*Winter Re-Air* "The Gods of New York" On the New Yorkers Podcast! - With Jonathan Mahler

0:00Hello, everyone, and welcome to The New Yorker, the podcast by New York City Cop. I am your host, Kelly Kopp, 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 Brooklyn Bell, Craig, is now higher. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

0:36This is a time square. This is a time square. With 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.

1:30And Jonathan, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, what you do, things like that. Yeah. So I was born in New York. Nice. Yeah. What borough? I was born in Manhattan. Oh. Yeah, my father grew up in the Bronx. He grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. Very cool. And my mom, also New Yorker, though she moved to Westchester at some point. and then you know spend 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 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 kind of a rite of passage for any young journalist.

2:25I've been in New York City, you know, pretty much straight through since 1990. Wow, 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, made the migration to first to Brooklyn Heights and then deeper into Brooklyn to Park Slope and then where I am 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, you know, my two kids are true New Yorkers. Right. Born and raised here, never lived anywhere else. And yeah, my wife is a transplanted New Yorker.

3:02Yeah. I don't hear that New York accent though. No, no. My dad had one. My dad had a great Bronx accent, but yeah. I love that. Yeah. Do your kids have accents? No, no. I think they're, no, but they are, you know, they are, they are true, true, true city people. I think, I think they're 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. You know what? 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?

3:36How does that work? Yeah, I mean, there's no there's no rule. Right. 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, 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.

4:05You 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 yeah the only way to travel for me i say living in new york city yeah no 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.

4:47And 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, right. Which was about, um, the year 1977 in New York and really kind of about the decade of the seventies in New York. And this book is, is, you know, you could look at it as the sequel. This is the eighties. Oh, and yeah. Yeah. And so the way this kind of came to be is, um, I, you know, I work at the New York times as my, my, my day job.

5:18Right. Um, currently, currently still. Right. Yeah. And I work, uh, 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, uh, I was, I wasn't one of the reporters who was, you know, kind of traveling with a candidate. I was one of a few writers who did kind of longer pieces about the, the pasts of some of the candidates. So did you, you know, follow a specific candidate or, yeah, no, I was not, were you equally? I was basically, yeah, all of them. Right. Cause it was, it was before we, even the primaries.

5:55Right. Um, I was in a, yeah, it was, 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, you know, took a little more time and research about, 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. And then I started to think, well, you know, that's a pretty interesting moment.

6:33Uh, 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. 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 it's 2016 was also Hillary. Yeah. Correct. It is. And Bernie. I mean, right. Yeah. Wow. That, that in itself could be a whole show what we're talking about right now. It was wild. Yeah. Before we get too deep, Jonathan, into what's in the book, can you give our listeners and myself some context?

7:15What 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. 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. It 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 like hauling hauling packages and, you know, trucks and, uh, and, you know, little railways.

8:09And I mean, the city was, was just like booming. Um, and it was a real kind of working class city because all these, these factories and, and this sort of shipping center had to employ people. So you had a city that was, was a great working class city with lots of powerful labor unions and labor bosses, um, 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 100 people on the assembly line.

8:47And it also gets expensive in New York City to have big factories. So why don't we move our factories out of the city? 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 know, 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 the poster on my living room wall framed.

9:27And two people within the last day brought up Charles Bronson and the Warriors. There you go. Those are iconic 70s. That is New York. You think about the subways covered in graffiti. Right. 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, 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.

10:07Real estate is going through the roof. People are building new skyscrapers, you know, the Trump Tower and so much else. And the city is, you know, new neighborhoods are getting discovered. New restaurants are opening. So it's this kind of the story of rebirth. But at the same time, this new economy left out a lot of people because 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 the city, you know, when it was coming out of the 70s, it couldn't afford, you know, there were no jobs or no tax. There was no tax revenue.

10:41So the city basically had to, you know, lay off firemen. It had to lay off cops. So you have a city that's kind of, you know, booming for a certain small, you know, segment of the population. Right. And you have a lot of people who are being left out and are getting frustrated. And, 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 had come during the Great Migration North in the 40s and 50s. Exactly. 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.

11:22It'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. Exactly. 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.

11:55But, you know, the AIDS epidemic and homelessness and political scandals in New York City. Crack. Yeah. 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 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.

12:53And 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. 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.

13:32reelected. He is the most popular, you know, as popular as any mayor has ever been in New York. He's on, he's, he's just, just led this great rebirth. Wasn't it like 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 because 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.

14:07You know, just, it takes, it takes me back in time 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 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 Koch wakes up? Yeah. Yeah. We, we kind of open the book. Can we talk about that? Sure.

14:41Yeah. 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, in, in modern history in New York. And, 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, they've kicked all the homeless people at city hall park and they have, uh, it's all cleaned up and they've got the, you know, the red, white, and blue bunting on City Hall.

15:21And it's a beautiful, cold, but clear winter morning. And he's out there and promising to make sure that these four years are even better for New York and that all the people he says, all the people who were left out, I got you. We are not gonna rest until everyone with AIDS 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.

16:06Yep. Kind of like, uh, seems to happen here and there. It does. Yeah. You know, as soon as you political leaders, yeah, you make big promises and that's when you know you're in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. 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, you know, because I'm a journalist, I'm a, you know, I work at the New York Times. I do a lot of reporting. I do a lot of talking to people.

16:40I do a lot of interviews. And so, you know, my first instinct is just to call everyone and, you know, meet with as many people as I could in person. So I did that. I interviewed, you know, about more than 200 people for this book. But because, you know, this happened some years ago now, this was, this was, you know, almost four decades ago. a lot of people are gone. So, you know, I talked to the people I could talk to. And then I consulted, you know, 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.

17:14So for instance, there's a, you know, 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. The 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. I used those. Benjamin Ward, who is the police commissioner. His papers, yeah, he was an amazing guy and his papers are at John Jay College in the city. Right.

17:54Okay. And so, 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, you know, 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.

18:29Yeah. 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 to do writing and, and, and, and, you know, I can say that the name, the name of your podcast, the New Yorkers, 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?

19:00And 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, uh, 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 game or 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 it was 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 for years he'd written me notes in the past before he became president so you had talked to him what do you remember what year you talked to him for the book yeah it was 2016 it was during the oh yeah okay yeah and it was before i even sold the book it was i was i was just writing about him for the times so i you know but i was yeah we talked about some of this stuff you know i've met you know being in my um 50s i've you know i've made friends through 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.

20:54I mean, a lot of people cross paths with him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He, uh, definitely is a fixture of New York city. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. 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. And 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.

21:29I can't. 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 when right before we were publishing it the week before, he's sort of traditionally, you, you, you send people like notes for fact-checking. So you're basically like, we're saying it was, and this was, you know, they're like 60 questions. So we're 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.

22:02So we just sort of took those answers 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. That's fascinating. 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 yeah of course yeah yeah so 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 So Bernie Goetz was a sort of self-employed electrician, you know, lived in the city.

22:51In 1984, he's around Christmas time, he gets on the subway, he's accosted, kind of sort of mugged by five black teenagers. He pulls out a gun and he shoots all five of them. One of them - I didn't realize that was all five. 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 2-3, 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.

23:33He gets off the subway, 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 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 he you know he fought back on the subway like a vigilante exactly vigilante exactly and then he he disappears no one knows where he is he turns himself into 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 i'm 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 he stood up yeah yeah uh and you know they're literally like chance on the subway you know mets jets gets yeah their t-shirts you know you know bernie he gets it or you know stuff like that and 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 morgan thou doesn't like does does kind of a half-ass job prosecuting him initially right then a little more time passes and it becomes clear wait a second this what was what was like did he we really need to shoot five guys.

25:05And 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. And this time really, you know, indicts him for murder and, you know, all sorts of other crimes. 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, like a murderer. I mean, or not a murderer because he's, you know, he didn't actually murder anyone.

25:39He nearly did. I mean, he paralyzed someone. And so, I guess attempted murder. And also, I mean, he, you know, he basically admits his testimony, you know, not his testimony, his statement to the police, you know, becomes public. And he basically says, I was trying to kill them. Like he's, you know, yeah. 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 are you what and that's piggybacking on other yes it comes after exactly 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 this you know just this this 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 a good point you said 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 they love running for yeah exactly running for mayor yeah how do you feel about the mayoral race today yeah well i mean it's it's kind of amazing that uh first of all that new york seems so like involved like this is i feel like this is the first mural race we've had in a while where people are really like 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 we were i was in a pool and these two old ladies came up to me and we're 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 over there haven't been living there how do they even know you're how do they know you were from new york we had started talking about it okay so it was so funny because uh this woman i was swimming in the pool there's two like old women in me like 70s or 80s and she was saying like don't show off for me i'm from brooklyn yeah and i was like i'm from brooklyn yeah 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 we're talking and she He had been born a few blocks away from me, maybe like 30, maybe like 50 years.

28:18So you were born in Bed-Stuy? Yeah. There's a good chunk of the book. I mean, there's some passages about Bed-Stuy. Okay, cool. I get pretty deep into Bed-Stuy. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah, it was when Jesse Jackson was running for president. It's where his New York campaign was based in Bed-Stuy. That's another, gosh, you just bring back all these memories. Yeah. And that's where Spike Lee shot Do the Right Thing. I'm sure you know that. 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. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's getting some some traction even outside New York.

28:56I think that look, I you can't whether you whether you agree with what he's proposing or not. That's socialist. He is he is speaking to a real problem in New York. I mean, 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. And the minute it stops - Not for just the billionaires. Exactly. But for the regular people like myself. Yes. And as soon as it stops doing that, it's like it's not New York anymore.

29:35And 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 yeah yeah our race here yeah totally so yeah and it's it's really interesting to watch yeah yeah for sure yeah it's going to be interesting to see how much yeah how much money kind of gets poured into trying to stop him yeah i'm watching that right now incredible yeah so much yeah 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.