The late 1980s were “the most convulsive and consequential years in the modern history of New York.” The city “had completely unraveled, besieged by crack, crime, AIDS, homelessness, and political scandals.” New York had been experiencing tumultuous times. Small manufacturers and their jobs had left the city in the 1960s. In the following decade, forty-five Fortune 500 companies and a million people left New York. But the 1980s started off positively as Wall Street settled down, prospered, and boomed. People and immigrants were coming back. However, the rising tide did not float the outer boroughs or the Black and brown communities, where poverty and violence were increasing. Arriving on the scene were the “crisis opportunists” who helped put the city back on track, but who also contributed to a more divided New York, one in which the rich got immeasurably richer while the middle and lower classes stagnated.
1986 began with Ed Koch’s third inauguration. The city was better financially and socially than when he became mayor, but the cuts in services were starting to wear. Deinstitutionalization by the state of mental health facilities put more poor people on the streets, at a time when Koch was allowing developers to close the city’s SROs. Koch came under fire when the SDNY’s Rudolf Giuliani began investigating a parking payment scandal in Queens and soon uncovered massive amounts of fraud throughout city government. The AIDS crisis kept expanding, and crack cocaine flooded the city. Notwithstanding Koch’s appointment of a Black police commissioner, there was a spate of white cops murdering Black New Yorkers. The year closed with the city and its mayor “shaken.”
1987 offered little improvement. The AIDS epidemic accelerated, and the gay community damned Koch for his silence on his own sexuality and his failure to commit to helping. Racial tensions worsened as a jury acquitted Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante who had killed one and injured three Black youths with a pistol. The city was calm over the summer but faced a tax crisis after Black Monday in October saw the largest drop in the history of U.S. markets. When a Queens jury convicted the men behind the Howard Beach assaults of manslaughter, not murder, Al Sharpton led “the largest, most disruptive civil rights action in New York’s modern history.”
1988 opened with Al Sharpton relentlessly accusing just about everyone in city and state government of extreme racism for not accepting Tawana Brawley’s phony kidnapping and rape narrative. He propelled himself to national prominence with his outlandish behavior and accusations. AIDS, crack, and homelessness continued to haunt Koch and the city. Nonetheless, at his annual year-end press conference, Koch told the city he would be running for a fourth term.
1989 saw the city’s jails and courts overwhelmed on the heels of the most violent year in New York’s history. Then, in April, the Central Park jogger case became a national headline. A successful, Ivy League–educated white woman was raped and beaten senseless in the park, and five Black teens were arrested. In the midst of a summer featuring Do the Right Thing, the mayoral primary pitted Koch against David Dinkins. In the final weeks, a white gang murdered a Black teen in Bensonhurst. In the September vote, Dinkins prevailed. In the closest race in eighty years, Dinkins edged out Giuliani. David Dinkins inherited a city in trouble.
Dinkins was as unlucky as Koch, as the city continued its downward spiral, and he lost to Giuliani, who ran on a law-and-order platform appealing to New York’s white ethnics. New York City prospered in the 21st century, but “the great working-class city was gone, and so was any realistic expectation that it might ever be bound by a single civic culture.” I’m not sure the author connected the dots between the late eighties and today’s New York, and certainly never points out what the opportunists accomplished, but it is nonetheless an intriguing read.
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