Jonathan Mahler > Quotes

“late.” It had been a year of dubious distinctions: The city had logged a record number of murders (1,896); its courts had handled a record number of drug cases (110,000); its prisons housed a record number of inmates (nearly 18,000); and a record number of people (28,000) were still sleeping every night in the city’s shelters and welfare hotels. It had become impossible to talk about New York’s problems”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“appointment!’ ” In March of 1983, Kramer vented his anger toward the mayor in a six-thousand-word open letter in the New York Native, a gay biweekly, headlined 1,112 and Counting (the current number of AIDS cases in the United States). “I sometimes think that, like some king who has been so long on his throne he’s lost touch with his people, Koch is so isolated and protected by his staff that he is unaware of what fear and pain we’re in,” Kramer wrote. “No human being could otherwise be so useless to his suffering constituents.” He went on to”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“Underpinning this rapid physical transformation was a financial one. As a city of renters became a city of owners and the demand for office space surged, real estate taxes quickly evolved into the municipal government’s primary source of revenue. A less tangible but no less significant cultural shift accompanied the economic one. Power in New York had once been held by public officials and labor bosses. But with its working-class population shrinking and the government giving way to private industry, a new breed of power brokers was rising. “The people who are making the deals and shaping the future of the city are, more than ever, private individuals,” The New York Times Magazine reported in a 1985 story headlined Who Runs New York Now? Manhattan, inc., a glossy magazine”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“To grasp their full significance, you have to reach back another decade, to the dark days of the 1970s. Squint your eyes and imagine New York as the forsaken metropolis it was: Central Park’s once lush Sheep Meadow had been reduced to a dust bowl; an eighty-foot section of the West Side Highway that had collapsed in 1973 stood unrepaired; the subways were covered, end to end, in graffiti. New York’s golden age as America’s great working-class city was over. Its once bustling and diverse shipping and manufacturing economy had been hollowed out by deindustrialization. The blue-collar jobs that had provided a foothold to earlier generations of European immigrants were gone, even as a new surge of immigrants—this one from Puerto Rico”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“The scandals were an indictment of the Koch administration but also of the city’s government more broadly—and, for that matter, of government itself. The city had doled out $4.4 billion in contracts to forty thousand private businesses in 1985. The simple, inescapable truth was that a lot of these lucrative contracts had been awarded in exchange for kickbacks. As such, the scandals fed a larger narrative coming out of Washington. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” President Reagan had said in his inaugural address in 1981. This sentiment had animated his policy”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“but had grown more pronounced on his watch. By 1986, Black unemployment in New York City was double what it had been in 1960. Urban sociologists coined a new phrase for the poor and chronically out-of-work: “the underclass.” Unlike earlier generations of poor Americans, Black and white, who had access to blue-collar jobs, they were trapped in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of welfare dependency. The NYPD’s treatment”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“Even as the tabloids published daily pullout sections filled with celebratory stories and pictures of the festivities, the city’s Black-owned media offered a very different take on the events. The city’s population was 25 percent Black, yet its newsrooms were still almost all white. And so, many thousands of New Yorkers who felt their lives and concerns weren’t adequately represented in the mainstream outlets turned to two Black weeklies to supplement their news diet: the city’s oldest continuously published Black newspaper, the Harlem-based New York Amsterdam News, and the new,”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“seats. At a little before eleven, Jean Griffith, the mother of Michael Griffith, the young Black man who’d been killed three years earlier in Howard Beach, arrived and settled into one of the front pews. Nearby was the young filmmaker Spike Lee, whose third movie, Do the Right Thing, had been released earlier that summer, and the members of the rap group Public Enemy, whose hit single “Fight the Power” was the movie’s iconic theme song. By the time the Hawkins family made its way through the knot”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“1980s was astonishingly swift and sweeping. The broader currents of history were all flowing in the same direction. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 had ushered in a new era of economic policy rooted in the free-market gospel of the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman. Once in office, Reagan set about slashing government spending and unleashing the power of the private sector. His 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act—the largest tax cut in the nation’s history, slashing the top income tax rate from 70 to 50 percent—freed up huge sums of capital for investment. His aggressive deregulation of the financial industry loosened lending standards and lifted limits on trading in inherently risky securities like stock options. At the same time, new technology”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“The current occupant of the office, Rudolph W. Giuliani, had been appointed by President Reagan in the spring of 1983, though it was New York’s Republican senator, Alfonse D’Amato, who had sponsored his candidacy. The job was, theoretically, a demotion for Giuliani, who had”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“American neighborhood of Bensonhurst. Yusuf’s murder had dominated the news for days, the latest in a series of heavily publicized, racially charged incidents that had rocked the city. In late 1986, another young Black man had been killed in a different white neighborhood in the outer boroughs: Howard Beach, Queens. Racial tension had been rising ever since, culminating a few months earlier, when a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers from Harlem was arrested for allegedly gang-raping and beating a white investment banker out for an evening jog in Central Park. Amplified by screaming tabloid headlines like Terror in Central Park and Wolf Pack’s Prey, and by real estate developer Donald Trump’s full-page ads calling for the execution of the suspects, the jogger story had turned New York City upside down.”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“On the night of April 29, 1986, Koch fished a freshly pressed tuxedo out of his oversized closet and made his way to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for a historic, if long overdue, event: New York’s first major AIDS benefit. Organized by the fashion industry and co-hosted by Calvin Klein and Elizabeth Taylor, it drew a long list of celebrities including Andy Warhol, Paul Simon, Yoko Ono, Brooke Shields, Bianca Jagger, and Donna Karan. “It would have been nice if it had happened sooner,” Koch told reporters upon his arrival, “but I’m not looking back.” When it came to AIDS, it was best that he didn’t.”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“Giuliani’s first major target as U.S. attorney was the scourge of drugs, specifically heroin. Within months of his appointment, he had taken to the op-ed page of the Times to warn New Yorkers about the “territorial war” being waged on the Lower East Side between “hard-working, law-abiding people” and “invaders who use the streets and abandoned buildings to carry on an open market in drugs.” Generally speaking, drugs fell under the purview of the district attorney and local enforcement. Giuliani did not hesitate to trespass on their terrain, introducing “federal days” when street dealers were hauled into federal court to be prosecuted under much harsher sentencing laws. A “Russian roulette” form of deterrence, he called it. Giuliani transformed the culture of the SDNY. A workaholic who was at his office by 7 a.m. every day, including Saturdays, he would walk the halls to see who was at their desks and who wasn’t. The SDNY had a long history of pursuing”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“In many ways, Wall Street’s success was the city’s success. The staid business of investment banking suddenly became sexy, attracting droves of aspiring millionaires to New York. Investment firms gobbled up the office space left empty by Fortune 500 companies during the seventies. By the mid-eighties, Morgan Stanley occupied twice as much space in the Exxon building as Exxon. Factories that had manufactured goods were replaced by investment firms that manufactured debt: perpetual floating rate notes, yield curve notes, and, above all, the so-called junk bonds fueling America’s unprecedented corporate takeover craze. Profits soared. In 1985, the city’s biggest investment bank,”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“Once a magnet for the aspiring upwardly mobile—the place where you went to make it—New York had become a place that you got the hell out of if you could. The city’s population declined by more than one million people over the course of the 1970s. (Another million went on welfare.) Forty-five Fortune 500 companies—Pepsi Cola, Nabisco, Shell Oil, Avon, Western Union, and General Electric among them—abandoned the city during the same decade, leaving behind some twenty-eight million square feet of vacant office space in Manhattan. To save money, the city”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

“what the mayor wanted to hear. In the absence of action from the city, a network of activists, doctors, and social workers coalesced around the epidemic, trying to raise awareness and provide support and care to those in need. They wanted Koch to publicly declare that the city was facing a health crisis, to appoint an AIDS coordinator, and to begin an aggressive public education program to slow its spread. No one seemed to be taking the AIDS threat seriously enough—not the federal government, not the media, not the medical establishment. But nearly half the nation’s cases were in New York. The members of the network”
― Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990