It is not enough to call Jonathan Mahler a historian of New York City. He is more like an archaeologist, able to pick up shards of culture and politics and business and various other endeavors and piece them together in ways that suddenly make sense of the times we lived in. In Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, he brought the year 1977 vividly back to life by juxtaposing, among many other things, the New York Yankees, Rupert Murdoch, the Son of Sam killings, a fiscal crisis, and a mayoral race.
Ed Koch won City Hall that year, and his ill-starred last term as mayor serves as the stage for Mahler’s new book, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986–1990. It is a superb narrative, told with vim, and shockingly relevant, not just because Donald Trump is a major figure in it but because the issues in this year’s mayoral race are foreshadowed by what happened decades ago.
JIM KELLY: Your new book focuses on New York City in the late 1980s, when it had recovered from its financial crisis a decade earlier but now faced a fresh series of calamities, including the growing AIDS epidemic, a dramatic rise in homelessness, the rampant use of crack cocaine, increased racial tensions, and a bubbling stew of corruption. Yet you say you were inspired to write the book by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. How so?
JONATHAN MAHLER: At the time I had been assigned to cover the campaign for The New York Times. I wasn’t on a specific campaign; I was mainly doing longer pieces about the candidates and digging back into their histories. Because of my interest in New York, I gravitated naturally toward Trump in the 1980s—really the decade when he became Donald Trump. So this sort of thrust me back into New York in the 80s, and I pretty quickly came to see what a wild and also transformative era it was. I never wanted to write a book about Trump, but from the start I imagined him as part of a sprawling cast of outsize characters who were striding across the city during those years.
J.K.: What a cast of characters populate The Gods of New York! I happened to be reading Bleak House when I received the galley of your book, and Charles Dickens would be hard-pressed to come up with more colorful folks. Did you have a favorite?
J.M.: I’ll take the Dickens comp! I’m going to cheat and claim two. One is Joyce Brown—a.k.a. Billie Boggs, the schizophrenic homeless woman who became an object of fixation for Ed Koch. She was complicated and volatile but also a formidable figure: she would sometimes burn the money people gave her and pee on the street. She did not disappear into the background. But she was also smart, capable, and charismatic: after successfully challenging her forced hospitalization by the city, she made the rounds of all the big talk shows, and even lectured at Harvard Law School!
My other pick is Koch himself. He’s really at the center of the book, and I came to see him as such a compelling figure. He was deeply and publicly flawed, but also desperately in love with the city and his job running it. He built his public identity around being the guy who’s out there on the street, mixing it up with constituents, flaws and all—nothing to hide—just a regular New Yorker. Yet he was always carrying around this secret about his sexuality. And I found his arc in the book to be so heartbreaking; at the start of 1986, he’s one of the most popular mayors the city has ever known, and by the end of 1989, he’s become the symbol of everything that has gone wrong with New York.
J.K.: You make the telling point that the tabloids back then were in rude health, and managed to stir the pot in ways that made every event and personage more dramatic. Is the city better off or worse off with a diminished tabloid culture?
J.M.: Worse! The tabloids were in many ways a polarizing force; that’s sort of the point of tabloids, to create heroes and villains and generally stir the pot. But they also unified the city around the same storylines and made all New Yorkers feel like they were part of the same place. When you stepped into the subway in the morning, pretty much everyone in your packed car would be reading a tabloid (save for those who were awkwardly origami-ing their Times into a readable form, which was an art in its own right).
I was struck by this again and again while working on this book—the way in which New York both felt like the center of the universe and also like a small town during these years. Now, of course, everyone is scrolling through their phones on the subway, watching videos, movies, etc. What they’re probably not doing is reading about what’s happening in New York City. Everyone’s in a different story now, and I think the city has lost a lot in the process.
J.K.: One of the people you profile is Robert Hayes, a lawyer who unearthed an obscure state amendment pushed by Fiorello La Guardia back in 1938 that guaranteed shelter for every male New Yorker (women and children were added later). Alas, homelessness is still with us, and the cost of adhering to that law rises every year. Not to sound heartless, but was there a better way to address this problem?
J.M.: This is a tricky one, because I think there were certain things New York had to do during the 1970s to save itself, and one of those things was to leverage the value of its real estate to raise revenues. And, also, there was nothing the city could do about one of the main sources of the homeless crisis, which was the release of tens of thousands of patients from state mental hospitals without any sort of plan for where those people would go.
Having said that, I think there was an original sin here, and that was not only allowing but incentivizing real-estate developers to demolish a ton of affordable housing—mostly in the form of welfare hotels—and transform it into co-ops and condos. People living in those buildings were often on public assistance and many were mentally ill. Where did the city think they were going to live?
J.K.: We now face the prospect of having a democratic-socialist mayor, and given how well you describe the causes and effects of the growing wealth gap in New York, I can’t say I am surprised by the popularity of Zohran Mamdani. I won’t ask you to critique his platform, but given that his rise is fueled by unhappiness with the current power brokers and that the city has proven resilient no matter who is mayor, are fears about Mamdani overblown? After all, we survived Jimmy Walker and Abe Beame!
J.M.: I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that New York will survive Mamdani too. To begin with, as mayor he would have no power over taxation beyond trying to pressure the state. But he’s also already walked back some of his—let’s call them “edgier”—suggestions, such as the fact that billionaires shouldn’t exist. And he has said that he will discourage the use of the offensive phrase “Globalize the Intifada.”
His primary campaign catered to his very progressive base—a common primary strategy—but he’s going to need to govern very differently if he wants to be successful. And to the extent that his success will be measured not only by bread-and-butter issues like maintaining public safety, trash removal, plowing snow, etc., but by making the city more affordable for people who work here—that seems like a pretty good goal right now.
I would also say to those out there who are threatening to leave the city if Mamdani wins: What kind of New Yorker are you? This city is an incredibly complex, often maddening, but also miraculous machine. Eight million people. More than 100 nationalities. And we all get along pretty well day in, day out, on crowded streets and subways and restaurants. But it’s also punishing. And when it gets too punishing for too many people, things start to break down.
That’s what happened in the 1970s, when capital fled the city and it fell into decay and disrepair. Then, in the 80s—the period my book covers—the city lurched toward privatization and, as a result, became an incredible wealth engine. Now too many people can’t afford to live here. So we’re due for another lurch. But it’s an ongoing process. There’s a constant call and response, and if you believe in this place you need to be part of that conversation, not take your toys and leave.
J.K.: What is the single most surprising thing you learned in researching The Gods of New York? Perhaps aside from the fact that The New York Times described the up-and-coming Trump in 1976 as “publicity-shy.”
J.M.: Ha, yes, that was a bit surprising! Another big one was how much the city has actually changed for the better since then. New York is surely a much less affordable city now, but it is also a much more socially tolerant place. We have largely moved on from the seething racial tension and homophobia that characterized that time.
Whatever you think of the Black Lives Matter protests, they were probably more indicative of a healthy civic culture than the white residents of Bensonhurst shouting racial epithets at Black New Yorkers marching through their neighborhood in the aftermath of the murder of the Black teenager Yusuf Hawkins—and the mayor suggesting, in response, that maybe the protesters should march elsewhere. If Ed Koch were alive and running for office today, would he be out of the closet? I don’t know, but maybe.
J.K.: Are there any books, fictional or otherwise, about New York that you have found especially good at capturing the city but may not be well known? One of my picks would be Managing Mailer, by Joe Flaherty, who oversaw the 1969 mayoral campaign of Norman Mailer, who ran on the platform of making the city the 51st state. William F. Buckley was also a candidate, and when asked what the first thing he would do if elected, he said, “Demand a recount.”
J.M.: Great question. I’m not sure this qualifies as lesser known, but I love Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, a beautiful novel set (mostly) in late-19th-century New York. It’s a bit fantastical, which is usually not my thing, but I think it’s one of the best novels ever written about the city.
On the nonfiction side, I’m a big fan of Joe Flood’s The Fires, a fascinating examination of the arson fires that swept across the city—and the South Bronx, in particular—in the 1970s. And I’m plugging a friend here, but with good reason: Kevin Baker’s recent history of baseball in the city, The New York Game, is spectacular. It ends after World War II, and I can’t wait for Volume II.
J.K.: Finally, we both are native New Yorkers, and I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Yet I think because I grew up here I do not have quite the romantic view that many of my friends who migrated here have. I mean, the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center is nice, but I don’t get rhapsodic about it. How do you fall on the romantic scale?
J.M.: I go back and forth on this one. There are moments—like when I’m standing on a foul-smelling crowded subway that’s not moving because of “signal problems up ahead”—when I wonder why I’m still here. But then there are others—like a recent, glorious summer evening, when I found myself riding a Citi Bike through a bustling Fort Greene to meet friends for dinner—when I fall in love with it all over again.
Mark Helprin actually captures this experience perfectly in Winter’s Tale. One of his characters, who has moved to New York from San Francisco, is turned off by the city (with its entire population “struggling, kicking, and shuddering like marionettes”) in one moment and enthralled by it in the next—“caught up in some sort of magic. For no apparent reason he suddenly became king of the world.… The city seemed to have no middle ground.” That about sums it up. This is a place that has no middle ground.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at Air Mail
