"The Gods of New York" On the New Yorkers Podcast! - With Jonathan Mahler

0:00This episode of the New Yorkers podcast is brought to you by NewYork100.org, recognizing excellence across New York City's five boroughs. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the New Yorkers, the podcast by New York City Cop. I am your host, Kelly Copp, published photographer, New York City tour business owner, real estate content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next book looks about, Tracy, now I am. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

0:45This is Time Square.

1:04With me today, I have Jonathan Mahler. He is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. His sports journalism has been featured in the book, The Best American Sports Writing. And he is the author of two books, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, as well as The Challenge. And his third book, The Gods of New York, is available now wherever you buy books. But above all else, he is a New Yorker. Hey, Jonathan. Welcome to the show. How are you today? I'm great. Thanks for having me here. We're so honored to have you joining us today and talk about your amazing book. Jonathan, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, what you do, things like that.

1:45Yeah. So I was born in New York. Nice. Yeah. What borough? I was born in Manhattan. Yeah, my father grew up in the Bronx. He grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. and um my mom also new yorker um though she was you know moved to westchester at some point um and then um you know i spent a good chunk of my childhood actually in california my parents moved and then when i was in high school and into college sort of in those years they moved back to new york uh and i you know graduated from from college i went to northwestern in chicago graduated in 1990 and moved to New York then. And aside from a kind of brief stint in Washington, which is kind of a rite of passage for any young journalist, I've been in New York City, you know, pretty much straight through since 1990.

2:40Wow, that's really nice. So you lived in Manhattan, any other boroughs? Yeah, well, I now live in Brooklyn. So those are really my two boroughs. I mean, I started in Manhattan, uh, made the migration to, uh, first to Brooklyn Heights and then deeper into Brooklyn to Park Slope. And then where I'm now in Windsor Terrace. Very cool. And you have a family. I have a family. I have a wife and two kids who are all, uh, you know, my two kids are, are true New Yorkers born and raised here, never lived anywhere else. And, um, yeah, my wife is a transplanted New Yorker. Yeah. I don't hear that New York accent though.

3:13No, no. My dad had one. My dad had a, might add a great Bronx accent, but yeah. I love that. Yeah. Do your kids have accents? No, no, I think they're, uh, no, but they are, you know, they are, they are true, uh, true, true city people. I think, uh, I think they're, um, hard to imagine them anywhere else. Yeah. That's interesting. And do they take the subway all the time? They take the subway everywhere and have been doing that since they were like eight years old. And they, you know, you know, I've always wondered that because I don't know how I would feel as a parent and what age do you allow your kid to ride the subway by themselves how does that work yeah i mean there's no there's no rule right um i think you just kind of get to a point where they're they've ridden the thing enough with you that you feel like yeah all right go ahead and they're always eager to right that's like you know that's like a it's a great thing about being a kid in new york you have this kind of independence with the subway system you can go anywhere you want and uh and it is pretty straightforward so right yeah yeah of course then they discovered city bikes as they got a little older that's a whole other thing but that's so interesting to me yeah you know just that whole lifestyle is you know what it's like to grow up in new york city yeah it's a totally different well you did you take the subway when you were young yeah i mean though when i was young we were you know we would visit the city you know once or twice a year because my parents you know love love coming back here right um so i was always on the subway with them so yeah you know i didn't i didn't take the subway alone when i was a little kid like my kids did yeah different time too right yeah yeah for sure.

4:39Yeah. The only way to travel for me, I say living in New York city. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm on the subway all the time. That's perfect. Yeah. So Jonathan, we have you on the show today because you've written a new book and it's all about New York city. What inspired you to write about this time period in New York city? And what's the name of the book as well? Yeah. So the name of the book is the gods of New York. Great name. Yes. Thank you. Um, and, um, I'll tell you a little bit about how it came to be. So I wrote a book, um, some years ago, uh, called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, which was about the year 1977 in New York and really kind of about the decade of the seventies in New York.

5:16And this book is, you could look at it as the sequel. This is the eighties. And yeah. And so the way this kind of came to be is I, you know, I work at the New York times. That's my, my, my day job. Right. Currently, currently still. Great. Yeah. And I work, I, I write for the Sunday magazine. So I generally do longer pieces, But in 2016, I was assigned to cover the political campaign, the presidential campaign, which was quite something. And I wasn't one of the reporters who was kind of traveling with a candidate. I was one of a few writers who did kind of longer pieces about the pasts of some of the candidates.

5:54So did you follow a specific candidate or both? Were you equally? I was basically, yeah, all of them, right, because it was before even the primaries. Right. I was in a - It's fascinating. Yeah, it was quite something. I was doing, I was not assigned to a specific candidate. So I was doing kind of longer stories that took a little more time and research about the kind of history of some of the candidates. So I dug back into their past basically. So because I'd written this book about New York in the 1970s, I was kind of naturally interested, of course, in Donald Trump's past. So I found myself kind of digging into his history in New York in the eighties.

6:36Right. And then I started to think, well, you know, that's a pretty interesting moment. I didn't want to write a book about him, but I did kind of realize like, wow, what a, what a crazy cast of characters in the city then. And what a crazy place New York was then. And so I thought maybe I'll maybe I'll just kind of dig back into this era and have have Trump be kind of one of a of a larger cast of characters. Wow. Yeah, that is really, really fascinating. And so 2016 was also Hillary. Yeah, correct. It is. And Bernie. I mean, right. Yeah. Wow. That in itself could be a whole show what we're talking about right now.

7:17It was wild. Yeah. Before we get too deep, Jonathan, into what's in the book, can you give our listeners and myself some context? What was New York City dealing with in the decades leading up to the 1980s? And give us a brief overview of New York City history during the 20th century. Yeah, I'd love to. So basically, New York went through a series of amazing transformations over the course of the 20th century. Right. And you can think of, I won't go all the way back to the beginning, but if you think about the kind of World War II and post-war New York, New York was just an unimaginably different place then.

7:56It was filled with manufacturing, with factories. If you kind of think about the shoreline of the city, they were all just bustling with ships and cargo coming in and longshoremen hauling packages and trucks and little railways. And I mean, the city was just like booming. and it was a real kind of working class city because all these factories and this sort of shipping center had to employ people. So you had a city that was a great working class city with lots of powerful labor unions and labor bosses and lots of immigrants. So that was sort of New York in the kind of 40s and 50s. And then what happens is the same thing that happens all across America and all over the world is that automation happens and suddenly it becomes a lot easier to manufacture things without having a hundred people, you know, on the assembly line.

8:56And it also gets expensive in New York City to have big factories. So why don't we move our factories out of the city? Right. So places, so between the automation and the kind of rising cost of real estate, New York loses a ton of jobs in the 60s and into the 70s. And then you think of what New York looked like in the 70s and you can think about some movies is maybe a good way to imagine it. Yeah, that's a good reference. You can think of The Warriors, perhaps. Right, exactly. Or you can think of one of the Charles Bronson movies, Death Wish, or you can think of Taxi Driver, maybe. What's so funny, I have Taxi Driver as a poster on my living room wall framed.

9:36Two people within the last day brought up Charles Bronson and The Warriors. There you go, there you go. Those are iconic 70s, that is New York. You think about the subways covered in graffiti. You think about the South Bronx, which was, you know, kind of arson fires. It was kind of burned down. Right. So that's the 70s. And then, you know, you know, kind of enter my book, which is really the 80s. And what happens in the 80s is the city is kind of reborn. Right. Because, you know, Reagan comes into office and he is all about deregulation and, you know, free trade and free markets. and suddenly wall street is booming real estate is going through the roof people are building new skyscrapers you know the trump tower and so much else um and the city is is you know new neighborhoods are getting discovered new restaurants are opening so it's this kind of story of rebirth but at the same time this new economy left out a lot of people because there were no there were there were no jobs for working class exactly there were no jobs for people who didn't have college degrees and the government was shrinking because, because the city, you know, when it was coming out of the seventies, it couldn't afford, you know, there were no jobs or no tax, there was no tax revenue.

10:50So the city basically had to sort of, you know, lay off firemen. It had to lay off cops. So, so you have a city that's, that's kind of, you know, booming for a certain small, you know, segment of the population. And you have a lot of people who are being left out and, um, and are getting frustrated. And, um, you know, a lot of those people were immigrants. A lot of those people were like New Yorkers of color, a lot of black New Yorkers who would come during the great migration North in the, in the forties and fifties. Um, and, um, you know, and so you have a city that's on the surface looks like it's thriving, but you go like kind of an inch below that surface and you can see a lot of frustration building.

11:31It's fascinating to me because now we're going up to 1986 where your book starts, correct? 86 to 89? 86 to, yeah, to 90. Yeah, to 90. Yeah. And, you know, I was, I graduated high school in 1986. Oh, me too. So everything that your book is talking about, I remember. Yeah. You know, I mean, I was in Florida at the time, but I remember a lot of the huge, big stories. Yeah, they were all national stories. They were all national stories. You know, that are in your book, you know, like the Central Park Five. Yeah. I don't know if I want to give away too much that's in the book. Yeah, that's okay. But, you know, the AIDS epidemic and homelessness and political scandals in New York City.

12:12Crack, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, do you want to, well, now at this point, we're up to 1986 where your book starts. Yeah. So basically you have this moment where the city's, you know, been reborn or so it seems, but you also have this situation where the foundation is kind of starting to crack because you got a lot of people who are left out. So that's where things are at the beginning of 1986. And then what happens over the course of the next four years is a series of social crises and incidents, violent racial incidents, that basically take that kind of simmering tension and basically throw gasoline on it.

13:02And you have a city that's kind of explodes over the course of those four years. And why did you pick 1986 to 1990, those specific years? Yeah, so I had a few reasons. I mean, one is just the confluence of events. So many crazy, huge historical events happened during those four years. Right. And also it was, you know, Ed Koch was mayor. It was his last term as mayor. Yeah. And there was something about his kind of storyline and going from, you know, at the beginning of 1986, his storyline kind of mirrors the storyline of the city. At the beginning of 1986, he's on top of the world. He has been reelected.

13:41He is the most popular, you know, as popular as any mayor has ever been in New York. He's just led this great rebirth. 78 % or something. 78 % of the vote is incredible. Unimaginable. Yeah. And then over the course of the next four years, it all unravels. And he runs for reelection again in 1989 and loses. But that sort of, he's kind of, in a way, he's sort of the heart of the story. He's the spine of the story. Right. Because it's sort of the unraveling of his city and the unraveling of the kind of, of the renaissance that he led. It's so fascinating to me. You know, just, it takes me back in time.

14:19Yeah. to myself watching tv and everything that you mentioned in the book like i said i completely remember yeah yeah yeah no it's a fascinating book yeah and it's this the thing about kind of recent history that's like it's recent enough that it all is a little bit familiar but it's far enough away that you're like oh wow i didn't realize that exactly exactly yeah and can i mention take it take us back to the beginning of the book isn't it where ed gotch wakes up Yeah. Yeah. We, we kind of, we talked about that. Sure. Yeah. I mean, the book opens with, with Ed Koch, um, on, uh, on January 1st, 1986, and he's just been re, you know, he's been reelected and it's, it's, it's his inauguration and, um, you know, and he's, uh, he is feeling great because he is, he is the most popular mayor in modern history in New York.

15:09And, uh, you know, he rides his town car down to, uh, to his inauguration at a city hall and, you know, everything is all right. You know, they've, they've kicked all the homeless people at City Hall Park and they have, I have it in my mind's eye right now, City Hall Park and everything. It's all cleaned up and they've got the, you know, the red, white, and blue bunting on, on City Hall. And, you know, it's a beautiful, you know, cold, but clear winter morning. And he's out there and, you know, promising to, promising to make sure that these four years are even better for New York. And that all the people he, he says, all the people who were left out, you know, I got you, right.

15:47You know, we are not going to rest until everyone with AIDS is, you know, is, is cared for. Everyone who's homeless has a home. Everyone who's poor has a job. Um, you know, he makes all these kind of bold promises on that new year's morning. And it's, you know, this very kind of, um, uh, ominous start because, uh, from there, you know, from that, that kind of lofty, lofty rhetoric and, and those high aspirations, it all, it all kind of falls apart. Yep. Kind of like a, seems to happen here and there. It does. Yeah. You know, as soon as you political leaders, you make big promises and that's when you know you're in trouble.

16:25Yeah. Well, you know, Jonathan, you do an amazing job of taking figures that we might know of and that we're kind of familiar with from the media and making them compelling characters in your story. How did you go about researching and writing about them? Yeah. It's interesting. So I, Because I'm a journalist, I work at the New York Times, I do a lot of reporting. I do a lot of talking to people. I do a lot of interviews. And so my first instinct is just to call everyone and meet with as many people as I could in person. So I did that. I interviewed about more than 200 people for this book. But because this happened some years ago now, this was almost four decades ago, a lot of people are gone.

17:08So I talked to the people I could talk to. and then I consulted, I did a ton of reading. I used all the old newspapers. I read every book that touched on any of this period of time and I used various archives. So for instance, the city has all of Ed Koch's mural papers. I went through those. There's a great oral history of Ed Koch at Columbia, which is basically everyone who worked for him, all of his friends, everyone is on tape there You can listen to them. It's amazing. Larry Kramer, who I write about, who was the founder of ACT UP, which was the great AIDS activist organization. His papers are up in New Haven at Yale.

17:51I used those. Benjamin Ward, who is the police commissioner. Wow. His papers. Yeah, he was an amazing guy. And his papers are at John Jay College in the city. Right. Okay, nice. And actually, the amazing thing is when I went to consult those papers, I saw that he had a memoir never published. so his whole life story was laid out in this this unpublished book so i was able to use that and it was very wow it's a real intimate book he he really i mean it's almost like a journal i mean he's talking about what it was like to be you know the police commissioner of new york during these years when with with you know when crack when the crack epidemic was going on and it's it's like it was pretty powerful stuff yeah so it was a kind of a hybrid of of you know phone calls reporting meetings um archival material and um and old newspapers that's fascinating you know what i love too i can feel your passion about this book and you know and a lot of you know what i love about having guests on my podcast on our podcast is it's about passion about new york city and your passion about this is palpable it's incredible oh that's great i'm glad you know yeah no i had such a blast writing writing and and you're not gonna say that the name the name of your podcast, The New Yorkers.

19:01Yeah. It's so, um, you know, someone asked me just in an interview actually earlier today about just like, you know, how would you, you know, what New Yorker, what is a New Yorker? And I was like, well, New Yorker is not just a person who lives in New York. And New York is a person who like kind of cares about New York and sort of believes in New York, believes in the idea of New York. Right. Right. Um, and you know, this book really, really kind of stirred that all up in me pretty, pretty, pretty powerfully. so were people receptive to you interviewing them about you know the the gods of new york yeah i mean for the most part people were were pretty pretty willing to talk i mean al sharpton spent a lot of time with me wow yeah spike lee was very very cool yeah agreeable yeah was he at a a game a knicks gamer where he's out i know he's always at he's literally always at a sporting event it's incredible yeah he uh but then you know he was he was you know he was 30 years old this is incredible he's a very different person yeah um and um obviously i had less luck with donald trump though i did just gonna oddly i i interviewed him a couple times in 2016 yeah when i was working on the campaign in at the time so i actually did did get a chance to talk to him did he remember talking with you uh i mean i i i would say if i you know he he probably would remember yeah talk to me i mean i did yeah yeah yeah yeah and i you know i knew him a bit before because I had written about New York for years.

20:28He'd written me notes in the past before he became president. So you had talked to him, do you remember what year you talked to him for the book? Yeah, it was 2016. It was during the campaign. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. And it was before I even sold the book. I was just writing about him for the Times. So I, you know, but I was, we talked about some of this stuff. You know, I've met, you know, being in my 50s, I've, you know, I've made friends here in New York City and I've heard stories of people who have dined president trump and things like that yeah yeah they're out there out there yeah well i mean he was such a new york figure for so long i mean a lot of people cross paths with him yeah yeah yeah he uh definitely is a fixture of new york city yeah definitely what about uh rudy giuliani yeah it's funny so i did um i he you know obviously he was going through some stuff while i was working on this book.

21:19And so I, um, I ended up writing a story, uh, kind of a profile of him for the, for the New York times magazine where I work. And, um, I was trying to get him to talk to me for the story. I talked to tons of people who knew him and I kept texting him. I had his phone number and we were texting and he was like, no, it's not, you know, it's not the right time. I can't do it. So he kept kind of putting me off and I was like, I had to write, you know, the post story had to be published. So, um, when right before we were publishing it the week before he's sort of traditionally you to you send people um uh like notes for fact checking they're basically like we're saying it was and this was you know they're like 60 questions so like these are the things where we're saying you did this we're saying you did that we're saying you said this we're saying you know you give him a chance to respond and he wrote back just you know just like he answered like he just went off on so many different questions so we just sort of took those answers and and use them as like footnotes in the story it was kind of funny so it's like i didn't actually interview him but i had his response to so many things oh that's that's fascinating yeah it really is can i ask you about bernard gett yeah sure so you had to get information or about him correct how was that yeah so that was um and i'm sorry jay do you know who he is i don't know oh we yeah yeah do you want to tell him yeah sure and it's okay to talk about this because it's sure yeah of course making sure yeah i don't want to give too much of the book away because it's so incredible yeah well thank you yeah well maybe we'll wet just give tell people just enough to wet their appetite there you go perfect so bernie getz was you know was a sort of self-employed electrician uh you know lived in the city in uh in 1984 he's around christmas time he gets on the subway he's you know accosted kind of sort of mugged by five like black teenagers.

23:13He pulls out a gun and he shoots all five of them. One of them he paralyzes. I mean, he shoots him once and then he shoots him again on the floor of the subway car. He then, the subway train kind of stops because there's gunfire. Do you remember which train it was on? Do you happen to know if you did? Yeah, it was the 23, I think it was. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's in the book. I'm trying to, yeah. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. He, uh, he, um, he gets, he, he gets off the subway, you know, runs down the tracks, he leaves the city and, um, no one, you know, there's the tabloids, you know, have the story of this, this, you know, the, the, this, the death wish gunman, they called him this guy who's, you know, who knows who he is or what happened, but he, you know, he's instantly already kind of like, you know, in a weird way, like already being kind of elevated into like a hero.

24:06He, He fought back on the subway. Yeah, like a vigilante. Exactly, vigilante, exactly. And then he disappears. No one knows where he is. He turns himself in to the police up in New Hampshire. Wow. And then they bring him back down to the city and everyone meets this guy. Here he is. Bernie gets the, you know, the kind of the angry, you know, vigilante fighting back. And he becomes a, literally becomes a folk hero among like a certain part of New York because, you know, people are like, yeah, you know, he's stood up. Fighting crime. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and you know, they're literally like chance on the subway, you know, Mets jets gets their t-shirts, you know, you know, Bernie, he gets it or, you know, stuff like that.

24:45And, um, and initially he's so, because, you know, because he's, he's like kind of beloved in, in, you know, quarters of the city. He's the, the, the district attorney, Bob Morgenthau doesn't like does, does kind of a half-assed job prosecuting him initially. Right. Then a little more time passes and it becomes clear. Well, wait a second. What was, like, did he really need to shoot five guys? And, like, you know, some of the stuff that he'd said in the past, he was clearly racist. Like, some of this stuff starts to come out. And it's like, oh, wait a second. Maybe. And then the DA kind of takes another run at him.

25:26and this time really, you know, indicts him for, for, for murder and, you know, all sorts of other crimes. And, um, and he goes on trial and this trial becomes this incredibly kind of polarizing event in the city because, you know, to half the city, he's still a hero to another half of the city. He's, you know, uh, like a, like a, a murderer. I mean, or not a murderer because he's, you know, he didn't actually murder anyone. He, he, he nearly did. I mean, he paralyzed someone. um and so so i guess attempted murder and um and also i mean he he you know he basically admits when his his his testimony you know not a testimony his his statement to the police you know get becomes public and he basically says i was trying to kill them like he's you know yeah um so you know nevertheless he goes on trial and is acquitted of everything but a legal possession of a gun right and so you know so that trial happens in 1987 and and you know I mean, like a big chunk of the city and like really all of black New York is like, what the, like, what?

26:27And that's piggybacking on other, you know. Yes, it comes after, exactly, it comes after some other serious racial incidents and some other like, you know, serious failures of the criminal justice system. So, you know, so he just, you know, it becomes this, you know, just this wedge that just, you know, sort of fractures the city. Right. You know, it's sad that it's still parallel to today. yeah yeah i mean the city's much better but no i don't mean new york city i'm sorry i mean just in the country yeah yeah yeah oh for sure no i mean this is uh yeah this is a this is a always an ongoing problem yeah yeah but i'll just i remember that i remember watching that you know on the 6 30 news with like dan rather or walter cron ropter cronkite every yeah yeah yeah you know and you know who loved uh bernie getz was curtis liwa you know who's the guardian angels of course who's now running for mayor.

27:19Yeah, exactly. He's now running for mayor. Yeah. How do you feel about the mayoral race today? Yeah, well, I mean, it's kind of amazing that, first of all, that New York seems so involved. Correct. I feel like this is the first mayoral race we've had in a while where people are really talking about it and are interested in it. I agree. And not just New York, like all of America, which is unusual for this country. I was just down in Florida, and I was in a pool on these, two old ladies came up to me and were like, don't vote for that socialist. Oh, that's hilarious. To be fair, they were from New York, so maybe they have a little more investment.

27:57They haven't been living there in like many years. How did they know you were from New York? We had started talking about it. Okay, yeah. So it was so funny because this woman, I was swimming in the pool. There was two like old women in the middle of the 70s or 80s. And she was saying like, don't show off for me. I'm from Brooklyn. And I was like, I'm from Brooklyn. And she was like, oh, well, I'm from Bed-Stuy. so and I'm like I was born in Bed-Stuy and so we just like were talking and she had been born like a few blocks away from me maybe like 30 well maybe like 50 years so you were born in Bed-Stuy there's a good chunk of the book there's some passages about Bed-Stuy I get pretty deep into Bed-Stuy yeah it's where when Jesse Jackson was running for president it's where his campaign was based in Bed-Stuy Yeah.

28:46Yeah. That's another, gosh, you just bring back all these memories. And that's where Spike Lee shot do the right thing. I'm sure you know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what are we going to say about this mayoral race? Yeah. So I think it's, so I think it's cool that people are actually like. Right. Care about it. Yeah. And then it's getting some, some traction even outside New York. I think that, look, I, you can't, whether you, whether you agree with what he's proposing or not, that socialist. he is uh he is speaking to a a real problem in new york i mean there is a we are in a crisis of affordability there is no the cost of living in the city has become unmanageable and you know new york is a place that for new york to work it needs to be providing opportunity it needs to be providing possibility for people right and the minute just the billionaires exactly but it's for the regular people like myself.

29:40Yes. And as soon as it stops doing that, it's like it's not New York anymore. And so I think that, you know, we're at a kind of tipping point now. So, yeah. Yeah. We'll see what happens. It's interesting. I mean, the whole country, like you said, is basically watching our race, our rural race here. Yeah, totally. So it's really interesting to watch. Yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see how much money kind of gets poured into trying to stop him. Yeah, I'm watching that right now. Incredible. So much money. It's interesting. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's like you can't, maybe it's going to cost you a lot to fight Mom Donnie, but it's going to cost you even more if he wins.

30:17Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what I think about, the amount of money that people are spending to stop the campaign. Yeah. And like, it just kind of all goes away. I know, I know. Exactly. Just set that money on fire. Yeah. Just set that money on fire. Which is insane. Yeah. What's interesting is my next question was going to be, how are the events of the book related to current day New York City? And here we are, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think about this mayoral race as being an answer to what, you know, kind of almost a bookend to what started in the 1980s. Wow. Wow. Yeah, because that's when the city really put its hands in the fate of finance and Wall Street and real estate.

30:58And like we are, that's what we're going to build our economy around these things. And what happens when you do that is a certain subset of the population, you know, thrives and another subset of the population does not. And the cost of living rises and fewer and fewer people can afford it. and um and then you reach a point of crisis and that's sort of what's happened now new york new york becomes a luxury product as as michael bloomberg mayor bloomberg called it right yeah i agree you know i also feel you know thinking back to the 80s i think that you know like you said it was a turnaround for new york city for the better yeah you're making me think of central park and how it turned around oh yeah yeah no it was do you remember you lived here do you remember how bad it was yeah i mean central park was a was a was a dust bowl right the the playgrounds where all this stuff was falling apart.

31:51Yeah, yeah. And then what the city did that was really smart. I mean, that they realized that, you know, for the city to rebuild the park was gonna be too much. They would cost too much money when the city was going broke. So they created a kind of public-private partnership and they brought, you know, the private sector in to help rebuild the park. And I mean, that to me is just like a great use of, of all of the kind of money that's being generated in the private sector in New York. It's like, hey, your company is so successful because your workers ride the subway. Your company is so successful because people want to be in New York because this is a great city and you need to give back.