The four years when old New York died and a new one was born

Mike Bloomberg once mused that New York was “a luxury product”. The former mayor meant that businesses—and, by extension, their staff—should be willing to tolerate higher costs in exchange for the advantages of living in a megacity. But many voters crave Manhattan buzz at Midwestern prices. This is one reason why New York’s Democrats recently backed a young, charismatic, far-left mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, whose plans to ease the cost of living (such as a rent freeze) would surely make things worse (by discouraging new construction).

Because New York has been tolerably well run since the 1990s, some New Yorkers have forgotten how much damage a dysfunctional city government can do. New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975, after decades of financial mismanagement. By the early 1980s crime and homelessness were visibly out of control. “Squeegee men” menaced motorists while purporting to clean their windscreens. Vandals and graffiti artists despoiled public spaces unchecked. The police were inept and sometimes corrupt. Between 1986 and 1989 an average of 1,760 people were murdered each year: nearly five times as many as were killed in 2024. AIDS, crack, racial tension, welfare fraud and cronyism added to the sense of chaos. Yet in “The Gods of New York”, Jonathan Mahler—a writer for New York Times Magazine and author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning”—argues that “luxury” New York was born in those four turbulent years.

Part of the pleasure of this book, especially for readers too young to remember the late 1980s, is that it chronicles a time when several important American political figures first strode onto the public stage. Here is Donald Trump, suing everyone, puffing out clouds of bluster and braggadocio, wildly overspending on his Atlantic City casinos and taking up with Marla Maples while still married to Ivana.

There is Al Sharpton, a rabble-rouser leading street protests—a rather different figure from the slender, sober-suited version who appears on network tv today. Here is Rudy Giuliani (pictured), with “the demeanour of an undertaker and the verbosity of a lawyer”, as one columnist wrote, making his first failed run for mayor. And an ambitious young medical bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci faces withering criticism from gay activists for what they see as his too-cautious response to the spread of AIDS. (Readers may wonder whether the long lockdowns he recommended during covid-19 were an overcorrection.)

Mr Mahler paints a portrait of a city facing multiple crises. AIDS was at first not just a death sentence but also a terrifying mystery, as healthy young men swiftly sickened and died. New York accounted for one-third of America’s recorded AIDS deaths by March 1987, and the city’s response was woefully inadequate, with too few beds and tests, and public nursing homes that would turn infected patients away, for fear of contamination. New York’s efforts to deal with homelessness were similarly flat-footed.

Race relations were dire. Black men were murdered for setting foot in white enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens. Five black and Latino teenage boys were falsely convicted of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park; Mr Trump took out newspaper adverts urging New York to bring back capital punishment. In 1984 a vigilante was acquitted of attempted murder after shooting four black teenagers who he thought were about to mug him—and became a folk hero to many white New Yorkers.

Presiding over the chaos was Ed Koch, first elected mayor of New York in 1977. Querulous, combative and tireless, he said he wanted to be “mayor for life”. Mr Mahler recounts his political demise. He was an avatar of an older New York—more working-class, with political control wielded by “white ethnics” (largely Italian, Irish and Jewish Americans)—and he failed to understand or respond to a changing city. Elected for a third term in 1985, he would lose the Democratic primary in 1989 to David Dinkins, the staid and courtly Manhattan borough president who would go on to become New York’s first black mayor.

The city’s economic engine also changed in this period; the industrial base was gone, and Wall Street’s boom in the 1980s presaged the rise of FIRE—finance, insurance and real estate—that would drive the city’s remarkable growth through the 1990s and beyond. As the crack epidemic ebbed, and as policing improved when Mr Giuliani was mayor (1994-2001), New York grew safer and more desirable. Rents soared as people flocked in.

Mr Mahler’s book is skilfully constructed and vividly written. The author avoids the longtime New Yorker’s trap of nostalgia. As with all great cities, things are always dying and being reborn: anyone who wants placidity is free to catch a flight to Bruges or Santorini. ■