A Reporter Revisits 1980s New York in All Its Tabloid Excess

New York Times

3 days ago

THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, by Jonathan Mahler
Among Jonathan Mahler's many gifts is an extraordinary sense of timing. He was partway through the research for 'Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning,' his nonfiction book about New York in 1977, when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 ripped a hole in the orderly illusions of the Giuliani era. What could have been a mere nostalgia trip, the bad old days of the '70s as viewed from the end of history, became instead a suggestive mirroring: crisis calling to crisis, and possibility to possibility.
His new book, 'The Gods of New York,' attempts a sort of sequel. It seeks to tell the story of the city a decade later, amid the excesses and excrescences of the 1980s: coke jags and shoulder pads, AIDS and crack and Odeon. Mahler's preferred method remains the panorama. In one corner of his crowded canvas, '4,000 invited guests who'd paid $5,000 per ticket' watch as President Reagan zaps the Statue of Liberty with red, white and blue lasers. ('She's everybody's gal,' he says, saluting her 100th birthday.) In another, a track-suited Al Sharpton leads a protest march through Bensonhurst, where locals shake watermelons in fury.
Everywhere, the streets teem with arbitrageurs and ACT UP activists and the swelling ranks of the homeless. And high above, in his obsidian glass tower, an outer-borough schemer named Donald J. Trump works to refashion himself as 'the city's white id.' A parallel can be drawn between this scene and our own, and Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, intends to draw it.
A couple of narrative through lines help get us from there to here. The first is 'a series of heavily publicized, racially charged incidents' that dominated the tabloid headlines of the day. The book opens in 1986, with the apparent stabbing of the corrupt politico Donald Manes ('QUEENS BORO PREZ KNIFED'), and ends in 1989, in the auto-da-fé of the Central Park jogger case ('NONE OF US IS SAFE'). Along the way we revisit Bernhard Goetz and the Preppy Murder, Howard Beach and Tawana Brawley. It's possible to imagine, or even long for, a re-evaluation of these controversies through bottom-up reporting — say, an intimate look at the life of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins before he was shot by a member of a racist mob, or that of Yusef Salaam before he was convicted of a crime he didn't commit.
In fact, Mahler's storytelling is most powerful precisely where it digs the deepest. His writing on homelessness is particularly strong, revealing the housing crisis not as an insuperable fact of city life but as the outcome of deliberate choices: the failure to fund a planned system of transitional 'community-based mental health centers,' the scandalous clearing of the city's S.R.O. hotels to make way for high-end developers. Portraits of the homeless advocate Joyce Brown and the fifth grader David Bright, one of the city's numerous 'hotel kids,' glow with nuance and sympathy.
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