex their muscle after World War II ended. “We were all over the place,” he recalled. “There were problems everywhere you turned and O’Dwyer was determined that the city’s residents not be hurt by private strikes. Plus, he thought no one really wins a strike.”

“In its first three years,” wrote labor historian Joshua Freeman in his book Working Class New York, “the DLR intervened in over 150 disputes.” Freeman said that perhaps its most impressive achievement was “brokering a stabilization agreement” between nearly three dozen unions and the Building Trades Employers’ Association in response to a slump in construction growing out of a fear of inflation and unpredictable labor costs.” Freeman wrote that O’Dwyer’s panel “would pressure the parties to negotiate, coordinating its efforts with state and federal agencies.” If that failed, “O’Dwyer typically appointed a tripartite committee, consisting of a public member (often a judge or retired judge) and labor and business representatives to attempt to settle the dispute.”

Kheel called O’Dwyer “one of the most brilliant men I have ever met, someone who could distill complicated issues into a half hour presentation after being briefed for five minutes.” One tug boat shop steward, a member of the International Longshoreman’s Union, remembered how O’Dwyer would sit in his shirtsleeves at Gracie Mansion, smoking a pipe, and try to get an agreement. “Both sides trusted him to do the right thing,” this ILA man recalled. “He had this amazing ability to get both sides to like him and it made it a lot easier to make a deal.”

The mayor would do well to take a look at the city’s archives and stop using the word “private” as an excuse for his inaction. He did the same thing in the TWU strike, when his major accomplishment was to get photographed buying a $600 bike and calling the president of the union a “thug,” a word heavy with racial overtones.

Instead of dining with three friends in midtown, he could call everyone together at Gracie Mansion, order in some food, lock the doors and tell the participants that no one is leaving until a deal is struck. Now that would be some refreshing old-time Tammany style leadership.