The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

by Jonathan Mahler

Overview

A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

“A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history . . . a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

New York entered 1986 as a city reborn. Record profits on Wall Street sent waves of money splashing across Manhattan, bringing a battered city roaring back to life.

But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illnesses. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.

The events of the next four years would split the city open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing. And a cast of outsized characters—Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer—would compete to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies.

The Gods of New York is a kaleidoscopic and deeply immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525510635
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.42(w) x 9.58(h) x 1.52(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which was adapted as an ESPN miniseries, and The Challenge, a New York Times Notable Book. His journalism has received numerous awards and been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn

Read an Excerpt

The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change. —Paul Auster, Ghosts

At 5:25 in the morning on New Year’s Day, Edward Irving Koch was awakened in his king-­sized bed at Gracie Mansion by the knock of a police officer on his door, just as he had been nearly every morning for the past eight years. He did not have a hangover, but he did have a head cold. Still, no runny nose was going to keep him from enjoying the historic day ahead—his historic day. In a matter of hours, he would become the third person in modern history to serve three terms as mayor of New York City. And he’d been reelected in a landslide, with 78 percent of the citywide vote.

Koch’s success was a tribute to him—his wit, work ethic, and unerring political instincts—but also to New York and, really, America. His father, Louis (né Leib), had arrived at Ellis Island in 1909, a Jewish child of peddlers from a dirt-­poor hamlet in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. He started as a lowly pants-­maker in a Lower East Side sweatshop, even sleeping for a while in the factory, and eventually built a solid middle-­class life for his family in a leafy section of the Bronx. His mother, Joyce (née Yetta), was a Jewish immigrant from similarly humble roots who had come to New York in 1912. She also worked in the garment trade before they were married and had their second child, Edward, in 1924.

Koch had benefited from the city’s and country’s largesse, enrolling at the tuition-­free City College of New York, in uptown Manhattan, when he was just sixteen before being drafted to serve in World War II in March 1943. Three years and two commendations later, he was back in the city, living with his parents on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Instead of finishing college, he went straight to New York University School of Law, courtesy of the G.I. Bill. At law school, he fell in love with Greenwich Village—its inexpensive restaurants, tree-­lined streets, and countercultural ferment. He was no beatnik, but he had progressive ideals. He took up folk guitar and was involved in the Right to Sing Committee, which campaigned against the ban on musicians performing in Washington Square Park. He also fell in love with politics. Koch was now running his own law practice, but at lunchtime during the 1952 and ’56 presidential elections, he could be found atop a soapbox on busy street corners, extolling the virtues of the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, derided by Republicans as an “egghead.” He soon discovered that he was a natural public speaker—shrill and nasal, but compelling and persuasive.

Koch became active in the local political scene, joining a movement of liberal reformers determined to wrest power away from the city’s entrenched Democratic leadership. He was idealistic and opportunistic in roughly equal measure. He first ran for public office—state assembly—in 1962 and lost badly, later referring to his impractically progressive platform as “the SAD campaign” because of his support for the repeal of laws banning consensual sodomy (an early gay rights issue), abortion, and divorce.

As an aspiring politician, Koch was combative and self-­righteous. No one would have called him likable, but his quick wit and ability to command an audience gave him an undeniable charisma. He was first elected Democratic district leader for Greenwich Village in 1963, defeating longtime Tammany boss Carmine De Sapio, and was elected to New York’s city council three years later. In 1968, at the age of forty-­three, Koch won a seat in the United States Congress. He would spend eight years in Washington, but he was ready to leave pretty much as soon as he arrived. He hated the endless gauntlet of cocktail parties with lobbyists and interest groups, and missed the cacophonous energy of New York, its crowded sidewalks, visceral political culture, screaming tabloid headlines, and cheap ethnic food. He entered the mayoral race for the first time in 1973 but dropped out months before the Democratic primary when he ran out of money.

He tried again four years later. Koch was fifty-­two by then and the longest of long shots, a gangly, mostly unknown congressman facing a large field of higher-­profile Democrats, including the young and widely admired Mario Cuomo and the feminist icon Bella Abzug. Even apart from his lack of name recognition, Koch had a very specific political vulnerability: He was gay. He had remained deep in the closet, a necessary price to pay for his political ambition. Still, he was a lifelong bachelor who lived in Greenwich Village, with all that that suggested. His media consultant, David Garth, refused to take him on as a client in 1977 without the reassurance that he wasn’t gay, and Koch gave it to him. Still not satisfied, Garth insisted that Koch enlist a female campaign surrogate to appear constantly and conspicuously by his side.

The role was briefly filled by a single female acquaintance of one of his senior aides, but Koch didn’t feel comfortable with her. And so Garth brought aboard someone whom he figured Koch would prefer—and who would add some badly needed glamour to the campaign—the twice divorced Bess Myerson, who decades earlier had been the first Jewish Miss America. Koch and Myerson instantly hit it off and he now eagerly played along. “Wouldn’t she make a great First Lady?” he asked at campaign events, suggesting that a Gracie Mansion wedding might well be in the cards if things broke his way. But even as Koch was acting out this ersatz relationship, he was secretly involved and in love with a younger man, Richard Nathan, a Harvard-­educated healthcare consultant who worked on his campaign.

Koch was still crisscrossing the five boroughs in a rented Winnebago, trying to raise his profile among voters, when he got his big break. In mid-­July, two months before the Democratic primary and in the midst of a brutal heat wave, much of the city lost power for twenty-­five hours and was swamped by looters in every borough, spurring the largest mass arrests in New York’s modern history. It was a deeply polarizing event, destined to reshape the city’s politics. In some quarters, the looting was seen as a cry of protest from the ghettos—as poor, urban neighborhoods were then known—a wake-­up call for those in power who had failed to see how desperate many New Yorkers had become during the city’s postindustrial descent. In others, it was proof that New York’s so-­called underclass was not simply an unproductive force but a destructive one.

Koch saw an opening. Reading New York’s prevailing mood, he shed his progressive base layer and moved to the right of the rest of the Democratic field. Refashioning himself as the law-­and-order candidate, he told voters that if he were in the mayor’s shoes, he would have called in the National Guard to deal with the looters; he also expressed his support for the death penalty—an issue over which the mayor has no authority. Soon after, Koch received an early morning phone call from the city’s newest tabloid proprietor, the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, alerting him to the news that his paper, the New York Post, was about to endorse him in a front-page editorial. (“I hope it helps,” Murdoch said. “Oh, Rupert, it sure is going to help!” a giddy Koch replied.) In the weeks that followed, Murdoch effectively turned over the Post’s coverage of the mayoral race to Garth and Koch.

Even with Myerson on his arm, Koch’s sexuality became an issue during the homestretch of the primary race, when he faced Mario Cuomo in a runoff. The Associated Press prepared and nearly published an unsubstantiated story that Koch had once been beaten up in his apartment by a male lover. Cuomo’s team dug for dirt about Koch’s private life and put up posters around Queens and in subway stations urging voters to “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.” Outraged, Koch called Cuomo, who claimed to know nothing about the smear campaign. Koch didn’t believe him and never forgave him for it. He narrowly defeated Cuomo in the runoff and went on to easily win the general election.

Koch was ebullient. “We’ve come a long way in nine months and tonight we’ve arrived,” he told six hundred of his supporters in the ballroom of the Americana Hotel. He was coming back to his beloved New York—and as its mayor.

Before his first inauguration, he made coffee for reporters in his Greenwich Village apartment and served them Entenmann’s cookies from the box. Then he rode the M6 bus downtown for his swearing-­in. Standing on the steps of City Hall in the bitter cold, he sounded almost naïve in his optimism that morning, urging “urban pioneers” to “come East” and help him rebuild the broken city.

In those early days, Koch had been worried that he’d feel lonely rattling around inside Gracie Mansion. His initial plan was to stay in his apartment and use the mayoral quarters mainly for ceremonial occasions. But he was surprised by how much he liked it. “You can get used to posh very quickly,” he observed.

Editorial Reviews

A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history, The Gods of New York offers a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results, for better and for worse. . . . A must-read.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

“Jonathan Mahler finds the origins of our own time in the squalor, strife, and sleaze of 1980s New York. Full of pathos and wry humor and replete with a colorful gallery of rogues, winners, losers, dreamers, and killers, The Gods of New York is a triumph of civic humanism. . . . A deeply enviable book.”—John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke

“Expansive yet fast-paced . . . an astute, propulsive history of the ‘entrenched’ inequality and zany politics that came to dominate the city and the nation”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A propulsive, gorgeously reported account of the forces that reshaped New York City in the late 1980s, The Gods of New York is brilliant historical non-fiction that doubles as a warning about the future. With its clashing crew of sharp-elbowed political players—visionaries, provocateurs, and grifters, and sometimes, all three at once—and its juicy, behind-the-scenes details of the tabloid stories that spiked the period like an EKG chart, The Gods of New York is a rollicking ride with a heartbreaking undercurrent.”—Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun

“The Gods of New York may be the best nonfiction book ever written about the city. Jonathan Mahler evokes the names of my youth—Bernie Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Ed Koch, Yusuf Hawkins—but he manages to both personalize the New Yorkers of the fateful years 1986-1990 and to fly over the city in a metaphorical helicopter, giving us a clear map as to how the city changed not just itself, but the country to which it is tenuously attached.”—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

“Jonathan Mahler has pulled off a magic trick, evoking the sepia glory of the decade of me in the city of me while also showing the fatal flaws baked into the revelry. The sunken, lost world of this book died with the corruption disguised as optimism known as the Reagan years, the canary in our civic mineshaft. All this happened both a long time ago and yesterday, undone by the same root causes now sweeping our land, proving that what happens in America, good and bad, happens first in New York. This is a story about the Big Apple, about the tree that birthed this forbidden fruit, and about the worms hiding inside.”—Wright Thompson, bestselling author of The Barn

From the Publisher