Thomas Dyja

“The impulse here is to add “again,” but making New York “work” had not always, and maybe not ever, been a goal for those who welcomed disorder as the way to overtime or a palmed twenty. City government had never been run for maximum efficiency; the point of patronage was jobs, with results a distant second. Management was the province of reformers and the public agencies, foundations, and advocacy groups who’d erected a virtuous scaffolding around City politics, assuring things actually got done while City Hall focused on giving special interests their taste. Everyone else got pinched, especially the middle class and small businessmen who paid for their independence by having to slash through thickets of red tape, following absurd union rules and paying inflated prices. Koch liked to tell about the time an old woman tugged his sleeve and said, “Mr. Koch, Mr. Koch, make the city what it once was.” To which he said, “Lady, it was never that good.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“For the first time in twenty-five years there was no Person of Color on the Board of Estimate, whatever traditional roles they’d had in City government erased. Squeezed by growing immigration, the breakdown of old political networks, a changing economy and soon, waves of drugs, crime, and disease, New York’s African Americans would be forced over the next thirty-five years into new cultural and social strategies that would in turn change the world.”
― Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation