Mr. Lhota, a Republican, held nothing back, warning that Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, would "annihilate" charter schools, commit a "civil wrong" by raising taxes and take a "reckless" approach to policing. With a jab of his thumb, Mr. Lhota said that Mr. de Blasio's policies "will push us back to where we were" in New York City's grimier days of runaway crime.
Mr. de Blasio, despite his enormous lead in the polls, appeared frequently rattled by his opponent's newfound fury, shaking his head, narrowing his eyes in pique and resorting, at times, to pleas for propriety. "I would ask Mr. Lhota to not use incendiary terms," he said, stiffly, at one point.
In the evening's most intense exchange, the candidates clashed over an advertisement by Mr. Lhota that used imagery from the 1991 Crown Heights riots to portray the Democrat as soft on crime. "It's race baiting and it's fear mongering and you know it," Mr. de Blasio said, adding: "Anybody who looks at that ad knows what he is up to."
Mr. Lhota shot back. "Don't tell me I threw out the race card," he said. "Bill, you cannot stoop to that level."
The hourlong debate, two weeks before voters head to the polls, seemed unlikely to realign the contours of a lopsided election. But it gave viewers a rare glimpse of an engaged and confident Mr. Lhota — the knowledgeable and straight-talking manager who had excited the city's political elites when he entered the race.
Their lecterns angled toward each other, the two men stared, pointed and seethed throughout the night, in a debate whose combative tone had an uneasy intimacy absent from their more staid previous encounter.
The tension made the few moments of levity all the more memorable. When the candidates both extolled a proposal by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to extend Lower Manhattan into the East River, in a kind of replica of Battery Park, Mr. de Blasio smiled and said he was startled by the outbreak of comity.
"We've had our kumbaya moment," he said.
The audience erupted into laughter.
The debate was the first time in an uneventful general election campaign that Mr. de Blasio found himself repeatedly forced onto the defensive. He struggled to respond when the moderator, Maurice DuBois of WCBS, pressed him on whether Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would support his signature proposal to finance prekindergarten classes by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Mr. de Blasio offered little in the way of a substantive answer, declining to articulate an alternative way to pay for the plan, dismissing signs that the governor is leery of raising taxes, and concluding, blandly: "We have to focus on the positive notion that this is what the people of New York City want."
Mr. Lhota was ready to pounce. "Bill de Blasio makes promises over and over that he can't keep," he said, before turning to the camera and delivering an ominous prediction about higher taxes from a de Blasio administration. "To those out there in the middle class," he said, "hold on to your wallets."
At one point, their insults acquired a literary cast. Mr. Lhota, peeved at Mr. de Blasio's repeated attempts to tie him to the Tea Party, cracked, "You talk about tea so much, you remind me of the Mad Hatter."
Mr. de Blasio seemed unimpressed with the allusion to Lewis Carroll, shrugging off the reference as "dated."
There was far less humor as the candidates attacked and defended the legacies of their previous bosses, David N. Dinkins and Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayors who were themselves longtime political foes.
Mr. Lhota declared himself "sick and tired" of Mr. de Blasio impugning the reputation of Mr. Giuliani, and mocked his opponent's role in the Dinkins administration, suggesting it was a time of weak-willed policing, a sky-high murder rate and, as Mr. Lhota reminded the audience, "the last time we had a race riot in the City of New York."
Mr. de Blasio, a former Dinkins aide, assailed Mr. Lhota's time as a deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, calling him "the right-hand man of Rudy Giuliani when he was going out of his way to divide this city."
"It was not a good period in our city's history," Mr. de Blasio said. "We should not repeat it."
The back-and-forth grew so heated that Mr. DuBois felt compelled to step in. "Please, please, gentlemen," he said.
Mr. de Blasio seemed aware of a changed dynamic on stage. So he tried his best to turn his opponent's sharp tongue into a liability, questioning Mr. Lhota's temperament and self-control.
Seizing on a pair of Mr. Lhota's better-known gaffes, he recalled that the Republican had called Mr. Bloomberg an "idiot" and publicly described members of the Port Authority Police Department as "mall cops."
"That's not what a mayor does," Mr. de Blasio said. "A mayor unifies, a mayor shows respect, a mayor makes sure we set a positive tone in the city."
Mr. Lhota, who prides himself on candor, sounded defiant, even as he conceded his words were not well chosen. "If I'm wrong, I will apologize, and if I'm not wrong, I'll stick with it," he said.
But it was clear that Mr. Lhota relished his role as a provocateur. Asked why, exactly, he had insulted Mr. Bloomberg, he spared no details, recalling his frustration when the mayor had spoken mistakenly about the reopening of a tunnel after Hurricane Sandy.
Managing to slight Mr. Bloomberg all over again, Mr. Lhota then reduced the billionaire mayor's words to a Seinfeldian punch line: "Yada yada yada."
David W. Chen and Louis Lucero contributed reporting.
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