The Gods of New York

New York City in the mid-1980s was a place of stark contradictions. A historic Wall Street boom had fueled a sweeping transformation of Manhattan, filling its skyline with glass towers and generating enormous wealth through a postindustrial economy driven by finance, insurance, and real estate. Yet large swaths of the outer boroughs remained neglected, their predominantly Black and Hispanic populations trapped in deepening poverty while public schools, hospitals, and housing deteriorated. Jonathan Mahler chronicles the years 1986 to 1990, tracing how interlocking crises exposed the fault lines beneath the boom and transformed both the city and the outsized figures who competed to shape its future.

The book opens with the August 1989 funeral of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager killed by a white mob in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, before reaching back to January 1, 1986, when Mayor Ed Koch was sworn in for a rare third term, achieved by only two modern predecessors. Koch, the son of Jewish immigrants, had risen from Greenwich Village liberal reformer to the personification of New York's revival, presiding over the boom that pulled the city out of near-bankruptcy in the 1970s. Reelected with 78 percent of the vote, he vowed to devote his new term to those left behind, pledging affordable housing, AIDS care, and the fight for social justice.

That promise quickly collided with reality. Within days, Queens borough president Donald Manes was found bleeding from self-inflicted stab wounds, setting off a chain of corruption revelations. Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin broke the story linking Manes to a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme in the city's parking violations bureau. Federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, the head of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, seized on the scandal, flipping witnesses and personally prosecuting Bronx Democratic Party chairman Stanley Friedman. Manes killed himself in March 1986; Friedman was convicted in November. Giuliani simultaneously won convictions in a landmark Mafia prosecution, cementing his reputation as the city's preeminent crime fighter.

The homelessness crisis was spiraling at the same time. Lawyer Robert Hayes had won a 1981 consent decree establishing the right to shelter for homeless men, and by 1986 Koch was spending $200 million a year on overcrowded, often inhumane shelters. Koch's own policies had worsened the problem: He allowed developers to convert thousands of single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs, the last-resort housing for the city's poorest residents, into luxury apartments, destroying 100,000 units of affordable housing. Ten-year-old David Bright, who lived with his family in the notorious Martinique welfare hotel, testified before Congress about hunger and degrading conditions, making national headlines.

The AIDS epidemic was devastating the city's gay community. Writer and activist Larry Kramer had been sounding the alarm since 1981, accusing Koch of complicity through inaction. In March 1987, Kramer gave a galvanizing speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Greenwich Village, telling his audience that two-thirds of them could be dead within five years. Out of that speech grew ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which staged bold protests from Wall Street to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) headquarters in Maryland to City Hall, demanding faster drug approvals and more funding for people with AIDS.

Racial tensions exploded on December 19, 1986, when Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old Black construction worker, was chased onto a highway and killed by a white mob in Howard Beach, Queens. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a charismatic activist searching for a cause to match his ambitions, volunteered as the family's spokesman. Defense attorney Alton Maddox and co-counsel C. Vernon Mason devised a strategy: The surviving witnesses would refuse to cooperate with local prosecutors until the state appointed an independent special prosecutor. Governor Mario Cuomo eventually agreed. In June 1987, the acquittal of Bernhard Goetz, a white man who shot four Black teenagers on the subway in 1984, further inflamed racial tensions. That December, the Howard Beach trial ended with manslaughter convictions for three of the attackers, vindicating Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason's confrontational approach.

Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason then overreached. In late 1987, they took up the case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old Black girl from upstate New York who claimed to have been abducted and sexually assaulted by white men. The advisors refused to let Brawley cooperate with investigators and made incendiary accusations without evidence. A grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had fabricated her story, discrediting the trio and fracturing the movement they had helped build. Sharpton's credibility was further damaged by a Newsday report revealing he had been working as an FBI informant since 1983.

Donald Trump, the real estate developer whose Trump Tower had become the defining symbol of the boom, was ascending from local celebrity to national figure. His ghostwritten bestseller The Art of the Deal, published in late 1987, sold 1 million copies in seven months. Trump publicly humiliated Koch by renovating the long-stalled Wollman Rink in Central Park ahead of schedule and for free, then leveraged the stunt into a feud over his proposed Television City development on the Upper West Side. But Trump was also accumulating staggering debt, purchasing the Plaza Hotel for a record $409 million and financing the massive Taj Mahal casino with $675 million in high-interest junk bonds. On October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed 22.6 percent, the largest single-day decline in Wall Street history.

As the crack epidemic drove crime to record levels, Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward, the first Black person to lead the New York Police Department (NYPD), waged a war on drugs while defending his department against charges of brutality, corruption, and secret surveillance of Black activists. Meanwhile, filmmaker Spike Lee shot Do the Right Thing on location in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, during the summer of 1988, depicting racial tension building to a climactic riot. When the film opened in June 1989, it drew both critical acclaim and anxious predictions that it might incite real-world violence.

The city's fractures cracked wide open in 1989. In April, 28-year-old Patricia Meili was found brutally raped and beaten in Central Park. Police arrested a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers who confessed after lengthy interrogations, some conducted without guardians present, though their statements contradicted each other and contained factual errors. The tabloids branded the suspects a "wolf pack," and Trump took out full-page ads in all four daily newspapers calling for their execution. The suspects were convicted in 1990 on the basis of their recanted confessions, with no physical evidence linking them to the crime; they were later fully exonerated. On August 23, 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins was shot and killed in Bensonhurst. Sharpton led marches through the neighborhood that drew ugly confrontations, with locals shouting racial slurs and holding up watermelons.

David Dinkins, the mild-mannered Manhattan borough president and the city's highest-ranking Black official, had entered the mayoral race pledging to heal the city's divisions. His campaign manager, Bill Lynch, a veteran community organizer, built a voter registration and turnout operation across all five boroughs. Dinkins defeated Koch in the September primary by nearly nine points, carried by record turnout among Black and Latino voters. In November, he narrowly beat Giuliani by just three points to become New York's first Black mayor.

Koch spent his final day at City Hall on December 29, 1989, as the NYPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums band serenaded him in the rotunda. Dinkins was sworn in on January 1, 1990, connecting his election to the fall of the Berlin Wall and pledging a new era. But the city he inherited was deeply fractured. In 1991, Crown Heights erupted in riots, and Giuliani defeated Dinkins in 1993 in a hard-right campaign focused on crime. Trump's Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy in 1991, but the brash persona forged in 1980s New York endured through reinvention after reinvention. ACT UP's activism helped accelerate antiretroviral treatments that, by 1996, made an AIDS diagnosis no longer a death sentence. The great working-class city gave way to a metropolis of entrenched poverty and extreme wealth.