{"id":62314,"date":"2025-08-12T10:36:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T10:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/62314\/"},"modified":"2025-08-12T10:36:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T10:36:06","slug":"looming-over-the-city-like-gods-the-men-who-changed-new-york-for-better-and-worse-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/62314\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Looming over the city like gods\u2019: the men who changed New York for better and worse | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Mahler didn\u2019t plan to publish his new book about New York City<\/a> from 1986 to 1990, tumultuous years culminating in a historic mayoral election, amid a similarly dramatic campaign for city hall. But he\u2019s not unhappy to do so.<\/p>\n

The Gods of New York<\/a> tells how the Democrat Ed Koch<\/a> sought a fourth term as mayor but by election year, 1989, was widely seen as an \u201cincumbent plagued by scandal, just like Eric Adams now\u201d, Mahler said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had Rudy Giuliani<\/a>, the tough guy from the outer boroughs \u2013 in Giuliani\u2019s case Brooklyn, now in Andrew Cuomo\u2019s case, Queens. And then we had the candidate of color who was saying: \u2018I\u2019m going to take the city back for the people who are getting left out.\u2019 It was David Dinkins then and it\u2019s Zohran Mamdani now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wary of generalization, as befits a veteran New York<\/a> Times reporter, Mahler nonetheless said that as the city \u201cwent through a big transformation\u201d from 1986-90, so \u201cit\u2019s going through another now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Gods of New York is a sequel of sorts to Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning<\/a>, Mahler\u2019s book about the city in crisis in the late 70s. Turning to the late 80s, Mahler presents a riot of stories from a period beset by racial tensions, the crack epidemic, soaring crime, sensational cases and an economic boom overwhelmingly boosting the rich. Keeping ordinary New Yorkers in mind, Mahler nonetheless presents extraordinary characters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will confess I went back and forth on the title, which was suggested by a friend,\u201d Mahler said. \u201cI thought: \u2018That\u2019s the perfect title.\u2019 And then a handful of people were like: \u2018You can\u2019t possibly call it The Gods of New York. Are you saying Donald Trump<\/a> is a god? And Rudy?\u201d<\/p>\n

Forty years ago, no one foresaw the Trump of today: occupying the White House, dividing America, Giuliani a shameless sidekick.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like: \u2018Well, not gods in that sense. This is much more like the Greek gods. They were kind of on their own tabloid Mount Olympus. Really, what I meant was that [Trump, Giuliani and others] were looming over the city like gods, not necessarily benevolent. Remember, the Greek gods were \u2026 wrathful, vengeful and petty. That was definitely what I was going for. Less literal, more figurative. So I stuck with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump in 1987. Photograph: Joe McNally\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Readers could do worse than make The Gods of New York a double bill with Paper of Wreckage<\/a>, an acclaimed oral history of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s New York Post published last year, a chronicle of the gutter press and the stars.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the characters were operating from the same playbook, in a way,\u201d Mahler said of a cast that contains others still prominent, among them Spike Lee, then shooting his remarkable first films in Brooklyn, and the Rev Al Sharpton, a Black leader through the Howard Beach racist attack<\/a>, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax<\/a> and other scandals once boiling, now near-forgotten.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were all trying to get the city\u2019s attention and use that attention. We now use the term \u2018attention economy\u2019 all the time. This was really kind of the beginning of the attention economy and all these characters kind of intuitively understood that.<\/p>\n

The gay rights campaigner Larry Kramer<\/a> \u201cwas organizing these incredibly in-your-face protests against the city and the country\u2019s handling of Aids [that were] no different, in a way, from what Trump was doing and is still doing, which is trying to get people\u2019s attention and keep it, trying to start a story and keep it going.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure that I would have seen that parallel if I hadn\u2019t seen Trump do it in 2016 when \u2026 I was working on reporting the [presidential] campaign. It was kind of crazy to watch him get elected, particularly as a New Yorker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working on The Gods of New York, Mahler saw Trump \u201cusing the same power to its ultimate effect: the insistence that he is never wrong, that you just keep moving forward. You act bulletproof, then you are bulletproof. I don\u2019t know that I would have understood what he was doing in the 80s and what all these guys were doing if I hadn\u2019t seen it play out on the biggest stage in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kramer died in 2020<\/a>, after giving a last interview to Mahler. In 2024, Trump surged back to power. Amid the fire and fury of the second term, reading about Trump in the 80s can feel a little jarring. As Mahler shows, even the Times was once drawn in.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Penguin Random House<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a great note in the Abe Rosenthal papers,\u201d Mahler said, referring to the long-serving editor<\/a>. \u201cA staff member wrote him a note saying: \u2018No wonder Donald Trump has such a huge ego: I don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s ever got on the cover of so many New York Times sections in such a short period of time.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess in some ways that\u2019s a failure on the part of the Times to see who Donald Trump<\/a> was, but I think also the context is important. In that moment, New York was recovering from some really dark days. The city was in a real death spiral for years. And then along comes this guy ready to invest in New York in audacious ways, really doubling down on the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so you can sort of understand why, if you\u2019re an institution like the New York Times that is very connected to New York, much more so then than today \u2026 they might feel like: \u2018Well, this guy believes in New York, he\u2019s betting on New York,\u2019 and you can see how that might earn him some goodwill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mahler also documents Trump\u2019s disastrous fixation<\/a> with Atlantic City<\/a>, which he utterly failed<\/a> to turn into a gambling hub, to his considerable cost; his callous treatment of women; his notorious call for the Central Park Five, Black youths ultimately shown to have been falsely convicted of rape, to be sentenced to death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Crime stories run through Mahler\u2019s book. The so-called Preppy Murder<\/a> also centers on Central Park, where Jennifer Levin\u2019s body was discovered. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein<\/a> emerges as a thwarted hero, aghast at suspect Robert Chambers\u2019 protection by the Catholic church and escape from the harshest sentence. And yet Fairstein went on to help subject the Central Park Five to a historic miscarriage of justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was so demonized<\/a> after the Central Park Five,\u201d Mahler said. \u201cI think it was interesting to see these two cases sort of as a pair, and the way in which Fairstein was so bitter about how the Chambers case played out \u2026 and then not even a couple years later, she\u2019s confronted with the chance to sort of make amends. Not that this was a conscious decision, but you could see how maybe she was more zealous than she should have been [regarding the Central Park Five], because she felt \u2026 unsatisfied with the resolution of the Chambers case.\u201d<\/p>\n

A man who held the stage longer than most, Koch, is perhaps Mahler\u2019s central character. At the start, the mayor is riding high. By the end, he\u2019s been brought low.<\/p>\n

Mahler said: \u201cHis third term was pretty clearly a disaster. But I think of him as a really sympathetic character \u2026 someone who was so flawed but also so committed to New York \u2026 he really cared about the city. I think that\u2019s a good lens through which to see his feud with Trump<\/a> [over Trump\u2019s real-estate plays], because Trump was in it for Trump and Koch knew that was not in the best interest of New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

Koch will also be known to history for being gay but not coming out, his mayoralty covering the worst years of the Aids epidemic, campaigners such as Kramer raging.<\/p>\n

Ed Koch listening to music on radio in Central Park. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive\/NY Daily News\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Mahler tells that story, counting himself \u201cvery fortunate that the Times did a big piece a couple years ago<\/a> about Koch\u2019s sexuality, and kind of outed him. I feel like now \u2026 we all know this is how it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was Koch a good mayor?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you would have to say yes and no,\u201d Mahler said. \u201cThough I\u2019m not sure he had any other choice, as he had to do something to save the city, he set in motion this transformation, this shift toward private business that I guess we\u2019re now seeing the sort of reaction against, with Zohran.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re back to the current campaign. Thirty-six years ago, in the election that ends Mahler\u2019s book, Dinkins beat Koch in the Democratic primary then seized the big prize. Mahler rates the city\u2019s first Black mayor<\/a> as a good one \u201cdealt a terrible hand\u201d, the same fate that befell Benjamin Ward, the city\u2019s first Black police commissioner<\/a>. Dinkins served one term, losing to Giuliani in 1993. The city\u2019s transformation continued. It always will, which helps make The Gods of New York such an enthralling read. The city Mahler shows is gone, but its stories remain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonathan Mahler didn\u2019t plan to publish his new book about New York City from 1986 to 1990, tumultuous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-62314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}