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New York in the 1980s was a brash and angry place. Lurid crimes, insider trading scandals and a new disease battled for the attention of a rabidly competitive tabloid press and a frightened city.
It was also my childhood home. I played softball in Central Park, heard my father advise Wall Street traders and watched my mother run one of the first support groups for people with Aids.
So reading The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler’s new book about the Big Apple between 1986 and 1990, was in many ways like opening up a scrapbook. A detailed portrayal of the city’s culture, politics and history, the book is a kaleidoscope of the dramatic events and public figures who dominated New York’s tabloids and evening news in those years.
Mahler, a longtime staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, contends that these were “four of the most convulsive and consequential years in the modern history of New York” that paved the way for the birth of the modern city. He argues that the city’s universal promise to its citizens of a better life fractured in this period: pathways to extraordinary wealth opened up for some, but the middle was hollowed out and those at the bottom found it harder than ever to escape poverty.
“A city that had once aspired to provide a safety net and foothold to all of its residents became a gladiatorial arena for those with the biggest appetites, the loudest voices, and the most outsized ambitions,” Mahler writes. “The great working-class city morphed into a city of entrenched poverty and extreme wealth, of celebrity, audacity, individualism, learned indifference, and resentment, foreshadowing the transformation of the broader nation.”
Mahler structures his book around the third and final term of New York mayor Ed Koch. A retail politician extraordinaire, he was known for standing at subway stations, thrusting out his hand to shake and saying, “how’m I doing?” As the crucial period opens, Koch has overwhelmingly won re-election and his bestselling memoir, entitled simply Mayor, has just been adapted into a Broadway musical. By the end, Koch has been defeated in the Democratic primary, and is leaving the city government mired in scandal.
In between, New York is gripped by the worsening Aids crisis, insider trading and a series of horrific violent crimes that divided public opinion. They included racially motivated killings in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, the vicious rape of a jogger in Central Park and the infamous “preppy murder”, whose protagonists met at Dorrian’s, one of the bars where I use to drink using a fake ID.
A skilled portraitist, Mahler spotlights a cast of larger-than-life characters who moulded public opinion in those days. Donald Trump, then a real estate and casino developer, stormed on to the front pages with a flair for self-aggrandisation and personal attacks but then stumbled into bankruptcy. Al Sharpton stoked controversy by challenging the way New York’s largely white police force handled violence against Black city residents. Larry Kramer organised “die-ins” to draw attention to the way homophobia was contributing to the rising Aids death toll. Rudy Giuliani, then an ambitious federal prosecutor, scrambled to build cases against Wall Street bigwigs Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.
Mahler also traces how filmmaker Spike Lee brought the worst of New York’s surging racial tension to the screen in the now widely praised Do the Right Thing. Months of shooting on location in Brooklyn drew celebrities including Mike Tyson, Stevie Wonder and Eddie Murphy, who invited the cast to come swim in his pool.
The filming culminated in a staged riot and the burning of an entire city block that felt so real that “an assistant director had to tell the dozens of extras who’d been recruited from the neighborhood to form the crowd of rioters to stop swinging at the cops, reminding them that they were just actors”.
In many ways, Gods of New York is seeking to recreate the magic of Mahler’s last book on New York, Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx Is Burning, which used the 1977 baseball season to frame a narrative about the politics and culture of the city during one of its most fraught periods. That 2005 bestseller draws its name from an on-air conversation between two sportscasters during the World Series about a fire they could see from aerial cameras. It was later made into a television mini-series for the sports cable channel ESPN.
As a narrative, Gods of New York is less successful than its predecessor, which focused more narrowly on a single year and had the contentious but thrilling Yankee baseball team at its heart. The wider lens in the second book sometimes makes it feel like a fire hose of tabloid news rather than a story with a well-structured arc. But the individual vignettes are compelling, albeit profoundly depressing at times.
To Mahler, the important takeaway is what he sees as lasting damage wrought by the late 1980s: “The great working-class city was gone, and so was any realistic expectation that it might ever be bound by a single civic culture . . . Rich, poor, very rich, very poor — for better and for worse, everyone would live in their own New York now.”
To me, strolling down such a fraught memory lane holds out a perverse kind of hope. If New York was able to survive and reinvent itself after a stretch of being dominated by such angry people and dreadful events, maybe there is hope for American politics and culture today.
The Gods of New York: The Tumultuous Eighties, from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots by Jonathan Mahler Random House $28/ Hutchinson Heinemann £25, 446 pages
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