The Untold Story of How New York Became a City for the Rich

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1:23Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:07Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us is Jonathan Mahler. He wrote an amazing book. He's wrote several books, but this is the most recent one. The Gods of New York, Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986 to 1990. I would like to tell all my young viewers I wasn't alive back then, but I was actually your age back then. and I love this book, Jonathan. It's great to have you on. I told my staff, this is the book that I didn't know that I needed to have in my life. It's got everything in it. It's lots of juice. I'm sure like your, and of course, Jonathan wrote The Bronx is Burning, a very famous tale about New York that got turned into a series on ESPN.

2:52Is this going to get turned into a series, sir? It is, yeah. There's a scripted series in development for FX. So, yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to look forward to that as well. But I have to tell you that this was a phenomenal book and soon to be a bestseller. Before we get into the book, tell us a little bit about you. Yeah. Okay. How did you get into the cultural documentary, political thriller? You're a time machine, actually. You're a personal time machine of mine. How did you end up like that, sir? Yeah. Yeah, well, I did. The way I ended up writing this book, actually, I was, you know, I work at the New York Times and I am at the magazine generally at the Sunday magazine.

3:34But in 2016, I was I was assigned to the campaign, the political campaign in 2016, which you remember very well. and you know I was not doing I wasn't following a candidate or anything I was kind of writing longer pieces that dug into the past of some of the candidates and because I had written the book you mentioned ladies and gentlemen the Bronx is burning which is about New York in the 70s now it's a little bit of a historian of New York City so I kind of gravitated naturally toward Trump Trump in the 80s and I wrote a few pieces about Trump in the 80s and that got me looking back at that whole period of time and how crazy it was, how crazy the 80s were in the city.

4:13And the sort of larger than life characters who were kind of striding around the city back then, you know, Trump, obviously, Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani, Spike Lee, Larry Kramer, lots of larger than life figures. And I thought, you know, this would be a pretty interesting period to spend some time researching and recapturing. And it was in the end kind of a a bit of a sequel to The Bronx is Burning, which is really about kind of New York hitting its low point in the 70s. And this book, The Gods of New York, is about the kind of rebirth of New York in the 80s and kind of the rise of Wall Street and real estate and this kind of new economy and new kind of cultural life that kind of sprang up in the 80s in New York.

4:57Yeah, you know, I lived it. So I'm a New Yorker. I was addicted at that time in my life to the New York Post and the Daily News. And so all of these stories were on those pages, but they were not as dense as this. They weren't as deep as this. You started in 1986. The city is booming at this moment. It went through a terrible period of time in the mid-70s, early 80s, but now the city's booming. But underneath, the city is about to crack wide open again. Again, tell us what was happening. Take us there. Because by 1989 into the 1993 period, we had very high crime, homelessness, et cetera. Exactly.

5:38So basically, in 86, you had Wall Street was booming. The real estate industry was booming. I mean, the city had really, really kind of sprung back to life. But at the same time, this wealth was really kind of concentrated in the upper classes. And there was the kind of emergence of a new kind of, you know, sort of poorer class, the underclass, as they were known. And then and then what happens is you get this series of kind of crazy, crazy confluence of events. So from, you know, from from crack to homelessness, as you say, all of these kind of racial incidents. Howard Beach, you know, the the the story of kind of Tawana Brawley, the Central Park jogger.

6:22And then, of course, Black Monday, which which, you know, you may remember the Wall Street crash in October of 87. So so all these events kind of conspire in AIDS. I don't think I mentioned AIDS. All these events kind of conspire to to throw the city into this, you know, kind of crazy period of turmoil and upheaval. and, you know, some of it's racial, some of it's kind of class, some of it is, you know, is around AIDS and this idea that the city didn't care enough about all the kind of gay men who are dying in New York. And the city really just kind of explodes during these years. You know, one of the things that grabbed me, because at the time of this genre, one of the best-selling books out there was The Bonfire of the Vanity.

7:07So you remember that book, you write about it. It was written by Tom Wolfe. And the book, The Bonfire of the Vanities and the Gods of New York, when I read those things as a sociologist, I'm not one, but I'm playing one on this podcast, it makes me think that the city of New York was a city, was becoming a city for the rich. Am I right about that or wrong about that? And if I'm right about that, explain what happened. Yeah. I mean, that is, you are right about it. The city was becoming a city of the rich. I mean, And it was, you know, the amazing thing about New York, the whole sort of story of New York, right, is that it's the sort of land of opportunity, the place where you go to make it, right?

7:47That's the kind of cliche about New York that has sort of proven true. too. And, you know, what what happened in the 80s is, you know, in the past, the city had had it had a had a big kind of middle class, a big working class. And there were, you know, there were factory jobs. The city had a big kind of city and manufacturing shipping and manufacturing economy. Now, in the 80s, the city gets become is about finance and the city is about real estate and all the kind of related industries, insurance, law, et cetera. And so it's it's, you know, this class divide kind of starts to happen. And, and, you know, one more thing I'd mention is, is Bonfire of the Vanities.

8:26I mean, of course, you know, you bring that up as this, this kind of iconic book from the eighties. I mean, in many ways, I thought about this book often as the kind of nonfiction Bonfire of the Vanities. I mean, I, you know, I'd read that book in college and it left a big impression on me. And, and, and, you know, really I'm, I'm, what I'm doing in this book is, is recapturing that period of time. But, you know, this is, this is the real life story. This is like, kind of what really happened. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a tremendous amount of intrigue. Of course, the protagonist or the villain, however you want to describe him was Sherman McCoy.

9:00And Sherman, you know, it was like Gordon Gekko. When I did the Wall Street 2 movie with Michael Douglas, they let me play myself in that movie. And Michael said to me, you know, I was a villain. All the Wall Street guys wanted to be Gordon Gekko and all the Wall Street guys wanted to be weirdly Sherman McCoy, but these were two obtuse sort of odd figures. I don't know. I didn't want to be those. I just wanted to see if I can get ahead and live a little bit of the American dream. But let's go to the complications as it relates to the geopolitical, or at least the city political, I should say. We have the rise of Zoran Mondami now.

9:38His campaign is kind of an echo or maybe a correction of what went down in the 80s. How do you connect his platform to what was set in motion back then? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty, I think you can really connect the dots pretty cleanly between the two. I mean, I think the 80s was really the moment when the city, when the city's economy shifted, right? When the old kind of, you know, working class city was dead. That city died in the 1970s and that kind of infamous period of urban decay and urban blight, the subways covered in graffiti, the Ford to City dropped dead, New York was broke. And then it's reborn.

10:18And it's reborn. Its economy is now reborn, but it's now kind of orbiting around Wall Street, orbiting around finance, orbiting around money. And that's sort of what happens in the ensuing decades, right, is that the rich continue to get richer. The poor kind of stay where they are. And even when wages start to increase, you still have the cost of living really kind of outpacing them. And you get to a kind of a point where the city has become unaffordable for the middle class. And I think that's what Zoran is tapping into. Is he going to win? Yes. I think it's pretty clear that he's going to win.

11:00Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I think the business community is doing everything it can, but I don't really see it. I mean, do you? Well, listen, I'm a big poly market guy. You know, he's at 82 % of the poly markets. So if, you know, if Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa and Andrew Cuomo are in the race, you know, I mean, it'll almost guarantee his electoral success. So, you know, we'll hope he gets a little bit more adaptive and less ideological. Let's go to your killer lineup. You've got Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Al Sharpton, the much larger version of Al Sharpton. He's only shrunk by about 200 pounds.

11:40Spike Lee, Larry Kramer, the big, big personalities who really understood the game that they were playing and who got played. I think everybody you mentioned was was was playing the game well. I think that that what what all of these guys and and, you know, you know, I think one way to think about this is, you know, someone asked me recently if I had written this book in 2014, would it have been a different book? And, you know, I think the answer is yes, because I had not yet seen Donald Trump reinvent himself as a presidential candidate and the president. And I hadn't quite seen how those skills that he really developed in the 1980s, that ability to to capture and hold the public attention, that ability to to to really kind of use publicity as a form of power, that kind of shameless way that he kind of walked through the world.

12:34You know, it wasn't until he, you know, became president really or ran his campaign that I saw like how he was able to take everything he learned in 1980s New York and apply it on really the biggest stage in the world. And the same thing is sort of true of all these characters, whether it's Larry Kramer or Al Sharpton or Rudy Giuliani. They all understood in the 80s in New York that if you could just get hold of the public's attention, and often they did that through the tabloids. But, you know, in Larry's Larry Kramer's case with ACT UP, he did it, you know, through through protest, through real in your face protest.

13:12The more confrontational those ACT UP protests could be, the better. So that meant, you know, marching into St. Patrick's Cathedral literally during Sunday morning mass and holding a protest there. You know, the more you could could kind of stir things up, the more the more effective you were at getting attention, the more power you had. And I think that, you know, it was sort of through the tabloids in particular, but also just through the life of the city in the 80s that all these figures kind of learned that lesson, that lesson really that publicity is power. You know, I looked up to Trump in the 80s, read his book, The Art of the Deal.

13:55You know, I was an I wasn't even an outer borough kid, Jonathan. I was a Long Islander. I was in Nassau County on the border of Queens. Family was a blue, you know, my dad was a blue collar worker. So I looked up to Trump. Tell us about, because you write about him. There was a mystique to him for people like me. What was it? Yeah. I mean, I mean, there's a couple things now, by the way. I was just going to point that out. But I did book up. I know, I know. But what was it about? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, you know, I think that, that first of all, this was a, this was a different moment.

14:32I mean, this was a very particular moment in time when, when it suddenly became kind of, you know, okay and more than okay to, to, to flaunt your wealth. I mean, that, that's what the eighties were about. The eighties were kind of about excess, about conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption, exactly. The masters of the universe, as kind of Tom Wolfe called them, right? And so, you know, I think that there was that kind of value shift, and he really embodied that kind of more than anyone. Um, you know, and, and, um, I also think that, you know, there was a, there was a, um, look that we've learned so much about him since then.

15:09Right. So, I mean, I think that you can be forgiven for, for, for not knowing some of these things about him, not understanding some of these things about him at the time. Um, and, um, you know, I, I think that, that, you know, one other thing that's, that's kind of important and it's easy to kind of lose sight of, cause you know, one interesting thing is, as you know, as I go back, as I went back and did this research, I saw that, you know, we all know that Trump was obviously like a big figure in the tabloids, right? The New York Post really built him up. I mean, that's, but you know, so did the New York Times.

15:39The New York Times, you know, gave Trump an enormous amount of attention, positive attention in the 80s. And then you kind of think like, well, how did that happen? And then you have to remind yourself that, you know, this was a moment when New York was just coming back from the dead. It was just kind of pulling itself out of this death spiral in the seventies. And along comes this, this guy, Donald Trump, this, this, you know, this, this, you know, real estate developer from Queens who's investing in the city, right. Who's like, I'm going to, I'm going to build, I'm going to build Trump tower.

16:10I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, rent it, rebuild the Commodore hotel. I'm going to rebuild woman rink. And so, you know, the city was, was kind of, I think it was easy to admire someone who is kind of doubling down on New York, you know, not, not long after so much of the, of the country and the world had really given up on New York. So I think that, that made him kind of a more, you know, kind of almost admirable figure, someone, someone who people like kind of respected.

16:40Looking back, we both lived through the era, looking back with a distance, What did we not all see clearly at that time? What we really should have seen? Yeah, I think quite a few things. I would say that, first of all, look, I think we didn't realize, first and foremost, we didn't realize what the ultimate consequences would be of turning so much power over to the business community and the private industry. I mean, I think, look, I'm not a I don't I wouldn't criticize those that, you know, in general, like New York needed to do something. And there's no question that that sort of that that the private sector and Wall Street saved New York.

17:29I mean, it pulled New York out of this death spiral. But, you know, but at the same time, the city lost, you know, so much affordable housing. and, you know, policies kind of were set in place that made it, you know, really difficult for sort of a lot of people to make it in the city, to have opportunity in the city. Another thing that I feel like, you know, we didn't realize, and this is, you know, a little bit of a kind of commentary about the media, you know, when we had those tabloids, those tabloids that you were addicted to, right? They, I think people think of tabloids as being really polarizing, right?

18:03Because of course, they turn the world into a story of heroes and villains. They're like comic books, right? But at the same time, what they also did was they got all of New York thinking about and worrying about the same things, right? They gave the city a kind of common narrative and a common storyline. And that made everyone feel invested in the life of the city in a way, so that New York almost felt like a small town at times. And, uh, and that is something I think we didn't realize how valuable that was this sense that like New York was a single city and everyone was reading about the Preppy murder, you know, about the, the, you know, about Robert Chambers and, and, you know, Jennifer Levin turning up, turning up dead in, in central park.

18:48And everyone was reading about, about Howard beach. And, and that made people kind of care about the city in a different way. I think I think we've we didn't realize at the time that that having you know having having a few outlets a few media outlets that that everyone read that everyone followed uh was was really having an important effect on the kind of civic life of the city yeah yeah no quite I mean there was a grittiness there there's a grittiness now I I will say this to you this was the precursor to Giuliani, obviously. And so what ends up happening is he comes and cleans up the city. I submit that we had 20 years of reasonably good executive management in the city.

19:31That was Giuliani and then 12 years of Bloomberg. And that led to a better quality of life for all of us. Unfortunately, that is disintegrated. We've lost the plot. Do you think we can get the plot back or do you think we're heading for a shit show? Uh, I think it's going to be tough. I mean, I think that, um, you know, I think that, you know, you look at, you look at Mondani's platform and, and, you know, obviously it's extreme. Um, and it's also, I think, you know, not, not terribly realistic. So, I mean, I don't, I think that the fact that he's, he is so popular sort of speaks to the fact that the city is in a kind of crisis right now.

20:11But I think that we're in a kind of existential crisis now in New York. I mean, I think people feel like this has become a playground for the rich or what have you. But I don't see an easy way out because there's no question. It's the millionaires and the billionaires who are providing the big tax base in New York. And that's you know, how our, that's, that's, that's how the city is functioning. So, um, it's not easy to see how we, how we find our way out of this, how this becomes a kind of a more equal city. Um, given, given that reality, I don't know. What do you think? I think it'd be very tough.

20:52You know, we may have to do what happens in San Francisco and bottom, uh, before things get better. It's unfortunate. So I'm down, we're down to the podcast piece of our episode where we have five words that we come up with for our authors. I'm going to read the word of the two words, and then you're going to react to the word. Give me a sentence or two. You ready? Yeah. If I say Wall Street, you say what in context of your book? Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas, Greed is Good. Greed is Good, Alan, you know, Boski, right? Ivan Boski, for sure. Yeah. Right. If I say 1986, what do you think? I say, um, Ed Koch's reelection.

21:33Uh, I say I'm Howard beach, uh, which was, you know, the sort of tragic, uh, uh, you know, a group of black men find themselves in an all white neighborhood in Queens and, and are, are chased by, by a group of white teenagers with baseball bats. And one is chased under the expressway and killed. Um, I think, uh, let's see. I mean, that's pretty good yeah well you see you left out the big piece thank you are we waiting for that john that was the first that was the first thing that came to mind but it's nine years just point out to my friends that if i gotta wait another 39 years for a med victory i'll be 100 years old okay let's go to let's go to zoran mandami zoran mandami um socialist uh i would say um um the future of new york um i would say um gosh what else uh i mean i would say excitement i think there is genuine excitement around him for better for worse um yeah okay all right let's go to the next one ready i say the word new yorker you say what well magazine for for one um i uh i would say I, you know, I mean, I think that is actually something I really kind of thought about a lot while I was writing this book.

23:01Because, I mean, I think, you know, this idea of like the New Yorker as a person who kind of cares about the city, who doesn't just live in this city, right? But who is, who loves the city. And, you know, that's, I think, that's, and sort of believes in the promise of the city and the possibility of the city. That's, I guess, my definition of a New Yorker. Not just a resident, but someone who sort of believes in the idea of New York, what Mario Cuomo kind of called the New York idea, right? All right, let's go to the words New York. You say what? Frank Sinatra. I would say...

23:47Still the place. It is, it is, it is. I'm going to dislead me. I mean, he's going to torture me, Zoran, because he hates Hedgehog managers and people like me, but I'll never leave it. You know what I mean? Maybe your next book will be The Demons of New York, the people with shit, bad stuff. But listen, you've written an amazing book. I want to thank you for coming on. Love every minute of it. Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York. What a great book. Egotist, idealist, opportunist, and the birth of the modern city, 1986 to 1990. What's next for you before I let you go? I don't know. I mean, I'm still at the time.

24:27So I guess for the moment, I'm just going to kind of refocus on my magazine stuff. But I'm definitely planning another book. I'm just not sure what it is yet. Well, listen, this is a great one. You're going to have to try to top this, sir. It's going to be hard. I wish you great success on another book. But I want people to go out and buy this one. What a great narrative about what happened in our great city 34 years ago. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I am Anthony Scaramucci and that was Open Book. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast.

25:08While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on X or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.