Rudy, as wrong as it feels to say about 9/11, benefitted from being in the right place at the right time. His decisions as mayor (including locating the emergency command center in the WTC complex against recommendations and going with first responder radio equipment that was inadequate to the task) resulted in 9/11 being worse than it could have been.
It was decided that, at the time, America needed to see heroes. Rudy and W were the obvious candidates. Investigatory pieces were seen as tasteless if not actually harmful, and Rudy was able to go on cruise control with “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.” He got a lot of mileage out of an incident where his incompetence made things dramatically worse.
And I’m not even addressing the Disney version of NYC. The scariest thing people are facing in Times Square now is a Russian-accented Elmo that’s overly aggressive to tourists.