A City of Winners and Losers: New York in the 1980s

If you want to understand Donald Trump, you need to understand New York at the end of the 1980s. This was the moment when the future president was transformed from a local real estate developer into a household name (“The Art of the Deal” was published in 1987.) Just as important, this was the time and place that shaped Trump politically. 

“The Gods of New York,” the new book by Jonathan Mahler, powerfully conjures a particularly intense period in the life of New York. The gay community was furious at the failure of public health authorities to stop the spread of AIDS. The black community was up in arms over a series of incidents — including the deaths of Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Griffith — that confirmed their suspicion that the criminal justice system was fundamentally racist. Activists watched with alarm as the homeless population grew to unprecedented heights. And everyone was set on edge by the violence and disorder that the crack epidemic brought with it. 

Presiding over this febrile environment was a mayor who was predisposed to combat (Ed Koch) and a collection of tabloid newspapers who were incentivized to throw gasoline on the fire. Is it any wonder that Donald Trump emerged from this toxic breeding ground with an instinct for how to command attention and a thirst for conflict?

We asked Thomas Dyja, the author of “New York, New York, New York,” to sit down with Jonathan Mahler to talk about what went wrong in the 1980s, how New York recovered, and what lessons present-day decisionmakers should take from the experience. The following transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Dyja:  Let’s start with the scene of your great new book, “Gods of New York.” There’s often a before-and-after mentality when people talk about New York City — the terrible “Drop Dead” New York of the 1970s, and then now. Your book covers 1986, which is not 1975, when your first book “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning” was set. This is further along. Is this a different New York yet? What’s changed in the city between your two books?

Jonathan Mahler: New York died and was reborn. I would say that in 1977 New York is at its nadir. It’s a couple years after the infamous “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline, a couple years after the near bankruptcy. It’s the year of the blackout, the year of Son of Sam. It’s really when the city bottomed out.

By 1986, when this book begins, the city has been reborn. But what happens in the four years I write about — 1986 to 1990 — is that New York begins to grapple with the wages of this rebirth. The city’s new identity, its new economic structure largely built around Wall Street, finance and real estate — that city is a very different place. It’s a city of winners and losers, a city of rich and poor, a city with a great deal of racial conflict.

Add into the mix the AIDS crisis, the arrival of crack cocaine and the rise of the homelessness crisis, and it becomes an incredibly combustible period. These are the years when the reborn city began to really grapple with what its new identity meant and how many people were going to be left out of it.

TD: A book like this is a benchmark. You and I have both written about the same period — I did 40 years, you did four. So between us we have a long haul and a core sample. What’s great about your core sample is that it lets us make comparisons between then and now, to see what we’ve learned, if anything.

Since we’re in election season, let’s start with talking about mayors — in this case, Ed Koch. My introduction to Ed Koch was moving here in 1980 from Chicago during the drought and watching him on TV with a bunch of kids singing about toilet flushing. I thought, “This is a very different place from Chicago. This man is not Mayor Daley.” Give us a quick sketch of Koch and where he was at this point.

JM: By 1986, he’s just been reelected yet again. He is really the most popular mayor that New York has had, probably since LaGuardia. He’s swept into office with a huge victory, basically uncontested.

But what we see over the course of his third and final term is that the whole city unravels. He goes from being this enormously popular, beloved figure — not just a mayor but the symbol of the city’s rebirth, like the city’s mascot — to someone whose shtick gets old. He was always out there, a proud New York booster when New York was down in the late seventies, always engaging with voters on the street with his famous “How am I doing?” He was shticky in that Catskills way, and people loved it.

But it all starts to get a little tired and old in these final years. The city and this great rebirth that he presided over really begins to unravel, and he’s ultimately driven out.

TD: When you look at Bloomberg’s last term, which wasn’t his best term either, how much of this do you think was Koch specifically and how much is just the perils of a third term?

JM: I think Koch, like Bloomberg, overstayed his welcome. People were tired of him. People started to feel there was a callousness to him, a narcissism. That’s what happens when you have a politician who refuses to leave office — they begin to look like a narcissist. That happened with Bloomberg and certainly happened beforehand with Koch.

Then combine that with a series of events, many of which were out of his control, that he reacted poorly to. That didn’t help matters. In some ways it was the chickens coming home to roost from decisions he’d made, and in some ways it was just bad luck.

TD: I also think by the third term, you have trouble getting the same level of talent that you had coming in. During the primary this year, we kept hearing people complaining about the talent pool. “Why are all the candidates so bad? Why can’t we ever have a good mayor?” Do you think our talent pool is significantly different now, or is this just something we always say?

JM: I was talking the other day with Bradley Tusk, and he was making the point that basically the moderates in New York, the centrists, the Bloomberg types — they have no political machine in New York. There’s no organization producing candidates. All the energy is out on the edges.

Looking at the mayoral race I wrote about in “The Bronx is Burning” — we had Bella Abzug, Mario Cuomo, Percy Sutton, who was a very successful Harlem businessperson and Manhattan borough president. It does seem like we’re far from that now. New York local politics are not drawing the most talented people.

TD: The one tragic flaw that I think we probably all agree on with Koch is race. At the end of the day, whenever I’m asked questions about Koch, it always comes around to that. One of the other big figures in your book is Al Sharpton. So let’s talk about the racial situation then and now. In your book, Koch is freezing out Black New York and the only forms of resistance, really, are two things you talk about: Al Sharpton and hip-hop.

JM: That’s right. And I guess film — “Do the Right Thing.” So protest and culture, or culture as protest.

One of the wages of the rebirth was that Koch did not bring Black New Yorkers into his administration to start. He also really actively alienated the Black community and Black leaders during his first campaign. There were his infamous comments about “poverty pimps.” Another thing that really cost him support in the Black community was that he promised he would not close Sydenham Hospital in Harlem — a campaign promise to the Black community. Sure enough, he turned around and closed it down.

He had no goodwill, really, in the Black community. By 1986, he had some Black votes — it wasn’t that he was completely wiped out — but among the city’s Black leadership, they wanted to run a candidate against him. There was already a sense in the Black community that their interests weren’t represented by Koch.

What really struck me in my research was Benjamin Ward, the city’s first Black police commissioner during these years. In his unpublished memoir, Ward says that he admired Koch, but Koch just didn’t understand Black people. He didn’t understand what the world looked like from the perspective of a Black New Yorker, and he didn’t really seem to care to. That really became clear during these years. It’s not quite right to say Koch was racist — I think Koch had a problem with empathy more broadly. He wasn’t successful at seeing the world from anyone else’s point of view except Ed Koch’s.

TD: So Sharpton — is he different now? Is he someone who has really changed, or is this just him adapting over time?

JM: I think the same fundamental forces are in tension in Sharpton that have always been — his desire to be famous and important and powerful, and his desire to make the world into a more equal place. Those two forces that make him such an interesting, complicated person have always been there.

What changed is he realized over time that he was accruing power and influence, that he didn’t need to always be the bomb thrower. He already was the person people were turning to, the person white politicians couldn’t ignore. As he began to accrue power and confidence in his ability to draw crowds, he didn’t need to be as outrageous because he had the power he was looking for. In some ways, it’s not so different from Donald Trump — he learned how to capture the public’s attention and then recognized all the power that came with that ability.

TD: Your book touches on the Central Park Five, Howard Beach, all these incidents. Where are we now compared to then with race relations?

JM: I think we’re far from that. When people ask me what’s better about the city now, I do think racial relations are unquestionably better. Black New Yorkers feel like they have much more of a voice in the politics of the city.

There was so much mistrust between Black and white New Yorkers during these years. White people didn’t go into Black neighborhoods, Black people didn’t go into white neighborhoods. The city is hardly a model of integration now — the schools are still largely segregated — but it just feels like a very different place.

The idea that movie critics were up in arms that Spike Lee had made “Do the Right Thing,” which ends with a riot in Bed-Stuy after cops kill a Black New Yorker — critics and political pundits were writing that it was irresponsible to release it. Can you imagine what the social conditions in the city must have felt like for a critic to feel justified in writing something like that? It’s almost beyond imagination.

TD: Yes, and George Floyd in many ways brought together Black and white people. In the 1980s, when Al Sharpton took several hundred Black New Yorkers into white neighborhoods to protest after Howard Beach or when Yusuf Hawkins was murdered, they had epithets screamed at them and watermelons held up.

JM: Exactly. The civil rights movement was primarily a southern movement. In New York, it was more of a militant Black power movement — Malcolm X and his acolytes. Those were people who had a very different understanding of the civil rights struggle, much more separatist.

TD: Another thing that’s hard to explain from then to now is crime. This book is a great reminder of how insanely dangerous New York was in this period, especially 1986 to 1990.

JM: This is when crime peaked in New York. I think it was 1990 when murder peaked. Obviously crack was a big part of that. You had a police department that had been shrunk during the fiscal crisis and was also overwhelmingly white.

We are so far statistically from where we were then in terms of crime. In some ways, Trump’s idea of how dangerous American cities are is because his brain still lives in that era. Going out in the street — everyone got mugged in the 1980s in New York if you lived here. That’s just what happened. The city is really a very safe place now, even though much of the country sees New York through a distorted lens.

But it wasn’t just street crime. There was also endemic political corruption — one Koch administration official after another in scandals. You had these high-profile white collar criminals — not just the insider traders like Boesky and Milken that Giuliani prosecuted, but Leona Helmsley the tax cheat, Imelda Marcos. The police corruption was endemic and ingrained. The whole city felt foul.

TD: And the mob, the Gotti lionization...

JM: Yeah, Trump — this is the world, the crucible for Donald Trump. There was almost a sense of immorality that had descended on the city during these years. Everyone, whether civil servants, politicians or the already rich, everyone was just trying to grab what they could. They were all looting the city in a way.

TD: Do we feel the city is still criminal in that way?

JM: No, though Eric Adams... that’s a pretty corrupt administration. But it doesn’t feel as endemic and widespread. It also doesn’t feel like everyone’s just taking what they can.

TD: I wonder if 9/11 was a kind of reset in how New Yorkers viewed each other. The concept of crime seemed so odd after that. We had all had this thing inflicted on us. Even if you weren’t standing downtown when it happened, it was emotionally so immense and it became clear we don’t like to do this to each other in some basic ways.

JM: Yeah, there’s just a different mood now, a different atmosphere.

TD: Another big factor is media and the role of tabloids. How do you see that then versus now?

JM: The tabloids played a huge role because they played a huge role in the city. There were really three or four of them if you include Newsday. Everyone read the tabloids. Everyone read Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton. These columnists were important, influential people — influencers long before the internet.

This had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, tabloids by their nature are very polarizing — they divide the world into heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. They’re comic books for adults. On the other hand, the fact that everyone was reading the same newspapers made everyone concerned about the same stories and issues. There was much more of a sense of New York as a single city. It was a single city whose identity was up for grabs and being fought over intensely, but it was still a place. If you were a New Yorker, you read the tabloids.

I think we’ve lost something with the fragmentation of media. People don’t care about the city in the same way. People care more about their neighborhood, their street, their life in the city, their kids’ school. We’ve lost a larger sense of civic identity — what Mario Cuomo once called “the New York idea.” What is the New York idea now?

TD: What would that era have looked like with social media?

JM: What’s funny is, you had influencers then too. This was the attention economy. Donald Trump and Al Sharpton were in command of New York’s attention economy. Page Six and the gossip columns made celebrities out of people in the same way TikTok makes celebrities out of people who aren’t doing something necessarily worthy of notice. The tabloids were the precursors to social media.

TD: Homelessness is another issue that really begins to come together as a concept and policy problem at this point.

JM: The term “homeless” didn’t really arrive until the ‘80s. There had always been homelessness — during the Depression, for instance — but it was always seen as a temporary condition. When it returned in the early 1980s, aside from the winos and bums around the Bowery, the thinking was this was just a temporary social crisis. Then it became clear that if someone didn’t do something, it would go on. No one was able to figure out what to do, and this temporary social crisis became a permanent one we’re still living with today.

It was shocking to see people sleeping on the streets in the 1980s. Now we routinely step over them on our way to the subway. We have for decades now. It shocks the conscience when you think about it that we still don’t have a solution, to say nothing of the mentally ill homeless, who are a whole other and much more urgent population.

TD: This was because of policy choices — we got rid of SROs, decided we wanted a family-oriented city starting in the ‘60s. We got rid of housing for singles, including the elderly. We also changed how we dealt with the mentally ill and deinstitutionalization. These were reversible policy choices.

JM: Absolutely right. One thing that becomes clear during these years is that the economic policy of incentivizing real estate development, which led to the demolition of so much affordable housing and SROs, might have been great for getting the economy moving again and spurring construction. But it also kicked tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers out of their homes. Many didn’t have the means to find or afford new ones. These were economic policy decisions.

TD: Tell me some good things that happened from 1986 to 1990.

JM: If you’re a fan of hip-hop, these were amazing years — Beastie Boys, Public Enemy. Fort Greene during these years was an incredible neighborhood, filled with Black artists.

I would also go back to my earlier point — there was an investment in New York. There was a sense of “we care about this city” that I don’t always feel now. I have a pretty limited circle of friends who are into New York politics the way I’m into New York politics. But then, in the ‘80s, you lived in New York and you were a New Yorker. I feel like a lot of people just live here now. They live here because they have money and can afford the great restaurants and theater. This is just where they happen to plunk themselves.

TD: I’ve always had problems with Jane Jacobs’ street ballet metaphor because watching ballet is a spectator thing. A lot of what happened was people coming in and living on top of the city and watching — “this place is adorable, it’s got the coffee shop” — but they don’t go to the PTA meeting or community board meeting. They don’t do the day-to-day things that are part of why that street ballet happens. You’ve got to jump in and folk dance, not watch the street ballet.

JM: Yes, for sure. One nice thing about this mayoral race has been seeing people, young people in particular, galvanized by a local politician. That’s something we really haven’t seen in a long time.

I was in college during these years, but working on the book made me nostalgic for a New York that existed then. I was in Chicago reading the Village Voice every week and feeling like, “Oh my god, New York!” Even though lots of horrible stuff was going on, it was alive and people were fighting for something.

The other thing that was good about those years was the characters were just amazing. I don’t know if that’s “good,” but it was fun to observe them. They were larger than life. “Gods of New York” is rightly titled — and many of them still march among us.