The Republican mayor-elect of New York was national news, and America was suddenly paying attention. What it saw was a lanky Mr. Smith with an engagingly open smile, talking about shining ideals, about a great city where people would work together, about replacing old power brokers and party-hack government with dedicated young people who cared about democracy and equality.

''John Lindsay was the best mayor New York ever had before he took office,'' a press aide to Mr. Wagner quipped.

But on Jan. 1, 1966, as Mr. Lindsay was being sworn in, the bubble burst. New York's vast lifeline of subways and buses was shut down by a transit strike that had been looming unattended for weeks. ''My God,'' said a straphanger who found the subway abandoned. ''Wagner left and took all the trains with him.'' There were bad gags about the mayor ending subway crime on his first day, but the reality was worse.

The longtime president of the Transport Workers Union, Michael J. Quill, had danced a pas de deux every second New Year's Eve with Mayor Wagner, blustering threats of a strike for weeks in a tyrannical brogue, and then settling at the 11th hour on terms that would let him -- and the city -- each claim victory.

The cognoscenti understood it to be a kind of charade. Mr. Quill and other municipal union leaders, in fact, trusted Mr. Wagner, who never mistook bluster for substance. His father, a United States senator, had written the 1935 Wagner Act, codifying rules for union organizing and adjudicating unfair practices.

In his final days in office, Mayor Wagner, true to custom, did nothing to avert a transit walkout, and Mr. Lindsay -- not yet in charge and determined to avoid the appearance of a backroom deal -- waited until it was too late. Then, instead of negotiating, he lectured the union chief on civic responsibility.

''Coward! Pipsqueak! Ass!'' Mr. Quill bellowed at the new mayor, referring to him contemptuously as ''Lindsley.'' Defying court orders against the strike, Mr. Quill went proudly to jail, and Mr. Lindsay took to the airwaves to rally the citizenry.

A Costly Battle of Wills Anoints a New Mayor

The strike went on for 13 days, with New Yorkers walking, riding bikes or staying home. The cost to the city, in lost productivity and wages, was a whopping $1.5 billion. Finally, a settlement was worked out: $52 million for two years, double the size of any transit pact negotiated by Mr. Wagner. For the city, it was a bad deal that would raise other unions' demands and commit administrations to heavy labor costs for years to come. For Mr. Quill, in the twilight of his stormy life, it was a resounding last hurrah. For Mr. Lindsay, it was a rude awakening.

The strike had been about more than money. ''It was a cultural collision that had more to do with symbolic power than dollars, as each man sought to make a statement about who who should rule New York,'' Chris McNickle wrote in his 1993 book, ''To Be Mayor of New York.''

Early in his first administration, Mr. Lindsay announced that he would give back $5,000 of his $50,000 salary, saying the city needed it more than he did. He got rid of pothole inspectors. He banned cars from big parks during weekends and nonrush hours, and had his parks commissioner, Thomas P. F. Hoving, organize musical events and other happenings to draw people back to the greenswards. He opened a bicycle path on the Brooklyn Bridge. He established the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting and campaigned to bring filmmaking back to the city.

After Dick Schaap, a columnist for The New York Herald Tribune, coined the phrase Fun City, the mayor adopted it to promote New York as a mecca of theater, art and other culture. The phrase came back to haunt him later when the trains stopped running and uncollected garbage piled up in the city streets.

While Mr. Lindsay brought urbanity to City Hall, there was another side of him that the public rarely saw, but one glimpsed by subordinates, reporters and others up close. In his first days in office, the mayor, enraged at criticism by City Hall reporters, banned the press from the main-floor washroom.

Lindsay aides said that in contrast to his sparkling performances on late night talk shows, the mayor was often aloof in private, looking over the heads in a meeting, his conversations punctuated by silences. Some said he displayed no curiosity about the lives of his staff members, was intolerant of their quirks and seemed incapable of warmth, except toward his family.

Fighting bureaucracy, he reorganized 50 departments into 10 super-agencies, each with an administrator who reported to the mayor. The plan streamlined overlapping jurisdictions and functions, but critics said it ultimately only added more layers to the bureaucracy.

Creating 'Night Mayor' And 'Little City Halls'

Another Lindsay plan to turn dozens of neighborhood storefronts used in his campaign into ''little City Halls'' -- ostensibly to give the voters grass-roots access to city government -- was cut down by City Council Democrats, who said they would in effect become Lindsay political clubhouses. The mayor instead opened a half-dozen neighborhood government offices.

He also created the ''night mayor,'' usually one of his top commissioners or administrators, who could be reached at any hour of the night to deal with problems or complaints. Like the neighborhood offices, the night mayoralty was eventually abandoned as needless and ineffective.

Mr. Lindsay also enlarged and reorganized the Police Department, modernized its communications system and appointed innovative commissioners, including Patrick V. Murphy and Donald F. Cawley, who were committed to rooting out corruption, integrating the force and establishing performance standards.

But he also antagonized many officers by announcing, within months of his inauguration, an executive order creating an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board to hear charges against the police, especially allegations of brutality against black and Hispanic people. A police union lawsuit blocked the action, and the issue finally went to the voters, who rejected the idea.

It was a major blow to Mr. Lindsay's prestige and to the cause of civil rights in what had long been a bastion of liberalism in the country. But it was only one of a number of Lindsay initiatives that were widely viewed as special concessions to black New Yorkers.

In 1968, Mr. Lindsay responded to black parents' demands for more control and more black teachers in their neighborhood schools by putting into effect, on an experimental basis, a school decentralization plan in several black areas of the city, including Ocean Hill-Brownsville, in Brooklyn.

Studies were cited that said integration was sputtering in New York, that schools had a poor record educating black children, that it was psychologically harmful for blacks to attend schools with mostly white teachers and administrators. The Ford Foundation, among others, had urged the city to pursue decentralization, and the Legislature had agreed to finance the plan.

Challenging a white, largely Jewish school bureaucracy, whose authority was to be pared by decentralization, Rhody McCoy, the administrator of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, transferred 13 teachers and 6 administrators, most of them Jewish, out of his district. In effect, he dismissed them without pedagogic reasons, and it was said that their real offense was to oppose decentralization.

The action was denounced as illegal by the United Federation of Teachers, which called a strike that closed 85 percent of the city's 900 schools for 55 days, putting a million children out of classrooms and disrupting thousands of families. The strike's bitterness was horrendous, with threats of violence and diatribes laced with racism and anti-Semitism; Mr. Lindsay denounced the slurs and ugly conduct as intolerable.

Teachers' Strike Leaves A Legacy of Tensions

The strike ended when the state suspended Mr. McCoy and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board on grounds that it had violated valid union contracts by transferring the teachers and administrators without cause. Later, the Legislature fashioned a compromise, decentralizing city schools into 32 districts and giving locally elected boards power to run their elementary and junior high schools, but adopting strong protections for teachers' jobs. But the episode left a legacy of tensions between blacks and Jews that went on for years, and Mr. Lindsay called it his greatest regret.

The last six months of 1968 were ''the worst of my public life,'' Mr. Lindsay later said. The schools were shut down, the police were engaged in a slowdown, firefighters were threatening job actions, sanitation workers had struck for two weeks and the city was awash in garbage, and racial and religious tensions were breaking to the surface.

The depth of feeling against Mr. Lindsay in the boroughs outside Manhattan was not widely understood beyond New York. But it became apparent to the nation after a Feb. 9, 1969, blizzard buried the city in 15 inches of snow. While major arteries were plowed quickly, side streets in Queens were buried for days, and homeowners greeted the visiting mayor with boos, jeers and curses. The scenes, captured on national television, conveyed a message that the mayor of New York was indifferent to the middle class.

Mr. Lindsay's hope for a second term appeared to fade with his popularity. Robert Price, who had run the 1965 mayoral campaign, had left after a year as deputy mayor. But Richard Aurelio, who had managed Senator Javits's campaign, replaced Mr. Price, and David Garth, the political consultant, joined the team. Louis Harris, the pollster, became an adviser, and crucial decisions were made.

One was to grant more generous wage and pension settlements to the municipal unions, undercutting their opposition. Another was to win back the Jewish vote by campaigning in middle-class Jewish communities in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx -- and having the mayor apologize for his mistakes. It grated on him, but the mayor made speeches and commercials saying he had mishandled the snowstorm and had let the school strike go on too long.

The mayor lost the Republican nomination to John Marchi, a conservative state senator from Staten Island. But the Democrats also put up a conservative, City Comptroller Mario A. Procaccino, and the major party candidates split the growing conservative majority and allowed Mr. Lindsay, running as a Liberal-Fusion candidate, to win the election with only 42 percent of the vote.

A Second Term Marked By a Host of Problems

Mr. Lindsay's second term was marked by growing racial and class tensions; substantial increases in crime; sharply rising costs for municipal labor, welfare rolls, health and education; and a deteriorating fiscal posture for the city.

It was also marked by disclosures of wide police corruption that began with allegations by two officers, Frank Serpico and David Durk. In articles by David Burnham of The New York Times, the officers contended that businessmen, gamblers and drug dealers were paying bribes to many officers to overlook crimes, and that senior commanders and even some top city officials had failed to act on evidence of graft.

Mayor Lindsay appointed an investigating commission under Whitman Knapp. In 1972, after a two-year inquiry, it concluded that corruption was endemic in the department, infecting ''a sizable majority'' of officers. Reforms included the assignment of drug, gambling and vice cases to specialized investigative units and establishment of ''integrity control'' officers to ferret out misconduct.

The problem that always plagued Mr. Lindsay -- alienating the white middle and working classes whenever he tried to help minorities -- arose again in 1971, when the mayor, trying to comply with federal orders to move thousands of poor black people into middle-income white communities, or risk the loss of federal housing funds, proposed building the city's first ''scatter-site'' housing, a low-income, high-rise project, in the middle-class, largely Jewish neighborhood of Forest Hills.

Pandemonium broke out. Residents said the development would bring in crime, drugs and social problems, erode property values, corrupt the schools and force people to move out. There were rallies and marches. Residents vowed to block construction with their bodies. On the other side, civil rights advocates said neighborhood preservation was a euphemism for racial bigotry, and insisted that killing the project would sabotage integrated and open housing everywhere. The fight inflamed racial tensions and nagged at consciences all over town.

Mr. Lindsay finally asked Mr. Cuomo to mediate, and Mr. Cuomo gained his first wide public attention by fashioning a compromise that cut the project's size in half, from three 24-story buildings with 840 apartments to three 12-story buildings with 432 apartments. It also increased the proportion of elderly residents and turned the project into a cooperative -- the first public housing co-op in America. It was built in 1972, and the crime and other problems never came to pass.

Running for Presidency Creates Ill Will at Home

But resentments against Mr. Lindsay were magnified just as he was making a decision to run for the presidency. Winning the White House was hardly more than a remote possibility, as Mr. Lindsay well knew. But he had long dreamed of it, his advisers were pushing hard, and he was aware that the national exposure could establish him as a spokesman for the cities and enhance his chances in years to come.

Running as a Republican was out of the question. Richard M. Nixon had the nomination sewn up and Governor Rockefeller, with whom a feud had degenerated into poisonous mutual distaste, stood in Mr. Lindsay's way. So in 1971, he joined the Democrats and began attacking Mr. Nixon over the war in Vietnam and the nation's housing, health, education and other needs.

Mr. Lindsay's race for the Democratic presidential nomination was over quickly. He was defeated in the Florida primary and dropped out after coming in sixth in Wisconsin. Moreover, it was resented by many Democrats, who saw him as an interloper, and by many New Yorkers, who saw him campaigning around the country instead of attending to business at home.

Switching to the Democrats also deprived the mayor of the financial support of many Republicans in New York, among them social and business leaders who had shared his liberal ideas and backed him unconditionally because they regarded him as a man of integrity. The mayor's party shifts and his futile presidential race were seen by these allies as opportunistic.

Moreover, the city's financial problems were deepening. When Mr. Lindsay's second term drew to a close, welfare rolls had more than doubled, to 1.2 million people. Labor contracts had committed the city to enormous future costs. City debt had grown in Mr. Lindsay's tenure to $9 billion from $2.5 billion.

Budget Maneuvering Causes Years of Ripples

Though he had vowed never to borrow for the city's daily expenses, Mr. Lindsay had been borrowing for years as the economy declined and the cost of city services soared. And his administration had resorted to budget gimmicks that mortgaged the future -- paying salaries on July 1 instead of June 30 to charge them to another fiscal year, borrowing against overestimated future revenues, using capital budget money for noncapital items, and on and on.

Many experts traced the city's mid-70's fiscal crisis to the Lindsay years, though Mr. Lindsay disagreed, insisting that it may have come sooner if he had not imposed new taxes.

By the mayoral election year of 1973, Mr. Lindsay had become a far more pragmatic politician and a better administrator -- even his opponents said so. But the Republicans and the Democrats had abandoned him, and Alex Rose, his old Liberal Party ally, urged him not to run again. Mr. Lindsay left office at the end of the year, exhausted.

He became a commentator on ABC's ''AM America,'' a precursor to ''Good Morning America,'' resumed his partnership in Webster, Sheffield and wrote articles for periodicals. He also wrote a novel, ''The Edge,'' published in 1976. He wrote two other books, ''Journey Into Politics,'' a 1967 account of his political career, and ''The City,'' a 1969 memoir of his first term and his re-election.

He had one more political fling, a 1980 Democratic primary race for the United States Senate. He was beaten by Elizabeth Holtzman, who lost the general election to Alfonse M. D'Amato.

From 1984 to 1991, he was chairman of the Lincoln Center Theater, and was credited with a significant role in its rejuvenation.

But his health was failing, and as his medical bills mounted, his financial status deteriorated, too. He had never been rich, and his eight years as mayor left him seven short of qualifying for a city pension under rules then in effect. After Webster, Sheffield folded in 1991, he joined Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon, Nixon's old law firm, but it went out of business in 1995, leaving him without health insurance.

Friends, including Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone, came to the rescue. Mr. Lindsay was named special counsel to the City Commission for the United Nations, with health coverage and a $25,000-a-year salary. It also made him eligible for a city pension in May 1997, under new rules requiring only 10 years of municipal service.

John V Lindsay