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Mayor Mike Peters is dead, according to WFSB

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'Mayor Mike' Dies At 60; Struggled With Liver Damage

By EDMUND MAHONY {sodEmoji.{sodEmoji.|}}The Hartford Courant

11:13 PM EST, January 4, 2009

Mike Peters, the wise-cracking fireman who, over four terms as mayor, helped lift Hartford from a political, financial and crime-ridden funk, died just before 8 p.m. Sunday following a struggle with liver failure, family members said. He was 60.

Peters had undergone a nearly eight-hour surgery last October to remove his cirrhosis-damaged liver and replace it with a healthy one. He had done well with the new liver, but developed complications with his kidneys. By Nov. 20, he was back in intensive care, and his doctors were considering a kidney transplant once he regained strength.

During his time in office, from 1993 to 2001, Peters repeatedly was elected to serve as Hartford's last weak, or ceremonial, mayor. Armed with a revision to the city charter, his successor, Eddie Perez, stormed into office with what Peters always wanted but never had: Strong mayoral authority to shape the city's agenda.

But powerless or not, Peters had limitless enthusiasm and he hurled it at his ceremonial office with great effect. Armed with only his personality, a not inconsequential weapon, he reinvigorated a city that, during the 1980s, seemed perched endlessly on the dismal brink of yet another failure.

By cajoling, badgering and begging often undisciplined members of the city council – then the real source of power in the city – he built alliances that allowed him to begin repairing Hartford. He tore down abandoned buildings. He razed rat and drug-infested, World War II era housing projects, incubators of many of Hartford's problems. He paved streets, cleaned up parks, washed away graffiti and pushed a tax cut through the city council.

Notably, he fought to regain the trust of the city's biggest private employers. He succeeded. His anti-business and pro-social service predecessor, Carrie Saxon Perry, had so alienated business that even iconic Aetna and Travelers were thinking about severing historic ties to Hartford and leaving town when Peters arrived at the Mayor's office.

He was short and shaped like a keg, but cast a larger than life shadow. He began as Hartford's chief pitchman and left recognized nationally as a force for urban improvement. But he was most comfortable with where he came from. He seemed to have a story about each of the city's street corners and a lot of the characters standing on them.

During an impromptu, farewell tour of the city in December 2003, days before moving out of his office, Peters was something of a slow moving traffic jam as he crossed and recrossed the city, revisiting the spruced-up commercial facades, neat new homes and new theatres and retailers he counted among his accomplishments. Constituents ran into the streets to shake his hand.

Oncoming motorists executed illegal U-turns to pull along side and wish him well. Waiting for the light at Garden and Ashley Streets in his black Buick, the soon to be unemployed Peters waved and asked a kid in a hooded sweat shirt outside the Ashley Cafe how he was doing.

"I need a job," the fellow said.

"So do I," Peters fired back.

In the 1980s, he was working at Engine 15 on New Britain Avenue. Blocks away, gangs of drug-dealing thugs were gunning one another down. The public schools were awful. Abandoned housing soiled street scapes. Corporations were down-sizing, shedding employees and moving away.

When Peters announced his campaign for mayor, he seemed to come from nowhere, which was not true. He had served on the Democratic Town Committee, the Redevelopment Agency and the Civic Center Authority. He started the Hooker Day parade. His sister, Geraldine Sullivan, had been a city council majority leader.

Peters' fresh face, self confidence and enthusiasm swept him into office. Political observers consider his first two terms successes, the final two less so. Peters claimed to have significant accomplishments during his third term, but, by then, they were clearly becoming harder to come by. His fourth and final two-year term is considered unremarkable.

Allies said that the longer Peters remained in office, the more envious his would-be successors on the council became. Sometimes, they said, Peters would put together a deal, only to find that the council had unraveled it when his back was turned. And, the allies said, Peters was tiring of constantly having to beg recalcitrant council members in order to build the majorities needed to move his agenda.

He also, during his final years in office, began a long and cold stand-off with the city's biggest news engine, The Courant, which he said had begun taking cheap shots at him.

Despite late term setbacks, Peters' list of successes is lengthy. He took down the decrepit Charter Oak Terrace housing project. He rebuilt the equally squalid Bellevue Square and Stowe Village projects. Along the way, he figured out how to boost the share of money Hartford received from Washington.

He began Mayor Mike's Companies for Kids to expand after-school activities and it raised $1 million for youth recreation programs in the city. He pushed for a state takeover of the non-performing Hartford public school system. And he backed a six-month, city moratorium on new social service facilities, such as half-way houses and group homes. Some city neighborhoods were at risk of becoming social service malls.

Peters fought to get the Crown Palace movie theaters and the new Stop & shop on the city's west side, as well as facade improvements on Park Street and the Veeder Place and ArtSpace projects. In 1996 he was at the top of his game. Syndicated columnist George Will called him "part Falstaff and part Fiorello La Guardia." Governing Magazine said Peters was one of 10 public officials of the year, crediting him with creating a citywide "mood swing."

When Hartford landed the presidential debate that year, big-shot, out-of-town political reporters waited in line for a chance to trade quips with Hartford's charismatic mayor. Peters was re-elected by a 9-1 ratio in 1997 and vice president Al Gore was among those who called with congratulations.

When Peters decided not to run for a fifth term as mayor in May of 2001, some wondered what he'd do next. After stints hawking used cars on cable TV for an Ellington automobile dealer, leasing tailgate lots to game-day revelers at Rentschler Field and tending to a handful of consulting "clients'' that friend and lobbyist Tom Ritter sent his way, Peters vaulted back into the public eye when he opened his namesake restaurant on Asylum Street in 2004.

Mayor Mike's Restaurant was a natural fit for the civic pitchman who turned a circuit of barstools into personal polling precincts. Billed as an American tavern with Italian and Southwest cuisine influences, Mayor Mike's was basically a family-and-friends affair. Business partners and financial backers include Peters' brother, Bob; brother-in-law Tim Sullivan; sons David, 27, and Chris, 32; Patrick McClelland, the general manager of Lena's restaurant in Parkville; and Darrell Sullivan (no relation to the Peters clan), who owns Sully's Pub next to Lena's.

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