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THE GODS OF NEW YORK

Also by Jonathan Mahler

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning

The Challenge

HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN

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FOR NORA, GUS, AND DANIELLE. MY FAVORITE NEW YORKERS.

THE GODS OF NEW YORK

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1989

THE POLICE ARRIVED EARLY AT GLOVER MEMORIAL BAPTIST

Church in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, lining both sides of Dean Street with blue wooden barricades. Sharpshooters in sunglasses and bulletproof vests took their positions along the rooftops of the boarded-up tenements that shared the block with the squat, tan-brick church, which had once been a synagogue. Bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the sidewalk. Several officers were dispatched to cut a large hole in the chain-link fence surrounding a vacant lot behind the church, in case any of the public officials due to arrive there in a matter of hours needed to make a hasty exit. It was the day of the funeral of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager who had been killed a week earlier by a white mob in the Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst.

Yusuf’s murder had dominated the news for days, the latest in a series of heavily publicized, racially charged incidents that had rocked the city. In late 1986, another young Black man had been killed in a different white neighborhood in the outer boroughs: Howard Beach, Queens. Racial tension had been rising ever since, culminating a few months earlier, when a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers from Harlem was arrested for allegedly gang-raping and beating a white investment banker out for an evening jog in Central Park. Amplified by screaming tabloid headlines like terror in central park and wolf pack’s prey, and by real estate developer Donald Trump’s full-page ads calling for the execution of the suspects, the jogger story had turned New York City upside down.

Against this backdrop, the murder of Yusuf Hawkins had instantly seized the city’s attention. The political calendar inevitably lent it even greater significance. The mayoral primary was just twenty days away. On the Democratic side, Ed Koch was seeking an unprecedented fourth term. He had presided over New York’s historic rebirth during the first half of the 1980s, but over the course of his third term, the city had completely unraveled, besieged not only by racial strife but by crack, crime, AIDS, homelessness, and political scandals. His challenger, Manhattan borough president David Dinkins, was vying for an even more historic distinction: to become the city’s first Black mayor. They were campaigning furiously and running neck and neck in the polls. Whoever prevailed would likely face a formidable Republican opponent in the general election, the popular former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudy Giuliani.

By ten-thirty on that late August morning, arriving mourners were passing through a gauntlet of men in red bow ties standing guard at the entrance to the small Baptist church: the security force for the Nation of Islam, whose controversial leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, would be delivering one of the eulogies.

The church could accommodate only three hundred people, and the Hawkins family’s spokesman, the Reverend Al Sharpton, had been in charge of the guest list. A year earlier, Sharpton had been widely derided as the attention-hungry puppet master of the Tawana Brawley hoax, a notorious, wrenching episode in which a Black teenager had falsely claimed to have been abducted and gang-raped by a group of white men. Now, undeterred by the scandal—or, for that matter, the sixty-seven count financial-fraud indictment pending against him—Sharpton was issuing orders to the city’s three leading mayoral candidates as well as to New York’s governor, Mario Cuomo, informing them that while they were invited to attend the funeral, they could not speak. Once they arrived at Glover, all four men were directed by the security guards to remain outside with the crush of spectators while the clergy and other guests took their seats.

At a little before eleven, Jean Griffith, the mother of Michael Griffith, the young Black man who’d been killed three years earlier

in Howard Beach, arrived and settled into one of the front pews. Nearby was the young filmmaker Spike Lee, whose third movie, Do the Right Thing, had been released earlier that summer, and the members of the rap group Public Enemy, whose hit single “Fight the Power” was the movie’s iconic theme song.

By the time the Hawkins family made its way through the knot of people outside on Dean Street, the air was thick and hot, the temperature approaching eighty-five degrees. Onlookers chanted, “Yu-suf, Yu-suf” as Yusuf’s two brothers, their hair cut into fresh fades, helped lift the silver, ﬂower-strewn coffin from the hearse and carried it into the church. After waiting nearly an hour in the August sun, the politicians were finally led into the sanctuary just as the service was getting under way.

The speakers described Yusuf as a peaceful, easygoing young man who had just graduated from junior high school with honors and had been headed to Transit Tech high school in September, in preparation for a career as a subway motorman. To those selected to eulogize him, though, Yusuf Hawkins stood for something much larger than himself.

The Reverend Timothy Mitchell, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Queens and a veteran of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement, listed off the names of other Black New Yorkers who’d been killed in recent years by white New Yorkers—in many cases by white police officers.

Sharpton spoke next. “When Black children keep getting buried and white children keep feeling justified, then we are doing something wrong,” he said.

He went on to paraphrase the Gospel. “Jesus said, ‘If you hurt one of these little ones, it’s best that a millstone be placed around your neck and that you be thrown into the sea,’ ” he thundered. “There’s a millstone around the neck of this country, there’s a millstone around the neck of this city.”

Two loudspeakers had been set up outside the church for the two thousand people standing in the street. Thousands more were listening to a live broadcast on the city’s Black-owned radio station WLIB.

“I don’t know who shot Yusuf, but the system loaded the gun,” Sharpton continued, pausing as the crowd erupted in “amens.” He turned his gaze now toward the casket. “I want you to know, Yusuf, we’re not going to let you down. They’re going to pay this time.” The politicians shifted uncomfortably in the wooden pews.

When it was his turn at the pulpit, Farrakhan addressed Koch, Cuomo, Dinkins, and Giuliani directly. “While power is in your hands, do justice,” he said. “Because there is a day coming when that power won’t be in your hands. Power will be in the hands of the righteous.”

Koch had been relegated to the church’s small, stultifying balcony. The instant the funeral ended, his bodyguards escorted him down a second-ﬂoor fire escape, across the vacant lot, through the hole in the chain-link fence, and into his waiting limo. The rest of the guests filed slowly out the front door, save for the Hawkins family, who stayed behind for a few more minutes for a final look at their slain son.

THAT AUGUST DAY in Brooklyn represented the climax, if not quite yet the conclusion, of four of the most convulsive and consequential years in the modern history of New York.

To grasp their full significance, you have to reach back another decade, to the dark days of the 1970s. Squint your eyes and imagine New York as the forsaken metropolis it was: Central Park’s once lush Sheep Meadow had been reduced to a dust bowl; an eighty-foot section of the West Side Highway that had collapsed in 1973 stood unrepaired; the subways were covered, end to end, in graffiti.

New York’s golden age as America’s great working-class city was over. Its once bustling and diverse shipping and manufacturing economy had been hollowed out by deindustrialization. The bluecollar jobs that had provided a foothold to earlier generations of European immigrants were gone, even as a new surge of immigrants—this one from Puerto Rico and the Southern United States—had arrived: Between 1950 and ’70, the city’s percentage of white residents fell from 90 percent to 77 percent.

Once a magnet for the aspiring upwardly mobile—the place where you went to make it—New York had become a place that you got the hell out of if you could. The city’s population declined by more than one million people over the course of the 1970s. (Another million went on welfare.) Forty-five Fortune 500 companies— Pepsi Cola, Nabisco, Shell Oil, Avon, Western Union, and General Electric among them—abandoned the city during the same decade, leaving behind some twenty-eight million square feet of vacant office space in Manhattan.

To save money, the city restructured its sprawling fire department, laying off thousands of firefighters and closing about 50 of its 360 engine and ladder companies. Many of those to close were in largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods across Brooklyn and the Bronx. It did not take long for these neighborhoods to be subsumed by an epidemic of fires. Most were accidental blazes that the city now lacked the ability to fight. Others were started by profitseeking landlords who hired arsonists to burn down their buildings in the hopes of collecting insurance payouts. Block after block was reduced to rubble, forcing hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers out of their homes.

Things reached a moment of crisis in 1975. Even with aggressive belt-tightening, the city found itself unable to cover its growing debt payments. No banks were willing to underwrite more bonds for the insolvent city, and neither was Washington willing to help. (ford to city: drop dead read the famous Daily News headline.) With New York on the brink of default, the state stepped in, pressing its government to allow a group of unelected officials including several business leaders to take charge of the city’s finances and design a rescue plan.

Their first priority was to restructure the city’s massive debt to bail out existing bondholders. The next was to dramatically shrink the size of its government through a strict regime of budget cuts to its once robust infrastructure—to the public schools, the municipal hospitals, the police department, and much more—while boosting revenues by, among other initiatives, raising the subway fare and imposing tuition at the city colleges. To jump-start the city’s stag-

nant economy and encourage businesses to reinvest in New York, there would be generous tax breaks to corporations and real estate developers.

And then, just as the city appeared to be on death’s door, it roared back to life.

FROM ITS EARLIEST incarnation as a polyglot Dutch trading port, New York had lived through numerous cycles of rapid reinvention. But even judged by these standards, the transformation of the city that took place during the first half of the 1980s was astonishingly swift and sweeping.

The broader currents of history were all ﬂowing in the same direction. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 had ushered in a new era of economic policy rooted in the free-market gospel of the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman. Once in office, Reagan set about slashing government spending and unleashing the power of the private sector. His 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act—the largest tax cut in the nation’s history, slashing the top income tax rate from 70 to 50 percent—freed up huge sums of capital for investment. His aggressive deregulation of the financial industry loosened lending standards and lifted limits on trading in inherently risky securities like stock options.

At the same time, new technology was revolutionizing the business of Wall Street, connecting New York’s brokers to markets all over the world, allowing people to trade faster and in larger quantities than ever before, and spawning the creation of esoteric new investment vehicles. The stock market started a historic bull run in 1982, posting average annual gains of nearly 27 percent for the next five years.

In many ways, Wall Street’s success was the city’s success. The staid business of investment banking suddenly became sexy, attracting droves of aspiring millionaires to New York. Investment firms gobbled up the office space left empty by Fortune 500 companies during the seventies. By the mid-eighties, Morgan Stanley occupied twice as much space in the Exxon building as Exxon.

Factories that had manufactured goods were replaced by investment firms that manufactured debt: perpetual ﬂoating rate notes,

yield curve notes, and, above all, the so-called junk bonds fueling America’s unprecedented corporate takeover craze. Profits soared. In 1985, the city’s biggest investment bank, Salomon Brothers, made $760 million (more than $2.2 billion in 2024 dollars)—surpassing the entire industry’s annual earnings seven years earlier.

In a matter of years, a whole new postindustrial economy had sprung to life, driven by what economists called the “FIRE” sector: finance, insurance, and real estate. The rising salaries, bonuses, and paper profits generated disposable income that fertilized the formerly barren city. A new, guilt-free consumerism bloomed. The galleries of SoHo became so inundated with collectors that dealers maintained waiting lists for popular artists; the ballrooms of Manhattan’s luxury hotels buzzed with debutante balls and bar mitzvah receptions; the dining rooms of Le Cirque and the 21 Club bustled with bankers.

Neighborhoods were rediscovered and repopulated, anchored by trendy new establishments. The bistro Odeon, which opened on the site of a former steam-table restaurant once popular among factory workers, became the after-hours cafeteria for writers, literary agents, artists, designers, gallery owners, movie stars, and everyone in between, introducing them to the formerly desolate neighborhood of Tribeca. The Union Square Cafe led the revival of the run-down area surrounding drug-infested Union Square. Barneys, once a purveyor of cut-rate men’s suits, reinvented itself as the destination for cutting-edge fashion, in the process bringing throngs of weekend shoppers to the once gritty neighborhood of Chelsea. With the art market booming and SoHo’s rents soaring, galleries were soon spilling over into the empty storefronts of the East Village and Lower East Side. Bars and restaurants followed, drawing new residents to the area.

New York’s business leaders had long argued that the city’s most valuable resource—its land—could be leveraged more profitably if its old factories, warehouses, and rental apartment buildings were replaced by high-end cooperative apartments, condominiums, and office towers. Now, fueled by the economic boom, generous tax abatements, and a ﬂood of exemptions to decades-old zoning laws, it was finally happening. A forest of glass office towers, luxury hotels, and condos rose from the ashes of the fiscal crisis. Uptown, on

Madison Avenue, came the freshly renovated Helmsley Palace Hotel, AT&T’s postmodernist headquarters, and IBM’s polished granite skyscraper. Downtown was Goldman Sachs’s concrete behemoth on Broad Street and the quartet of glass skyscrapers that made up the World Financial Center (a monument to New York’s emerging identity as, well, the world’s financial center). Adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art was the fifty-two-story, glass-sheathed condominium Museum Tower. And just a few blocks away, on Fifth Avenue, was the ultimate symbol of the boom, the fifty-eight-story Trump Tower, whose marketing materials described its $10 million penthouse as the most expensive apartment in the world.

Underpinning this rapid physical transformation was a financial one. As a city of renters became a city of owners and the demand for office space surged, real estate taxes quickly evolved into the municipal government’s primary source of revenue.

A less tangible but no less significant cultural shift accompanied the economic one. Power in New York had once been held by public officials and labor bosses. But with its working-class population shrinking and the government giving way to private industry, a new breed of power brokers was rising. “The people who are making the deals and shaping the future of the city are, more than ever, private individuals,” The New York Times Magazine reported in a 1985 story headlined who runs new york now? Manhattan, inc., a glossy magazine launched a year earlier to cover their comings and goings, called them “the Power Elite.”

In perhaps the most unmistakable sign that New York was back, immigrants were once again streaming into the city, and from all over the world. Between 1980 and ’86, eighteen different countries each sent more than five thousand people to New York, with the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, and China leading the way. By the start of 1986, roughly one-third of the city’s population was foreign-born. At the same time, New York had reached a new milestone: For the first time in its three-hundred-fifty-year history, the majority of its residents were non-white.

The bankers and business leaders had saved the city. Or at least one part of it.

SO SQUINT YOUR eyes once more and now imagine a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan. Beneath the surface, though, New York’s foundation was beginning to crack.

Even as this remarkable story of rebirth was unfolding in Manhattan, a very different narrative was unfolding across large swaths of the outer boroughs. The boom had created hundreds of thousands of jobs within the FIRE sector. But not only were the manufacturing jobs that had once sustained the city’s middle class gone; so, too, were tens of thousands of positions in the city’s ever-shrinking government. What remained for the most part for nonprofessionals were low-paying service industry jobs. Wall Street was doling out billions of dollars every year in bonuses, and yet around one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line.

While Manhattan was being reimagined and rebuilt, block after block in the outer boroughs remained neglected and in many cases burned-out and abandoned. Public schools and hospitals were underfunded and overcrowded, struggling under the weight of need. The massive mid-century public housing projects that loomed over the landscapes of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx had become symbols not of urban renewal but of urban despair, sealing their residents off from the city around them. Poverty bred helplessness, and hopelessness bred drug use.

As the city’s complexion changed and poverty became more entrenched, long-simmering racial resentments bubbled over. In 1984, a white electrical engineer named Bernhard Goetz became a folk hero after shooting at a group of Black teenagers who approached him on the subway, asking for five dollars. “You look all right, here’s another,” he’d said, firing a second bullet at one of the youths and severing his spine.

Frustration was building among Black New Yorkers, too: at the lack of economic opportunity, at their systematic abandonment by the city, at their severely limited political power, at the stark racism embedded in seemingly every aspect of the criminal justice system.

A year before Goetz’s subway rampage, a twenty-five-year-old Black art student at the Pratt Institute, Michael Stewart, was arrested for scrawling graffiti in a downtown subway station. Thirty-two minutes later, he was delivered to the nearby Bellevue Hospital in a coma. After another thirteen days he was dead, almost certainly from injuries sustained while in police custody. And yet in the waning weeks of 1985, an all-white jury in Manhattan acquitted the six transit officers involved in his arrest of every single charge leading to his death.

During the final four years of the 1980s, the cracks in the city’s foundation would widen into chasms, and New York would be forced to grapple with fundamental questions about its identity: How could it be both the great working-class city, drawing in and lifting up immigrants from around the world, and the capital of global finance and private industry? How could it retain a single civic culture—a shared idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker— when the wealthy were building a city of their own? When its once great public institutions had become places of last resort? When thousands of its residents had no homes? When large swaths of the city were losing faith in the very people and systems intended to support and protect them?

These years would begin on a hopeful note: Surely a city ﬂush with cash, riding Wall Street’s epic boom and a surging real estate market, could begin to address its growing imbalances and reconcile its emerging identity with its historic promise. Instead, it would be hit by an unceasing wave of crises that would deepen and cement its new fault lines, as the double-barreled solution to the city’s problems—the shrinking of its government combined with its reinvention as the center of global capital—became the source of a whole new set of problems.

The unleashing of profit-driven real estate development on the cityscape would send thousands of New Yorkers into the streets, driving homelessness to levels not seen since the Great Depression. In the face of increasing economic desperation, a cheap and highly addictive new drug, crack, would spread like wildfire across the city, spiking crime rates and straining the criminal justice system. The AIDS virus would become a full-blown epidemic, moving from

New York’s gay community to its homeless and intravenous drug users, in the process becoming deeply intertwined with the city’s social problems. It was all already far too much for New York’s tattered municipal infrastructure—depleted by years of severe austerity measures—to handle when, in October of 1987, the engine powering New York’s rebirth, Wall Street, experienced the largest single-day decline in its history, forcing more budget cuts. Punctuating all of these crises was a series of polarizing racial incidents— Howard Beach, Tawana Brawley, the Central Park Five, and, finally, Yusuf Hawkins—that became ready-made allegories for the precarious state of the city. And ensuring that every one of these stories hit New York with maximum force was a tabloid media at the zenith of its power and popularity.

Amid this upheaval, a new breed of powerbrokers would rise— crisis opportunists with radically different agendas but a common set of abilities that made them perfectly suited for this moment. They loomed over New York with an overgrown and yet selffulfilling sense of their importance during these years, turning it into their own grand stage as they competed to shape the city’s future while writing their own mythologies. They were a varied cast, consumed by overlapping dramas. Some would go on to become important national figures, their public personas having been forged in the fires of late eighties New York.

New York would come out the other side of these years a different city, deeply and in some ways permanently divided. It had turned to private industry to save it, and in many respects private industry had done its job: The city’s budget had stabilized and the ﬂight of people and capital had been reversed. But along the way, New York had traded away something that it would never be able to get back.

The promise of New York had always been the promise of America. It was, in aspiration if not always in reality, the place that proved the value of the American experiment—a place where anyone belonged and could succeed. Only here, in a crowded city teeming with ambition and opportunity, was it possible to migrate, in the course of a single generation, from the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side to the limestone grandeur of Park Avenue.

In the last four years of the 1980s, the promise of New York changed. It was suddenly possible to amass larger fortunes, more quickly than ever before, and many New Yorkers certainly did. But it was also harder than ever for many more New Yorkers to get traction in the new economic order. A city that had once aspired to provide a safety net and foothold to all of its residents became a gladiatorial arena for those with the biggest appetites, the loudest voices, and the most outsized ambitions. The great working-class city morphed into a city of entrenched poverty and extreme wealth, of celebrity, audacity, individualism, learned indifference, and resentment, foreshadowing the transformation of the broader nation. In many ways, the forces that roiled New York during the second half of the 1980s anticipated those that would roil America over the subsequent decades. The arrival of the global economy, the surge of immigrants, the nostalgia for a simpler time, the desire for order and authority—New York saw it all first.

But I’m getting ahead of the story, which begins at a moment of celebration: the triumphant third inauguration of the man who had been at the center of the city’s rebirth and would soon find himself at the center of the coming chaos.

PART ONE 1986

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 wakeup 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 swearingin. 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.

He had people to write his speeches for him now, but he rarely read them, preferring to talk about whatever happened to be on his mind. In addition to his regularly scheduled press conferences in the Blue Room, he would give impromptu ones throughout the day beside a radiator near the entrance to City Hall. He was a workaholic, but there was always time to eat. “We’ll be having lunch,” he would say, just a bit anxious that some staff member might have had the temerity to cancel it. He was especially fond of a Peking duck place in nearby Chinatown, but he was also happy to travel farther afield; his driver would simply ﬂip on his siren to expedite the trip.

Now, at the beginning of 1986, it was hard to remember a time when Ed Koch wasn’t mayor of New York. In truth, the title felt inadequate; he was the city’s mascot, the symbol of its improbable revival. Restless, stubborn, rude, audacious, immodest, obnoxious, but unpretentious, he was the personification of the city—its “nut uncle” and “bachelor workhorse,” according to one profile. Over the course of his first two terms, he’d become a national celebrity. He’d graced the cover of Time magazine; played a bagel-eating cabdriver in an early VH1 music video; made cameos in All My Children and The Muppets Take Manhattan; and delivered a straight-from-theBorscht-Belt monologue on Saturday Night Live. Penthouse depicted him in a caricature as King Kong, perched (nearly nude) atop the Empire State Building. Through it all, he was that rare politician who somehow became more human, more real, even as he grew larger-than-life.

In the middle of his second term, Koch published a score-settling memoir, Mayor, in which he gleefully denounced the “radicals,” “elitists,” “ideologues,” and all the other “wackos” and “phonies” who had dared to challenge him over the years. Critics called it petty and self-indulgent, but the book sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-one weeks and was adapted, at Koch’s urging, as an Off-Broadway cabaret show, and then a Broadway musical. Koch liked to joke that he wanted to be mayor for life, but was it possible that he had even bigger dreams? Reviewing Mayor, glow-

ingly, on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the writer Gay Talese mischievously speculated that its publication foreshadowed an eventual presidential bid: “Why not, he must ask himself, sitting alone in his bachelor apartment on weekends in Greenwich Village.”

In truth, Koch was perfectly happy where he was; his ambition was to stay there. He told reporters that he planned to run for a fourth term, a fifth term, a sixth term. . . . And why not? There were no mayoral term limits yet. He was sixty-one and inexhaustible, hurtling from press conferences to meetings to events until late at night, when he watched the eleven o’clock news, chirping at the anchors and correspondents throughout, and critiqued the bulldog editions of the papers before finally heading off to bed. His appetite for combat had not diminished a bit with age: “I am not the type to get ulcers,” he liked to say. “I give them.”

Koch had not dated anyone since Nathan, and they’d stopped seeing each other after his election. He was too fearful that their relationship would become public and drive him out of the mayoralty, and so he had sacrificed one love to make sure he didn’t lose another. Koch’s mother had died in 1960, his father in 1982. He had no partner and no children of his own. He had an older brother and a younger sister and plenty of friends, but the city was, in a very real sense, also his family, which made voters an indispensable source of affection and affirmation. He was a man who loved engaging with people on the street—“How’m I doin’?” was his trademark question—and being mayor was, among many other things, the perfect distraction from the fundamental loneliness of his closeted life. The hours he spent in his king-sized bed every night were the only ones he spent alone. The media even followed him on vacation!

THE FIRST DAY of 1986 was a cold, cloudless one in New York. Koch rode downtown along the FDR Drive in the back of his Lincoln Town Car for his inauguration, skipping his usual workout at a downtown health club, a routine that consisted of him listening to Barbra Streisand on his Sony Walkman while walking briskly on a treadmill. By the time he arrived at City Hall, the homeless had

been cleared from the northern end of the plaza and chairs were being arrayed outside the French Renaissance–style building for his swearing-in. Caterers were busy assembling the buffet spread— three thousand sandwiches, eight hundred bagels with lox, one hundred gallons of minestrone soup, sixty-five pounds of cheese— for the reception that would follow at the nearby Tweed Courthouse. It was, in retrospect, an ominous choice of venue, Boss Tweed’s name being synonymous with big-city corruption. But on the first day of his new, third term, Koch was as popular and unassailable as he’d ever been.

He met brieﬂy with the City Hall press corps in his office a few minutes before delivering his inaugural address, showing them the 160-year-old Bible on which he would be sworn in. It was open to a passage in the book of Exodus wherein God compels Moses to part the Red Sea in order to save the Israelites. Koch remarked that he would like to do something similarly bold during his upcoming term.

Bess Myerson, now serving as Koch’s commissioner of cultural affairs and still glamorous at sixty-one, was master of ceremonies. Standing at the podium in a full-length mink coat, she boldly predicted that the next four years “will be even better years for our city, and ourselves.”

At ten minutes before noon, Koch appeared between the graceful columns on the top step of City Hall in a blue pinstriped suit and an “I New York” scarf as a local high school chorus belted out Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” Three thousand members of New York’s political, financial, social, and cultural establishments looked on as the archbishop, Cardinal John O’Connor, remarked that Mayor Koch “is the only man I know who speaks to God as an associate.” It was a joke of course. But in fairness, Koch had performed a kind of miracle.

When he took office eight years earlier, the postwar New York that had served as his crucible was in ruins. He had inherited a $500 million deficit, and the Emergency Financial Control Board, which the state had created in 1975 to oversee the city’s spending and debt repayments, was demanding a four- year fi nancial plan. Koch was so bad with numbers that he needed his assistant to bal-

ance his checkbook. But he knew exactly what he had to do. He slashed and burned like a hard-boiled CEO, cutting thousands of city jobs and dramatically reducing services. Having promised to balance New York’s budget by the end of his first term, he raced to get it done a year early.

At the same time, he was engaged in municipal triage. He created an arson strike force to help put an end to the fires that had been ravaging the Bronx and Brooklyn. He repainted all 6,424 graffiti-covered subway cars and dispatched guard dogs to patrol the train yards at night to protect them from being retagged. Faking it until he made it, he plastered vinyl decals of half-opened windows on the empty apartment buildings visible from the Cross Bronx Expressway so that they would look occupied. He turned to the private sector for help, empowering a new public-private partnership to take charge of the restoration of Central Park. Desperate to get the city’s economy moving again, he doubled down on “bulk for benefits” programs that allowed real estate developers to bypass the city’s zoning laws if they agreed to make improvements to the public infrastructure. And he doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax abatements to encourage new construction and to entice companies that were considering leaving the city to stay. As skyscrapers started shooting up around New York, he liked to joke that the taller the building, the more tax revenues it generated.

During his second term, Wall Street took off and brought the city along for the ride. The workings of the stock market were an utter mystery to Koch, but that had not stopped him from celebrating this new and seemingly bottomless source of revenue for the city. “I don’t know how you all make money in this venture,” he’d said at the ribbon-cutting for the NYSE’s new futures exchange in 1982. “But I hope you make lots of it!”

It was, in a sense, ironic that Koch was the one who had presided over New York’s historic transformation into the center of global capitalism. He was the product of a very different city and clung stubbornly to his own middle-class roots. Even as more New Yorkers were becoming owners, he remained a renter, hanging on to his $475.49-per-month rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in case he ever got voted out of office and had to vacate Gracie Mansion—

the Mansion, as he called it. He didn’t much like rich people and could sound wry when it came to discussing Manhattan’s explosion of wealth on his watch, referring, disparagingly, to the “richies.” As trendy new restaurants started popping up across the city, he remained loyal to the old red-sauce Italian places in the Village. “I only go to hotels that are forty dollars a night,” he joked at the black-tie opening of the Helmsley Palace in 1981.

Still, the money was ﬂowing, the city was booming, and Koch was more than happy to celebrate its success. Standing on the top step of City Hall in the bracing January air, he took a rhetorical victory lap. “For ten years, we’ve been haunted by the phantom of fiscal failure, for ten years we’ve been shadowed by fears that the calamity we overcame will somehow come back and attack us again,” he said. “On the first day of 1986, it is time to put aside uncertainty and give ourselves the credit we deserve.”

The “we” and “ourselves” were a bit disingenuous. Of course, he was really talking about himself. But Koch was also aware that the city had real problems, exacerbated by the very budget cuts and tax incentives that had propelled him to success. He had taken extreme measures to get New York back on its feet. But now that its finances were stable and Wall Street and the real estate sector were off to the races, he could make some adjustments.

He had already hinted to reporters that he had different aspirations for his third term, if not to eliminate poverty and inequality— these would always exist in a capitalist system, he said—then at least to help lift up and support those who had been overlooked or mistreated. In fact, he had already started. He was about to unveil an ambitious plan to rehabilitate or build from scratch 252,000 new units of affordable housing over the next ten years. And the city had just opened its first publicly funded AIDS ward: ten beds for the most acutely ill on the twelfth ﬂoor of Bellevue Hospital. Koch liked to place inspirational messages to himself on his desktop, and he would be starting the new year with a new one, a quote from Horace: “Begin, Be Bold, and Venture to Be Wise.”

He hammered the point now, as he built toward his conclusion. “We won’t rest until there’s a job for everyone who wants one,” he said, his insistent nasal whine turned up another notch thanks to his

head cold. “We won’t rest until the housing we so desperately need is built. It’s time to stop the new cruelty of substituting park benches and subway stations for the state health facilities and community residences we need. We will never be satisfied until persons afﬂicted by AIDS receive all the care and compassion we can possibly provide. We will never be satisfied until people are completely safe in our streets and our subways.”

He was on a roll, New York’s Moses wading confidently into the Red Sea, with every expectation that it would part for him: “We will never be satisfied until we have finally won the fight for economic, racial, and social justice.”

Ten days after Koch’s triumphant third inauguration, in the early morning darkness of January 10, two New York City police officers spotted a dark blue Ford LTD driving erratically on the Grand Central Parkway in Flushing, Queens. They pulled over the driver in the shadow of Shea Stadium. He slowed to a stop but failed to put the car in park, so that when he took his foot off the brake, it lurched forward into a chain-link fence. The fifty-one-year-old man behind the wheel was not drunk, but he was bleeding profusely from a deep gash on his left arm and another on his ankle. There was blood on his brown suit and all over the steering wheel and seat. A four-inch paring knife was lying on the ﬂoor of the passenger side.

The story was front-page news in all the New York dailies. queens boro prez knifed read the banner headline in the New York Post.

His name was Donald Manes—though everyone called him “Donny”—and his borough encompassed 118.6 square miles. With a population of nearly two million, it was larger than all but a few American cities, but when it came to politics, Queens operated like a small town. Its power was concentrated in a three-block strip of Queens Boulevard lined with government buildings—Borough Hall, the criminal and civil and family courts, the district attorney’s office—and the peripheral businesses they supported. There was a deli called Pastrami King (Manes had a weakness for chopped liver on rye), a bar called Forty Yards, an Off-Track Betting parlor, and a

handful of collection agencies, bail bondsmen, and lawyers who billed by the job and posted their rates in their windows (Misdemeanor: $166).

This was Manes’s domain, and he presided over it like a feudal lord. He was a dying breed in the new New York, an old-school municipal powerbroker. Judgeships, jobs, contracts, prospective political candidacies—everything ﬂowed through Donny Manes. His office at Borough Hall was cluttered with commemorative hard hats, shovels, and other mementos from the hundreds of local events he attended every year. He was known, naturally, as the King of Queens. Just a few months earlier, he had been reelected to a fifth term with 84 percent of the vote. Manes was Jewish, but a cross dangled next to the Star of David on the gold chain around his neck, a tribute to his political mentor, Matty Troy, who was Catholic— and whom Manes had ultimately challenged and overthrown in order to take power himself.

His inﬂuence extended beyond his borough to the larger affairs of the city. As a borough president, Manes occupied a seat on the all-powerful New York City Board of Estimate, the eight-member administrative body charged with signing off on the city’s major land-use decisions and capital projects. And he was close to Ed Koch: Days before Manes had been discovered on the Grand Central Parkway, Koch had presided over his inauguration in Queens. As far as the city’s government was concerned, Donald Manes was one of the most important people in New York.

By midmorning, dozens of reporters had crowded into the lobby of Booth Memorial Hospital, where Manes was being treated. Investigators from the police department and the Queens district attorney’s office came and went in belted trench coats, ignoring the reporters calling after them.

Manes’s cardiologist finally gave a brief press conference that afternoon. Manes was now in stable condition, he said, but he’d been near death when he’d arrived twelve hours earlier. He was in shock and had lost half his blood from the stab wounds. He had subsequently suffered a heart attack and was still too weak to speak to the police about what had happened.

The mayor appeared at Manes’s bedside soon after, telling re-

porters that neither he nor anyone else cared what had happened to him: “I only know that I’m happy—overjoyed—that he’s alive and well, and I think most of the people in this city look at it exactly that way.”

It was wishful thinking.

Around the same time that Donald Manes’s Ford lurched into a fence in Queens, a separate, very different crisis—less headlinegrabbing, if far more sweeping—was unfolding in midtown Manhattan. In what had become a nightly ritual since the arrival of winter in New York, three city vans pulled up outside Grand Central Terminal at 1:30 a.m.—closing time. A dozen or so disheveledlooking men shufﬂed out of the building and into the frigid night air to climb aboard. More still lay sleeping inside the terminal and had to be roused awake by police officers rapping on their wooden benches with night sticks.

A couple months earlier, during the first cold snap of the winter, Koch had issued an emergency order directing the city’s police and social workers to move the homeless off the streets and into shelters or hospitals when the temperature dropped below freezing. The legal viability of the order was uncertain—under state law, people could be hospitalized against their will only if they were considered to be an “imminent danger” to themselves or others—but Koch was nevertheless determined to get them off the streets. Four years earlier, the city had tried to hospitalize a sixty-one-year-old mentally ill woman living in a makeshift cardboard hut on a sidewalk in Chelsea. She refused, and froze to death hours before the city was able to obtain a court order to at least move her into a shelter. The story had made the front page of the Times and become a public relations headache for Koch. As the ranks of the homeless continued to swell, he knew that it was only a matter of time before it happened again. “What we are interested in is saving lives,” he said of the emergency order.

Koch’s 32-degree policy, as it was known, had earned him a dubious distinction: On any given night, the city was now sheltering upward of eight thousand individuals and four thousand families—

as many as it had during the depths of the Great Depression. They were part of an ever expanding population that existed in a parallel New York in the shadow of the boom, one of sidewalks, soup kitchens, and cavernous municipal shelters.

It was a pair of doctoral candidates in public health at Columbia, Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper, who had first turned the plight of the homeless into an urgent political cause five years earlier. The two had observed the growing number of people living in the streets and wanted to know who they were and how they had gotten there. And so they began a comprehensive field study, roaming the city’s shelters, parks, squares, docks, abandoned buildings, subway cars, and tunnels night after night for months on end, using offers of food, hot coffee, spare change, and cigarettes to engage their subjects. Their 129-page report, “Private Lives/Public Spaces,” was a groundbreaking ethnographic examination of the city’s modern homeless population, estimated at the time at thirty-six thousand. It made the front page of the Times when it was released in 1981, and was even covered by the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, which cited it as proof that the capitalist experiment was nearing its inevitable collapse.

New York’s “new homeless,” Baxter and Hopper learned, were not a monolithic group. Unlike the largely white “bums” and “vagrants” who had historically populated Skid Row on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, many were Black. Some had been driven out of their homes by fires or because they could no longer pay the rent and had nowhere else to go. Many were addicted to drugs or mentally ill. The advent of antipsychotic drugs coupled with the cultural backlash against the institutionalization of the mentally ill had spurred New York State to release more than one hundred thousand patients from its psychiatric hospitals since the midsixties, nearly half of whom wound up in the city. The state had intended for them to transition to community-based mental health centers, but the funding for the centers never materialized.

Still, most of these former psychiatric patients did not wind up in the streets right away. Rather, they found their way to one of the city’s old welfare hotels, or SROs (for single-room occupancy), scattered across the five boroughs. They paid their rent with government benefi t checks and were treated by a roving band of case-

workers and psychiatrists who toted bags of antipsychotics with them. These SROs were residences of last resort not only for the mentally ill but for many struggling New Yorkers. It was marginal housing for people living marginal lives, but it was at least a warm place to sleep at night.

During Koch’s first term as mayor, however, he started allowing real estate developers to transform these SROs from last-resort housing into high-end apartments and hotels, under a decades-old tax abatement program. This was by no means the original intent of the program: It had been created in 1955 to encourage the owners of unheated, cold-water tenements to upgrade their buildings, not to create housing for the rich. But Koch, desperate to kick-start the city’s economy, permitted developers to redefine it. For owners, the first step to taking advantage of this windfall was getting rid of existing tenants, a campaign that took many forms. One SRO on the Upper West Side, the Embassy, experienced thirteen mysterious fires over the course of six months in 1978 before its conversion into a 176-unit high-rise apartment building. And so it was that in a matter of years the vast majority of the city’s SROs had been emptied out, casting more people into the streets.

New York was not the only American city suddenly confronting a homelessness crisis. Deinstitutionalization was a national phenomenon, and so too was rising poverty: Between 1978 and ’85, the number of American households living below the federal poverty line grew by 25 percent. But for New York, the problem was especially acute. No city had anywhere near as many people living on the streets, and its unique density made them impossible to ignore. Koch understood housing insecurity, if not actual homelessness. His own father’s fur business had gone under during the Great Depression and his family had been forced to leave the Bronx and move in with relatives in Newark, where Koch shared a foldout bed in the living room with his older brother. His idol, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, had built his way out of New York’s Depression-era homelessness crisis with seemingly limitless support from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (“He comes to Washington and tells me a sad story,” Roosevelt said of La Guardia. “The tears run

down my cheeks and the tears run down his cheeks and the next thing I know, he has wangled another $50 million out of me.”)

But this was a very different moment. When President Reagan addressed the subject of homelessness in a TV interview in 1984, he volunteered his view that the people who were sleeping in the streets were doing so “by choice.” From his pro-free-market perspective, housing was best built by private industry, not government. Rather than sending more money to New York and other cities suddenly confronting homelessness, he cut the nation’s public housing budget by 78 percent.

Koch initially approached the problem as if it were a temporary emergency; the city had experienced waves of homelessness before, and they had always passed when downturns yielded to recoveries. He was trying to cut spending and had no desire to take on the added financial burden of housing a whole new population. The city already subsidized several so-called lodging houses—known as “ﬂophouses”—which offered free beds on a nightly basis but required a ticket from a referral center. He felt that that was enough. He demanded, futilely, that the state take greater responsibility for the mentally ill whom it had discharged from its hospitals, and appealed to churches and synagogues to pitch in and help.

For a while, then, the job of caring for New York’s homeless fell largely to a loose coalition of volunteers and religious figures. It was a group that included Ellen Baxter’s husband, Tony Hannigan, who had persuaded Columbia University to repurpose an underutilized brownstone owned by the university as a drop-in center with free sandwiches, medical care, and hot coffee, as well as “the Johns”— two Franciscan priests, John Felice and John McVean, who ran the early morning breadline at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in midtown Manhattan, where the city’s needy had been lining up for many decades. They conducted memorial services for the hundreds of homeless whose corpses were sent every year to unmarked graves in New York’s potter’s field—a sprawling cemetery for unclaimed bodies on Hart Island, off the East shore of the Bronx—and lobbied the media to abandon pejorative words like “derelicts” and “bums” for the more humanizing term “homeless.” When the city announced

its intention to expel the homeless from the area surrounding Madison Square Garden in advance of the 1980 Democratic National Convention—“weeding the Garden,” one commentator called it— the advocates moved them into a temporary shelter in the courtyard of St. Francis, both to give them someplace to go and to draw attention to their cause.

Koch would not be off the hook for long, though, thanks to another member of this coalition, a young lawyer named Robert Hayes. A product of Catholic schooling—Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens and Georgetown University—Hayes was steeped in the tradition of helping those in need, but it had not been his intention to give his life over to activism. While a law student at New York University in the mid-seventies, however, he’d been taken aback by the number of people who appeared to be living in Washington Square Park. After graduation, as an associate at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, he spent his free time informally interviewing people sleeping in the streets. Many of them told him that they were often turned away from the city’s ﬂophouses, especially during the winter. Even when they could get a bed for the night, they said, these facilities were so crowded, dangerous, and degrading that they often preferred the streets. Hayes visited a few lodging houses himself and was alarmed by what he saw: a couple hundred men sleeping in a single room, some on metal springs without a mattress, others on chairs or on newspapers spread out on the ﬂoor. Everyone was fully dressed, with their shoes beside their heads, so nothing could be stolen.

Hayes started digging around in the basement of NYU’s law library looking to see if he might be able to cobble together a lawsuit on behalf of these men. He soon hit pay dirt: In 1938, during the depths of the Depression, Mayor La Guardia had persuaded New York State’s residents to pass an amendment to its constitution stating that the “aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns” and “shall” be provided by the state and local governments. It was a remarkable action—the government seeking greater responsibility for the care of its citizens, a pure expression of New York’s most progressive aspirations.

Hayes used the amendment to build a lawsuit arguing that the

state and city were obligated to provide decent shelter, hot meals, and medical and basic social services to its neediest residents. He filed the suit in 1979 on behalf of six homeless men whom he’d met at a Catholic mission on the Bowery. The lead plaintiff was Robert Callahan, a World War II veteran and former short-order cook. Another plaintiff listed his address as a cardboard box on Park Avenue. Koch initially shrugged off the suit and defended the city’s ﬂophouses. “Would you have us put them in the Waldorf?” he cracked to a reporter.

But Hayes had him checkmated with that decades-old constitutional amendment. Koch agreed to settle the suit in 1981, signing a consent decree that effectively ratified the right to clean and safe shelter for homeless men, the city’s largest homeless population. (Women and children would be dealt with separately.) He almost instantly resented this new obligation and scrambled to fulfill it without ripping a giant hole in his budget, opening a shelter with 400 cots at the Fort Washington Avenue Armory and cramming some 525 cots into an old psychiatric hospital on Wards Island with a maximum occupancy of 180.

The economic boom that took hold during Koch’s second term only exacerbated the homelessness crisis. As Wall Street surged and property values soared, developers began targeting rental apartment buildings in addition to SROs, pushing out existing tenants to turn them into luxury co-ops and condos—further shrinking the supply of affordable housing and driving more people into the streets.

Belatedly recognizing the desperate need for affordable housing, Koch finally imposed a temporary moratorium on the demolition or conversion of SROs at the start of 1985. (Racing to beat the deadline, one developer, Harry Macklowe, demolished four midtown SROs in the middle of the night without first obtaining permits or even shutting off the gas, electricity, or water in the building.) But by then, it was already too late. The wholesale conversion of the city’s SROs had wiped out a staggering one hundred thousand units of affordable housing, with no plan to replace them.

Since signing the 1981 consent decree, Koch had taken a piecemeal approach to trying to meet his legal obligations to the homeless, and to trying to satisfy a city that was becoming increasingly

fed up with them. There was only one true solution: more housing. But that was going to take many years. Until then, it would be more crisis management.

Hayes did not make it easy for Koch. He had left his law firm job in 1982 to start an organization he called the Coalition for the Homeless and became a full-time nuisance. He filed one lawsuit after another against the city to hold it accountable to the consent decree, challenging everything from the lack of toilet paper in the shelters to the insufficient number of toilets. When he wasn’t in court, he was organizing protests, staging sit-ins, issuing press releases, and calling news conferences where he railed against the inadequacy of the city’s response to the ever-growing homelessness problem. It seemed inconceivable to him that New York, with its long history of supporting those in need and its vast intellectual and financial resources, was not trying to serve as a kind of model to the rest of the nation in addressing this crisis.

By the beginning of 1986, Koch was spending $200 million a year to shelter the city’s homeless. Huge, barracks-style shelters were the cheapest and most efficient way to serve the maximum number of people, but they were clearly inhumane. The problem was that any time Koch tried to open a smaller shelter somewhere, the neighborhood would revolt. Frustrated with what he called “an outbreak of selfishness” in the city, he had opened a handful of smaller shelters secretly in the middle of the night to avoid protests, more often than not in poor neighborhoods with limited political clout.

But his biggest concern—politically, and as a basic matter of human decency—were those who refused to enter the shelters and insisted on remaining in the streets, despite the weather or their need for medical attention. Koch went on numerous nighttime ride-alongs with homeless outreach teams, doing what he could to coax into city vans people who seemed to need psychiatric care or were simply freezing. “I won’t hurt you,” he said to one who tried to ﬂee. “I’m the mayor and I want to help you.” Eventually, he grew tired of trying to reason with them and instituted his 32-degree policy—even though his lawyers warned him that it was vulnerable to legal challenge, and his homeless services staff warned him that there weren’t enough beds to accommodate everyone.

Sure enough, New York’s nineteen shelters were soon bursting at the seams. Buses, like those parked outside Grand Central on the night of January 10, crisscrossed the city trying to find empty beds for their often reluctant passengers.

By then, Hayes had already taken Koch to court again, this time demanding that he add more beds to the shelters and also put more distance between them. And so the city said that it would wedge another 80 cots into a shuttered hospital in Brooklyn and add 350 cots to a new men’s shelter that had recently opened in the former psychiatric wing at Bellevue. “People want perfection,” Koch said. “There is no other city that does what we do. We are very proud of it and we, on occasion, would like to be commended.”

While Koch was busy trying to sweep the homeless off New York’s frigid streets, the tabloids remained fixated on the Manes Mystery— as they had instantly dubbed the Queens borough president’s strange near-death experience.

Manes had last been seen at a reception in Queens several hours before he was pulled over by the police near Shea Stadium. No one knew where he went after leaving the event. A colleague who had also been in attendance remembered him looking exhausted and sweating profusely. Friends noted that he had not seemed himself lately. News accounts quoted one witness who claimed to have seen him in the hours between the reception and the stabbing at a supper club in a seedy Queens marina. New York magazine suggested that he might be among a group of Jewish politicians who were being stalked by Palestinian terrorists. Another witness said that he had seen a female in a miniskirt running away from a dark blue Ford on the shoulder of the Grand Central Parkway only minutes before Manes was pulled over.

Koch continued to defend his old friend and dismiss the prurient interest in what had happened to him. “Do I care whether he was with a hooker?” he replied when asked for comment, though no one was exactly suggesting that Manes had been. “Who cares?”

After a few days, on January 14, Manes was finally able to speak to investigators. He told them that he had been kidnapped by two

men who took him on a joyride around Queens, before beating and stabbing him and leaving him bleeding in his car. The story was fishy: Who were these men, and why hadn’t they taken his wallet?

After another eight days of speculation, Manes convened a press conference at his hospital bed. Greeting reporters in his pajamas and bathrobe, he revised his earlier statement. In fact, he changed it completely. “The wounds I received that night,” he said, “were selfinﬂicted.”

His lawyer stepped in to provide some context, telling reporters that Manes’s family had a history of mental illness; not only had his father fatally shot himself, but Manes had found his body. What’s more, he added, Manes was on some new medications for his high blood pressure and had recently started an all-liquid crash diet, which “could very easily have caused him to be hallucinatory.”

The reporters gathered in Manes’s room may or may not have bought the explanation, but at least one man knew better.

Michael Dowd ran a collection agency on Queens Boulevard called Computrace, which had a contract with the city to chase down unpaid parking tickets. It was a good business: Nearly half of the $250 million in tickets the city doled out every year went unpaid. The private contractors who collected these fines were entitled to keep a portion for themselves.

To maintain his collection contract, Dowd had for years been paying generous kickbacks to Manes. While the Manes Mystery had been playing out daily on the front pages of the tabloids, buried deep inside the papers were other, much less dramatic reports, anonymously sourced, about federal prosecutors investigating corruption at the city’s parking violations bureau. Dowd had no doubt that these two stories—Manes’s suicide attempt and the budding parking violations scandal—were related. If Manes was in the Feds’ crosshairs, it was only a matter of time before he would be too. He felt like he needed to do something to get in front of whatever trouble might be coming his way, but he didn’t know what.

That’s when he got a call from an old friend from the neighborhood, the Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin.

In 1986, the Daily News was one of four daily newspapers that shaped how New Yorkers made sense of their city. It was a strange moment for print media. On the one hand, its decline had already begun, and no one doubted that it was only going to get worse. Just a few decades earlier, New York had had ten daily papers vying for the city’s attention. But with the rise of the modern media—first radio, then television—most of them had long since folded. The only ones left now were the News, the New York Post, Newsday, and The New York Times. The paradox was that those surviving papers were more inﬂuential than ever. Together, they determined which stories would command the city’s attention.

The Times occupied its own Olympian realm, “the paper of record.” But it was the tabloids, with their grabby headlines and sensationalistic tone, that dictated the news cycle and drove the conversation on the city’s streets. And at the start of 1986, they were in the midst of a protracted war for New Yorkers’ hearts and minds, as well as their loose change.

Since taking possession of the then-liberal New York Post a decade earlier, Rupert Murdoch had turned it into a racy right-wing tabloid, with an ever-increasing emphasis on sex and crime. Its downtown newsroom, on South Street in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, was dimly lit and famously foul; a writer for Rolling Stone once described it as looking like the inside of an ashtray.

Central to Murdoch’s overhaul of the paper was the introduction of a new gossip column, known as Page Six. Gossip columns had been around forever, but in their most recent incarnation they had existed mainly to track the late-night comings and goings of film and Broadway stars. Page Six aspired to serve up a much juicier and more provocative dish. In the process, it broadened the definition of “celebrity.” Socialites, media moguls, corporate raiders, real estate developers—any member of the city’s so-called Power Elite now qualified as a bold-faced name. And so while The Wall Street Journal covered every utterance of Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund, Page Six chronicled his protracted legal battle with his upstairs neighbors over the size of his Christmas tree, which was so large that it had to be winched up the outside of the building and brought down through the roof.