How New York City Changed

 

The post-WWII New York City, in which I grew up, was very different from the New York City I live in now. I grew up at the end of what journalist Jonathan Mahler called "New York's golden age as America's great working-class city" with a "bustling and diverse shipping and manufacturing economy." I can in fact - if just barely - remember when my father worked in a factory straight down the IRT subway line in downtown Manhattan and a friend's father in another factory across a bridge in northern Manhattan, all long since gone. After graduating from one of the glories of that now tragically lost New York, tuition-free City College, I left the city to go to graduate school in New Jersey in 1972. My parents moved out of the Bronx two years later. For the next decade-plus, I visited regularly, still socialized with friends in the city, and continued to appreciate and avail myself of the city's vibrancy on those occasions. But the city was changing irrevocably, and the New York to which I returned actually to live in again in 1987 was a very different city from the one in which I had grown up. What had happened in between and in particular what was happening then in the late 1980s is the tale Mahler tells so vividly in The Gods of New York:: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City 1986-1990 (NY: Random House, 2025). 

Mahler is also famously the author of what we might call a 2005 prequel to this book, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City.

His new book begins in 1986 with Ed Koch's triumphant inauguration to his third term as mayor. It is in fact a journalistic chronicle of that four-year term as the city's citizens experienced it, with lots of flashbacks to the path that had led there. Koch's third term, however, "was pretty clearly a disaster" and ended, of course with his dramatic defeat by David Dinkins in 1989. For all Koch's personal limitations, he was a real product of the old New York City, and Mahler presents hims a someone still truly committed to the city - in conspicuous contrast to some other rising stars at that time, whose commitment to anything other than themselves might be more easily questioned. There too, however, I think it is important, even while knowing what we now know about the later trajectories of outsized 1980s New Yorkers like Donald Trump (whom Mahler at one point characterizes as "the city's white id") and Rudy Giuliani, to try to remember them as we perceived them then. (The same might be said in a different register for that other larger-than-life 1980s New Yorker who is still so very much with us, Al Sharpton.)

The book can be read as an anecdotal journalistic account of the political corruption scandals, high-profile crime stories, and highly publicized and racially charged incidents that dominated Koch's third term through the city's tabloid headlines. Those tabloids themselves are an important part of the story for the significant role they played in shaping New Yorker's attention and uniting them around "the same narratives and story lines." Among the many crime stories, the infamous Robert Chambers "preppy murder" case also evokes unhappy memories of the peripheral role played by some New York Church figures, among them Theodore McCarrick.

The indispensable background story is, of course, the infamous collapse of the old city's economy and politics in the 1970s and the city's much ballyhooed rebirth linked to the ascendancy of the so-called FIRE industries - finance, insurance, real estate, eventually turning the city into what one later mayor would call a "luxury product." The city's rebirth - as a playground for the rich, folks like  those President George W. Busch would later famously call "the haves and have mores" - was real enough. But Mahler looks under the hood, so to speak, exposing its shallowness. Mahler is particularly good at highlighting how the homelessness crisis came to be as a result of specific policy directions (among them, the clearing of the city's SROs to profit developers and the failure to provide adequate community-based mental-health services). He also does a particularly good job recalling New York City's experience of the 1980s AIDS epidemic and the emerging and controversial responses to it.

His final paragraph sums it up well: "The existential questions that New York faced as it entered 1986 were answered. The great working-class city was gone, and so was any realistic expectation that it might ever be bound by a single civic culture. A new city, or, rather, an infinite number of cities, had been born. Rich, poor, very rich, very poor - for better and for worse, everyone would now live in their own New York."

Mahler's book appears at a particularly poignant moment when the bill has at last come due for New York's 1980s transformation. At this time, when so many TV watchers have been riveted by HBO's glorious series The Gilded Age, Murray Kempton's comment, quoted by Mahler, seems especially apt: "The robber barons sacked the earth and flayed the toilers, but they left mines and mills and railroads behind them. Their greed was the terrible engine of progress; ours is only the bedizened fellow traveler of decay."

Now the bill has come due - both in terms of the nationalization of oligarchy and the retreat from politics properly understood, but also as New Yorkers are about to vote in yet another mayoral elections that is in effect a referendum on whether the preferential option for the rich has been worth the price paid by both our bodies and our souls or whether it may be time at last to reclaim an alternative civic sensibility.