Jonathan Mahler

“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