Fifty years ago, New York City was on the brink of default—unable to pay its bills, meet payroll, or fund pensions. People were fleeing, crime was rising, everything was falling apart, and its leaders were out of their depth. New York needed major reform and a massive bailout, prompting the infamous but entirely invented Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
Except, the city didn’t drop dead. If the Big Apple never sleeps, it certainly wouldn’t take the long nap—something was still stirring.
A decade later, the city was alive: glitzy new skyscrapers were going up in Manhattan, Wall Street was minting money from junk bonds, and the city was paying its bills. The late 1980s—a period Jonathan Mahler chronicles in The Gods of New York—was when many larger-than-life New Yorkers became national figures. The late ‘80s were the crucible that made Rudy Giuliani and Spike Lee, Larry Kramer and Ed Koch, Al Sharpton and, inevitably, Donald Trump. This was the age of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the vanities were ablaze.
It was a time when the city as a municipality got its house in order, but the city as a polity was a house divided.
The AIDS crisis and the Preppy Murder dominated the headlines. Homelessness became a feature of the streets, and “gentrification” started transforming the streetscape. It was a city of segregation: if it was cocaine and champagne on Wall Street, it was crack pipes and prison time in Bed-Stuy. Manhattan was booming, the Bronx was no longer burning, and Brooklyn became the pyre for the cultural fire next time, as Spike Lee and Public Enemy fought the power. Out of that turmoil emerged a city newly solvent but spiritually spent. It had repaired its finances, but lost its faith in itself.
If the power had been fought, nobody could quite say who won.
By the time David Dinkins—the city’s first black mayor—was elected in 1989, the city was no longer recognizable to many. The new mayor rhapsodized about the “gorgeous mosaic” of New York even as many saw a city unraveling along racial, social, and economic lines. As Mahler writes of Dinkins, quoting Newsday, the people expected him to save the city’s “municipal soul.”
Mahler wonders: after all that, “Did New York still have a municipal soul to save?”
In Mahler’s view, by the end of this era, a new New York had been born: one in which the working class city was giving way to a city of the very rich and very poor. The “realistic expectation that it might ever be bound by a single civic culture” was gone. The city was saved, but its soul remained on trial.
Mahler describes a polity that once read—or hate-read—the same tabloid newspapers, marched on the same streets, cared about the same issues—even as its various constituents found themselves, sometimes quite literally, on opposite sides of those editorial pages and streets. The issues facing New Yorkers in the late ‘80s didn’t stay on the op-ed pages: the era was defined by its protest culture, the street marches, the gathering en masse at City Hall—always to the chagrin of Mayor Koch. Sharpton and Lee embodied and answered the struggles and aspirations of black New Yorkers, ravaged by violence and poverty; Kramer embodied and answered the rage of gay New Yorkers, ravaged by disease. Giuliani protested with disgruntled police officers, who had done much of the ravaging. Still, they gathered.
What do New Yorkers gather to protest today? A war in Gaza? “No Kings”? Mostly geopolitics and memes—nothing municipal.
In an interview, Mahler observes that “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.” Many are there for the nightlife, the food, the theatre—for the entertainment rather than the enterprise of the city itself, as if New York were a Club Med on the Hudson. As he concludes, “This is just where they happen to plunk themselves.”
And yet their daily lives are intensely hyperlocal. Mahler observes:
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?
What is a city in an era of civic atomization, when so few show up at City Hall—or even know the name of the guy running it?
If there was a common spirit thumping in the hearts of New York’s citizens in the 1980s, you could hear it blasting from the boomboxes of Bed-Stuy and the bullhorns in City Hall Park. Today? You can’t hear what the guy next to you is listening to on his headphones, and nobody is watching or reading the same thing on their phones. Perhaps modern cities are only gorgeous mosaics, and each of us is a distinct and shining tessera held together yet apart by the thin mortar of shared streets.
And yet Mahler’s nostalgia deserves a check: is it so bad that New Yorkers are more invested in their neighborhoods and kids’ schools? That they read W42ST and Greenpointers and school bulletins more than The Daily News or The Post? After all, you can’t literally live in the entirety of a city as big as New York—and so much more of it is livable today. It’s progress enough that Al Sharpton now hosts the news rather than makes it. That neighborhoods battle rats instead of crack and debate bike lanes instead of race relations. New York got nice, safe—comfortable even—right up until the pandemic upturned the Big Apple cart once more.
It’s taken another crisis to reveal the rot beneath the shine.
Before the 1980s, the idea of New York was that it was a place where anyone from anywhere could make a life. It wasn’t a cultural melting pot, per se, but a cauldron that could turn an immigrant from Tulsa or Timbuktu into a member of that rare caste, a New Yorker. If the streets were once paved with gold, today, it takes pockets full of gold—or a rent-stabilized apartment—to claim the right to join that caste. Perhaps that’s what has changed the city’s civic identity. Who can afford to protest when it takes two incomes just to pay the rent? The burden now falls to professionals of the caring class—or to trust-fund babies LARPing towards Bethlehem—rather than citizens who see their fates bound up in the city’s.
Mahler’s question—what is the New York idea now?—isn’t exclusive to New York at all. Every city has tried to emulate the new New York idea in the past three decades: making themselves more attractive for employers, while doing the bare minimum to make themselves affordable for employees. You can’t keep the weirdos in Austin or your heart in San Francisco if you only build homes for the super-rich or super-poor. Nor can you cultivate a civic identity when the only people who can afford to care about City Hall are the people who run it. Local politics cannot be retail in a luxury city.
Cities might find this an expensive proposition.
Cities are healthier today than in the 1980s, but the punchbowl of pandemic-era paper is over, and so is the party. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Austin, budgets are buckling again; New York alone faces a looming $10 billion gap within three years. With less money, cities will face more urgent problems: climate shocks, persistent homelessness, and political resistance to building more housing—all under a federal government that increasingly treats them as the enemy within, presided over by one of those fabled, foibled gods of New York.
Perhaps these challenges will kindle a new civic urgency—compelling people to pluck themselves from the bedrooms and bedroom communities where they’ve plunked themselves. To lift their heads from their screens and take an interest not just in their neighborhood but in the idea of the city itself—because the bill is coming due, whether as a property-tax invoice or a cut to essential services. Will they notice when the streets are no longer paved in gold, but not paved at all? Perhaps then they’ll discover that cities are not the backdrop to some Greek tragedy, where citizens are at the mercy of divine vanities, but that each of us is a player in the drama and comedy of civic life. To save the municipal souls of our cities means rediscovering the idea of them—that they are not playgrounds for the gods, but places for ordinary people.
Is that an idea we can believe in?
A detail worth noting is that Dinkins inherited a city that was committing close to 2,000 murders per year, but it peaked and fell while he was still in office.