The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s romp through the status and racial anxieties of 1980s New York, begins with an unnamed mayor being Mau-Maued by Harlem activists. As he soaks up the abuse, he fantasises about the confrontation spreading:
Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third World down there!… Staten Island! Do you Saturday do-it-yourselfers really think you’re snug in your little rug? You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge?
This fictional world, a collision of riches and poverty and criminal justice and electoral politics, maps neatly on to the period described in Jonathan Mahler’s new book. His previous New York social history, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, focused on 1977, which saw a heatwave, a crime wave, a city-wide power blackout, a baseball title race and a mayoral election. Ed Koch comes from nowhere to win that election, while junior prosecutor Rudy Giuliani and real estate tyro Donald Trump hang out at Jimmy McMullen’s bar on the Upper East Side, hoping they may gain admittance to Studio 54.
Fast forward nine years and we are at the start of The Gods of New York. The city has rebuilt its finances, buoyed by a resurgent financial sector fuelling a property boom in Manhattan; the outer boroughs have yet to feel much of the benefit. Koch has just been elected for his third term; Giuliani, now US attorney for the southern district of New York, has been prosecuting the Mafia and is limbering up to go after Wall Street; Trump is throwing together deals and leveraging all the political capital he can muster.
Michael Griffiths, a black man from Brooklyn, is chased on to a highway by a mob and killed by a car
Over the course of the book, which ends in 1989, Koch is beset by overlapping crises, to the extent that it is hard not to feel sympathy for him. The first is crime. Part of this is corruption: ten days after the inauguration, his ally, the Queens borough president Donald Manes, is involved in a mysterious car crash that turns out to be linked to a parking fines scandal; two months later he has shot himself. This is only a curtain-raiser for other rumbling scandals in the Democratic party machine.
But worse is the run of high-profile violence that inflames the city’s racial politics. Bernhard Goetz, who has shot four black youths on a subway train, comes to trial and is largely acquitted. Michael Griffiths, a black man from Brooklyn, is chased on to a highway in Queens by a mob and killed by a car. Yuseef Hawkins is shot and killed in Bensonhurst. Activists, notably the Reverend Al Sharpton, confront the authorities on behalf of bereaved black families. But they also overreach. Tawana Brawley accuses four white men, including police officers and an assistant DA, of having kidnapped and raped her, and Sharpton leads protest marches through the streets. When it becomes clear that the story is a hoax, the assistant DA demands a huge damages claim from Sharpton, which is paid by his supporters. Trisha Meili, jogging in Central Park, is raped and severely assaulted; the police extract confessions from five teenagers and Trump places an advert in the Daily News calling for their execution. Convicted and imprisoned, they are later exonerated.
Koch is also presiding over a deepening Aids crisis in the city, his tardy response complicated by the fact that he is a closet gay. He receives especial criticism from the playwright Larry Kramer and his group ACT-UP, who carry out a series of protests culminating in a die-in at St Patrick’s Cathedral. All of this against the backdrop of widespread homelessness – Koch repeatedly tries to move the homeless off the streets and finds himself thwarted by civil liberties groups – and the crack epidemic.
Individual gadflies come for him too. Giuliani, with ambitions to replace him as mayor for the Republicans (and facing machinations within that party that make the Democrats look fraternal), is directing a series of prosecutions to bolster his own image and damage Koch’s. Trump is embarrassing him where possible, tussling over the lease for Trump Tower and renovating the Central Park ice rink when the city lacks funds. Announcing at a Republican dinner that he is not going to run for president in 1988, he speaks up for tariffs on ‘these countries that are ripping us off’, proposes an attack on ‘horrible, horrible’ Iran and warns that ‘if the right man doesn’t get into office, you’re going to see a catastrophe in this country in the next four years like you’re never going to believe’. (Within a few years he has suffered multiple bankruptcies and is hosting The Apprentice.) Koch eventually loses the Democratic primary to a relatively left-wing challenger, David Dinkins – who will himself serve one term before losing to Giuliani.
The book’s emphasis on crime and money leaves it surprisingly thin on finance and also on culture – an important part of what still brings people to the city. Ladies and Gentlemen… was incisive about CBGBs’s punk and new wave and disco. Here there is an extended account of the filming of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – influential, to be sure, though not offering much relief from the rest of the narrative. But overall, Mahler’s exploration of the rowdy origins of the ruling style of contemporary US politics is engaging, enlightening and discouraging.
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