This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a best selling author and a staff writer for The New York Times. Jonathan Mahler's first book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, was adapted into a mini series for ESPN. His second book, The Challenge, won the Scribes Book Award in two thousand
and nine. In the world of sports journalism, Jonathan Mahler has been featured in the anthology book series The Best American Sports Writing, and has received numerous journalism and media awards throughout his career. Mahler's latest book, released this past summer, is entitled The Gods of New York The Tumultuous Eighties from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots. Raised in Palm Springs, California, I was curious where Jonathan Mahler's fascination with New York originated from.
I was born in New York. Both my parents were New Yorkers. My father was a working class Jewish kid from the Bronx who you got himself into Bronx science and went off to medical school, also in New York, and was offered a job out in California at a hospital out there, and you know, he had barely left New York, and I thought he was like, well, this is the dream, you know, moved to California, raised my
family out there. So we moved to Palm Springs, and my mom hated it from day one and couldn't wait to move back to New York and find you way there for a while. I was there, really my whole childhood.
I moved back.
I was in college when they moved back, and they actually made a deal because my mom was a smoker, lifelong smoker, and my father's a doctor. My father said, if you quit smoking, we'll move back to New York. And then what happened next was that they moved back to New York. My mom quit smoking. She was so miserable. My dad said, please start smoking again. So she got everything she wanted. She got to move back to New York and continue smoking.
What was it about New York that he he didn't want to go, he wanted to stay.
Well, he just you know, he was a workaholic, and he was so devoted to his patients that he for him his life was going to the hospital, seeing patients in his office, making it a practice.
He had a practice.
He worked seven days a week, and so you know, he had a little, a little snippet of time on Sunday afternoon when he would sit by the pool and you know, read a medical journal. So for him, it was it worked out great. But my mom couldn't stand it.
So it's interesting to me that you have written three books, correct, The Box is Burning, Challenge, and then this book now Gods of New York. They were born in New York, but you're not a lifelong New Yorker. You know, a big part of your youth was outside New York. What is it about New York? Because I mean, we both everybody has their opinions as to why do we stay? Yeah, yeah, it's so challenging, it's so tough. Why do we stay? Yeah?
It's funny because I grew up in California, but I always felt like a New Yorker because both my parents were in New Yorker. I'd rooted for the Yankees and the Giants and the Knicks. Really from birth, inherited that from my father, and we would come back every you know, of every chance we got. My mom would bring us back to New York, which was, you know, really every year. I mean we'd come at least once, so I felt always connected to New York. It was always like the place where I should be.
Living, I think.
And by the time I got out of college, my parents had moved back here, and so it became kind of naturally the place to move. And once you kind of settle in in New York, it's so hard to leave if it worked for you. Yeah, exactly, particularly because not only because it's so hard to sort of find a way to make it work that once you do, you don't want to give it up, but also because New York is it's always changing. You know, you're always
going to new neighborhoods, discovering new neighborhoods, new restaurants. Your life here, I feel like it doesn't feel static in the way that it might in other places, so you just don't get bored with it.
I think, well, I think that if you have an escape from New York, that makes everything a lot different. If you can't go anywhere else, if you have no other option, New York can be very very onerous in that way of your spending the summer there in the hot summer. But now for you, where did you go to College of Northwestern? I went to Northwestern? Yea in Chicago, And did you study journalism there?
I studied English literature there actually, but I did start working on the paper there, so that's kind of what got me launched. So even though I was an English major, I worked on the college paper.
Why, well, what attracted you to then? You know?
I guess I feel like as I kind of worked my way through college and started to think about what I might want to do, I realized that the only thing I knew I was like pretty good at was thinking and writing. And then the idea of you know, going out into the world and not spending all my days kind of at a desk was appealing to me. The idea that I might have a career kind of engaging with people and thinking and writing reporting, reporting. Yeah, so I thought I would maybe be interested in giving
it a try. So I did it at my senior year really at Northwestern, and then I graduated and thought, well, I'm going I'm going to give this a shot and see how it goes. Moved to New York and try to be a journalist and if it works out, great and if it doesn't.
How did it begin?
My first job was actually at the McNeil LAIRR News Hour.
How did you pull that off? How?
I just applied for an internship there and remarkably was able to get one, which I loved and you know, sort of sad to see what's happening to public television.
Now.
Of course that's a separate story, but I felt like I wanted to I wanted to.
Write how long were you there with them?
I was there about six months, I think, so recall Yeah, not very long, no, because it was an internship.
It was just to get me. Well, what did you pick up on that in terms of I mean, obviously I liked both of them and I liked that show, but it was among the starchiest news programs in my life. Yeah, those guys were pretty old school. Did you absorb that? Like, I'm here and what do they want from me?
I mean what they wanted from me mostly was was lunch orders.
And coffee, but it was that face.
Yeah, I mean I think I occasionally, you know, contributed some research to some stories.
Was basically the extent of my work.
It was a real inter yeah, true internship, but I mean those guys were amazing. I mean, Robert McNeil was an inspiring figure just because he had been a foreign correspondent. He had just he had this kind of gravatas, like the kind of qualter Cronkite type gravatas, and he was so cultured and so well read, and it was just he was a certain kind of newsman that you just felt like, Wow, that guy's amazing, Right.
They took the obligation very seriously, totally. Yeah, Yeah, and he loved it. Where do you go after McNeil?
Lay?
After that, I worked at the Wall Street Journal's wire service, the Dow Jones News Service, and I was a wire service reporter there. I mean a lot of people probably even know what a wire service is, because I think that them barely exist.
Yeah.
They were these kind of news services that provided stories to newspapers all around the world, and they worked on a very kind of hyperactive schedule. Let's say, I mean you were kind of writing all the time. Newsrooms would have these little kind of teletype machines and they would spit out these stories from the wire services, and they would rip them off and use them ass copy in their newspapers. So I did that writing about you know, financial news for four years and.
That was.
Yeah, Yeah, it was grueling, grouling.
What about it made you stay? Well, that's a good question. I was sort of moving up.
I started as a real kind of general assignment reporter, where I was I was really just writing. I'm essentially rewriting press releases, you know, forty press releases a day. And then I became a proper reporter and so I sort of, you know, was able to kind of grow a little bit there, even though I didn't really love the job. So I was kind of looking for what I wanted to do next at that point, and I knew that I wanted to be writing less frequently and
longer stories. And I found my way. I started freelancing for a newspaper, and then I kind of found my way there on Staff, which was a Jewish weekly newspaper.
Called The Forward.
Yes, it's an amazing institution. I mean it's been around for well over one hundred years, over one hundred and fifty years. It was a you know, it was sort of the newspaper for Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants who came to New York in the early twentieth century and you know, a sort of a in the modern era. It was kind of reinvented as an English language newspaper. So so I worked there for a number of years and I love that it was.
It was great. I remember reading in the book that you're Jewish and your wife Issima is not Jewish, although you convinced her to have a Jewish wedding. And she refers to the harrowing experience of you going to a New England Christmas.
That was in an essay I wrote. I think, yes, yeah, no, she's a writer, she is an editor. So the first Christmas I went to her grandmother, who's no longer with us, but yeah, yeah, exactly. She had a little Christmas ornament with my name on it, which was you know, it was hard enough to be going to Christmas, but let alone have an ornament with my name on it.
Was christ You know, it's a very sweet gesture. But I was. I was surprised how long went the forward, How many years I.
Was there for?
Five years? Wow, So you really build a foundation. I did. Well.
It takes a while, you think, so, yeah, I don't even believe me, right, Yeah, I guess in each of these jobs, I felt like I was still learning and kind of growing and you know, finding new things to do, so I could stick around. And also because I was sort of here in New York, there would have been opportunities at newspapers around the country, But if I wanted to stay in New York, it's harder.
And the forward were you married when you did the on the forward? That was after the forward?
That was after Yeah. So then I actually was at my next job where I met my wife, which was at Talk magazine, but Tina exactly.
Yeah. So, and Tina said she thought that it could work if one for COVID and Harvey bailing out from his financial commitment to the thing. She thought it was a really worthy project. Did you agree? I did.
I thought it was a great magazine. It really was just starting out. I mean, I think in the end, I started working there a year before launch, so to me it feels like it was longer. But I think that the magazine really only survived for two years. I loved working for Tina.
It was fun. I'd never worked at a glossy magazine. It was a whole other world. Describe that it.
Was just so different. I mean, particularly because I, you know, I was at a. I had come from this, you know, weekly Jewish newspaper where basically if you took a source out to lunch, that meant like splitting the cost of a tuna sandwich. And then suddenly I met, you know, this, this glossy magazine where you you know, you have a proper expense account.
You know, yes, you want exactly.
You know, even even raw tuna.
So it was wild.
I think the idea was that it was obviously kind of celebrity driven, but it was also literary and classy.
And and fun.
You know, I really enjoyed it, but it was coming at the tail end of the age of the glossy magazine. What was a story you wrote for her that you that you enjoyed. I'll tell you what I remember, because it's the one celebrity, real proper celebrity profile I've ever written. It was when Ridley Scott was making Gladiator and I flew over to London to profile Russell Crowe and to write about the movie. I was in London for what was in the end, I think an hour long interview
in Russell Crowe's hotel room. I was in London for a week, kind of waiting to get the nod to come over and interview, and he obviously had no interest in talking to me. You know, it was kind of an education I think in the kind of journalism I didn't want to do, but you know, an experience like I'm glad I had.
But did he come around when you were with him? Was he really for me? Was he? No?
No, he was diffident the whole time. He had no interest in being there. I'm sure he had been forced to do it. And Ridley Scott was much better. Actually, I then went out to La and he was he's a salesman. He is a salesman, and I think he was interested in talking about his movie. Russell Crowe was not interested in talking about his performance.
Yeah, I'll tell you.
There was one other fun story that I did there. There was a moment in time when the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, had just made an agreement with the Venetian Hotel, which had just opened in Las Vegas, and they were going to send some of their art over to the Venetian and so there was going to be you know, there were going to be paintings from the Hermitage in one of the world's most famous museums
in the Venetian Hotel as part of this agreement. So I went over to Saint Petersburg and spent a few days in the Hermitage and interviewed people there, and you know, in the middle of winter, it was kind of just an unbelievable city, just the most beautiful city. And then from there I came back to the United States and went to Las Vegas to the Venetian Hotel. So it was the biggest kind of you know, contrast of reporting trips you could possibly imagine.
Yeah, you read talk how long really until it folded?
Which was three years, I guess in the end, because I started before launch.
Yeah, then where do you go?
That's when I sold my first book, which was Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning. So I started writing that book, and I also started freelancing for the New York Times magazine. So I was sort of doing those kind of in tandem for a little while until I got my book done.
Why the book about the Bronx was your first book? You've been writing for a while now, and you're going to write this your first book.
Yeah, it was my first book. I mean, it goes back a little bit to what we were talking about before that. You know, New York had always had this kind of mythic hold over me, you know, because my father had.
Grown up in both my parents had grown up in New York. My father grew up in the Bronx, and.
It was always, as I said, the place that I was kind of supposed to be. I you know, I had this kind of connection to it, but I also felt like I didn't know it as well as I wanted to, and I didn't know its history as well as I wanted to. So, you know, when you're when you're setting out, especially when you're setting out to write your first book, you feel like I need a subject that I know it's going to hold my interest because
this is going to be hard. And so it was you know, New York, and you know New York in the seventies, which was when I had my first kind of when I first came here, my first images of New York were really New York in that era, in the seven yeah, exactly seven eight. And you stayed for how long on that trip as a child, we would come for you know, always a couple of weeks. We would stay in an apartment that belonged to a friend of my parents.
Summertime.
Summertime, we would go to you know, I go to Yankee Games. We would go to see you know, we went and saw show Sweeney Todd. We would see shows on Broadway. We would sometimes go to you know, Gilbert and Sullivan Light Opera. We would go to Rockefeller Center. We would just kind of do all the things you do here. I just felt like I knew it was a subject that had a kind of hold over me.
Somewhat surprisingly, you maintain memories as a seven year old I did. I mean just so interesting.
Yeah, I mean, nothing too detailed, but just you know, almost like movie images that you sort of have a vague recollection of, and like kind of a sense of almost aesthetic memories in a way, especially with the first book, I mean, you really don't know what you're doing. I did so much research that didn't make its way into the book. I talked to so many people, I read so many books. I mean, in a funny way, a
lot of that material didn't appear in the book. But you have to kind of master a subject in a way to write a book about it, and that does mean a reading widely and talking to people widely and going way really beyond the subject of the book to feel count yeah, like to just feel marinated in it and to feel kind of comfortable a lot.
You know, it's going to stay out, ye, going to make the cut.
No, No, that's exactly it. The book was sort of partly about the Yankees from that year, nineteen seventy seven, because that had been again this team I followed from afar out in California, and I was kind of obsessed with in the way that you are when you're a kid,
you become obsessed with sports teams. And then part of the book was just about the city and the life of the city, the nineteen seventy seven Blackout, the Son of Sam, and these were just things that I as I researched, I just got kind of more and more into. It's the great thing about writing a book is that you know, as you get to know a subject more in a way, it becomes more captivating.
It sort of pulls you in. Who was the imprint for our Strauss and Jeru and how did you pull that off? Getting a book published? Stuff?
I wrote a propose, I had a good agent. I rewrote the proposal a couple of times, and they bought it. Yeah, and then they published my second.
Book too, Author and journalist Jonathan Mahler. If you enjoy conversations with intrepid writers, check out my episode with Lawrence Wrights.
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To hear more of my conversation with Lawrence Wright, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Jonathan Mahler details how his first book, The Bronx, is Burning wound up becoming a mini series for ESPN. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Before joining the staff at the New York Times, Jonathan Mahler was a sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He then became a contributing writer for The New York Times, where he covered everything
from baseball to politics. From Mahler, I wondered what it was like transitioning from freelancing to full time staff writer.
Actually, for a while I worked from home, and then I rented an office for a little while in Dumbo in Brooklyn, and I would go there every day and write, and then eventually I went full time on staff at the time, So they gave you a desk, they gave me a desk. Yeah, Actually, now we don't even I don't even have a dedicated desk. We have kind of floating desks in the magazine for.
The writers, and I, you know, I don't. You're still working with them now, I am still there. Yeah. And when you first walked into as I call it the kremlin there to work at the Times, what was the feeling you had. Did you feel the kind of halft of that experience?
Yes, definitely, and you know, initially the Times moved so it kind of, you know, just a few blocks, but it moved into this very kind of you know, beautiful sort of modern building.
You know, it's an amazing office. I mean, I love it.
I love being in the building. I love being at the Times. And it's like, you know, in particularly now, I mean, you feel like the work that the Times still does feels more important than ever and it's an amazing workplace filled with just very smart, dedicated people.
And you still feel when you first got there, you felt you were with a very special crowd of.
People totally from the beginning till the present day.
I mean, it really is. It's a special place. Yeah. Now when you write the book Challenge and you're immersed in this, a Guantanamo correct Yeah, is one of the big backdrops there, exactly. I've asked other writers who write to kind of embrace difficult material. How do you manage your feelings while you're doing some of this work? You do ever get really really down and kind of overwhelmed?
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that you sort of learn and I don't even know if you learn it, it just you learn it in the way that it's just sort of necessary is a certain degree of detachment. I think, not so much that you become kind of inured to you know, what you're seeing and hearing, but there's a sort of a pursuit of a story. There's a kind of a mindset that I think you get into when you're sort of on a
story and you're pursuing a story. And it's funny because I think for journalists who sort of do this, you don't even really think about it until you kind of step outside and you know, you're asking a question like that question, because it doesn't feel like you don't feel detached, but it's what you have to do to to kind of pursue the story and to not feel defeated by it or crushed by it.
You know.
In the case of Guantanamo, I mean I think I just you know, I spent some time down there. I spent some time in Yemen because the sort of main one of the main characters of the book was a Yomeni detainey, and so I wanted to go over and meet his wife and meet his family, and you know, he was being held on Guantanama Bay with you know, his future was very uncertain she had no contact with him. I mean it was, you know, it was obviously, you know, sort of powerful and sad to be kind of reporting
on it. But at the same time, I felt like I had a job to do. I felt like I needed information I needed for my book and for actually for a magazine story I did before the book, And so you just sort of find your way through it.
Is there ever a situation, it doesn't matter whether it's The Times or the Wall Street Journal, that you want to do something and you check yourself. Do you say to yourself, I don't want to bother pitching this idea because they're probably going to say no, do your censor yourself.
I don't quite censor myself. I would say that for an idea to work, it has to be something that people other than me are going to.
Be interested in.
So I try to sort of edit myself, I guess, rather than censor myself. Though I think it's also okay to kind of go with the passion project now and then, or try to go with a passion project. I probably should try to do more of it. In fact, yeah, I think it's harder.
How did ESPN become the venue for the Bronx's Burning series.
Yeah, the book kind of moves back and forth between the Yankee season and the year in the life of the city. So they were interested in obviously in the kind of the Yankee story, which is an amazing story because it's kind of Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin are just locked in this kind of you know, amazing like duel over the course of the time. Yes, yeah, it
was some crazy stuff. And Reggie Jackson was this like, you know, this kind of larger than life figure in the city, and so is Billy Martin in his way. So they were in did in the baseball story. Of course, when they came to me to option it and develop it, they also said, oh, we're going to you know, we're
interested in the city stuff too. All that kind of I think kind of fell out along the way and it really became a kind of a story of the Yankee season with kind of the city and the kind of against the backdrop of the city, you know, So it was sort of half the book in a way, I guess.
Then you had the movie adaptation of the Challenge and that was in clooney Land or whatever it was. And then what happened exactly.
Yeah, well it never it sort of it died in clooney Land, as I guess sometimes happens. Yeah, I don't know exactly what happened. I know that there was a script. Aaron Sorkin actually wrote wrote a script, right, and I don't know quite what happened, but you know, they renewed the option and then I guess for whatever reason, the script didn't work out, and then it just kind of somehow died.
So when you do this book, now, when you're doing The Gods of New York, you use I mean, most writers are very specific and very intentional with their words. What was it that you felt the word gods applied to these people? Why did you choose that word? Yeah, well, it's funny.
That's a good place to start because the title is kind of a little controversial, because you could read this as what, you know, are you calling you know, Donald
Trump and Rudy Giuliani gods? And I think the idea is, really, I know, the ideas is the kind of the Greek gods, the sort of the gods who can be vengeful, who can be narcissistic, and so really the ideas just these were larger than life figures who were elevated to this stature, you know, by the kind of culture of the city, by the tabloids, and so they kind of loomed over
the city like gods in a way. So it's it's not it's very much not not a god in the sense that they are all powerful, but rather that they're these these kind of towering figures who are kind of hanging over the city, you know, on their own kind of mount olympus.
It's a lot of the shots exactly. The picked that specific time, which is interestingly, the last two years of Reagan's second term and the first two years of Bush's only term. Yeah, that eighty six through ninety Why that period? Why did you home in on that? Yeah?
I mean, you know, I sort of started with a kind of a wider lens thinking about the eighties, and then I kind of came to see that, you know, I wanted to narrow the narrative down a little bit just for storytelling purposes. I didn't want it to feel
like kind of a survey history of the eighties. So and I felt like the story of those four years, which which were really there, it's the story of really Cotch's last term as mayor when when everything he's done over his first two terms unravels and the city unravels. And so many crazy things happened during this just this four year period of time. I mean, from Howard Beach to Black Monday, you know, the stock market crash, to the Tauana, the crazy Tawana Brawley story, to uh use
Hawkins Jogger use of Hawkins. Plus it was the sort of the AIDS crisis and and the birth and rise of Act Up and this kind of whole new activist movement. It was when Crack arrived in the city. It was when you know, New York had its first black police commissioner ever who was presiding over this unprecedented kind of drug epidemic. It's when homelessness really became an issue in the city. It was when Spike Lee May Do the Right Thing, which is you know, kind of an iconic film,
and I really captured the city in this moment. It just so many things happened in this four year window. Plus I had kind of Cotch's final term as a as a sort of a narrative spine that it just felt like both from a you know, really from a storytelling end, kind of a more Geshtalty perspective.
It was like the right the right period, author and journalist Jonathan Mahler. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Jonathan Mahler talks about the breaking point New York City faces today and how it mirrors that of the nineteen eighties. I'm Alec Baldwin and this
is Here's the Thing. Jonathan Mahler's most recent book, The Gods of New York, chronicles how New York City dramatically changed during the tumultuous years of the late nineteen eighties. The book also details why he believes that period of time served as a prequel for the New York City
of today. Talking to Maler Now in the aftermath of an historic mayoral election, I wanted to know his thoughts on Zoran Mamdani's unlikely political ascension and what his win says about the current state of New York City.
Well, I think it certainly tells us that the city is at a kind of a breaking point. I mean, I think that this is in many ways kind of the story of my book, right It's the story of New York is emerging from the kind of dark days of the seventies, the fiscal crisis. The subways are covered in graffiti. You know, it's a disaster the city's and a death spiral.
And then it's.
Reborn in the nineteen eighties. And at the center of that rebirth is Wall Street and is the real estate industry, which kind of lives off of the Wall Street bonuses. And you know, New York kind of goes through this transformation and becomes the capital of global finance. But the problem with that transformation is that a lot of people are left out of it, a lot of people are
squeezed out of it. And you know, I think that that cycle it sort of exacerbates over the course of the decades since then, the wealth gap widens and you get to a point of crisis now where you have a you know, you have people who are making you know, one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year, can't afford to buy an apartment in a you know, in a neighborhood they want to live in, and are kind of struggling to live in the city, and then you have
people who are making a whole lot less than that, who are on a waiting list to get public housing for years on end. And so you know, it's maybe that not surprising in that context that someone who is really proposing much of it is not not realistic, but
still proposing you know, pretty radical policies here. I mean, you know, and by radical I mean I don't mean that in a negative cast necessarily, but big change, let's say, and you know, from from doubling minimum wage to providing free childcare for every New Yorker from six weeks to five years. I mean that is a you know, the idea that that's you know, a lot of money, A
lot of money, yes, a lot of money. I think it speaks to really the sort of extreme income inequality that's kind of become just like the fabric of the city.
Now. See, I wonder with holmlessness, you know, I mean, when do we say to ourselves that it isn't working the policy is, and then they have to be taken somewhere. It could be decommissioned army bases or something in upstate New York where you can get a shower and a meal and get cleaned up and get I mean, or do we just lay on the streets? Has laying on the streets worked? I don't know. I'm looking for someone to maybe help now.
Though, now, I mean, those are good questions to ask. I mean, I tell the story actually in the book of Really kind of the beginning of New York City's homeless policy, which is kind of an amazing story. This guy Bob Hayes, who was at the time a young associate at a Sullivan and Cromwell, a kind of a fancy white shoe law firm. You know, this is in the late seventies, is you know, struck by all the people he sees who seem to be kind of living
in Washington Square Park and on the streets. And because this is you know, New York did not have a homelessness problem per se until this period of time. I mean, they were what we're called like bums and whinos on the street the Bowery. Yeah, but you didn't have you
didn't have people sleeping on the streets. So this guy, Bob Hayes, is sort of curious about this, and he starts talking to them, and you know, he learns that they're people who've found themselves on the street, either because they were in a mental hospital that they were sort of pushed out of, or they were living in a single room occupancy hotel, a welfare hotel that they got they got pushed out of, or you know, they found their way to the streets and there was nowhere for
them to go. And so he decides he's going to file a lawsuit on behalf of these people, these homeless people. One of the plaintiffs literally lists his address as a cardboard box on Park Avenue, and he is rooting around in the NYU Law Library to try to figure out, you know, how he's going to make his case. And he finds a piece of legislation that was passed during the Depression, that was sort of pushed by LaGuardia that says New York State shall provide you know, care, housing
and care for the needy. And he's like, bingo, paydirt. He adds that to the lawsuit. He's the guy that honor he did.
Yeah. Wow.
Kach realizes that he's cooked, he's lost. He signs a concree saying that he will do this, and suddenly the city is desperately trying to house literally thousands of people who are sleeping on the streets, and so the story of homelessness kind of begins there. And I think in the beginning there was the sense of like, Okay, well, this is just a you know, we'll figure this out. It's just a logistical issue. We just have to figure
out how to find homes for these people. And needless to say, that did not happen, and forty years later, we're still trying to figure out what to do.
What does the next mayor need to do in terms of we've been kicking the can on so many issues in the city, and we've been you know, one day you turn around, it seems like yesterday people were saying the subway is great, and we've invested in the subway, and the subways on time, everybody's love of the subway's just really really humming along. And then it's like ten years ago, by the like, the subway's a disaster. Whatever
you do, don't take the subway. I mean, obviously COVID was a part of that whole episode, but I mean, I wonder, what is the thing you think, Mom, Donnie Adams, whoever that comes in what's the issue that we can no longer forestall?
I mean, I do think it's the affordability issue. I mean, I think that this city, it can't be New York City if it isn't giving people a foothold, if it isn't giving people a chance, right, I mean, I feel like I am all for endless opportunity, boundless opportunity in this city. I think you should be able to come here and get as rich as you can get, be as successful as you can be. But I think it has to also find a way to give people a foothold.
It has to give them some kind of leg up to try to make it or I think it's just going to lose so much.
But we have to have a net. You got to have a net for people. When I was a kid, I'm an acting school at NYU, and I'm going and then years go by and I understand that every maid, every guy that works in a shop, every bus driver, everybody, cops, even everybody's coming from somewhere else. New York is that strange place where I went to GW and they taught us when we took DC Culture and Politics, where they said, this is a city where all the rich people live
outside the city. They go on the trains out to Virginia, Super Virginia, Maryland and so forth. And it changed over the years, and the Manhattan has always been, for the large part, maybe with some lapses, the place where the rich people lived in town exactly, and everybody else who didn't have money lived out of town commuted. So we have to make that work for them. I can't stand to see people, even some I work with who work take care of my home, struggling with their costs like that.
What are you planning on doing next? You have another book on the boiler nothing yet. I have to say I wrote this book. It took me eight years, and I was working full time at the Times throughout.
It is very.
Difficult to write a book while working at the New York Times. So I think, for a little while at least, I'll just take a break from the book writing.
Because your wife, your editor.
She yes, she does, she does, she always does. She's the best editor.
Oh that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, Well, this book the Gods of New York. I haven't read a book or been aware of a book that's encapsulated the cauldron of New York at that time. I mean, New York was really, really, really tough. What's an excerpt that you favor?
How about I'll start with this two paragraphs of my introduction of ed Koch. At five point twenty five in the morning on New Year's Day, Edward Irving Koch was awakened in his king sized bed at Gracie Mansion by the knock of a police officer on his door, just as he had been nearly every morning for the past eight years. He did not have a hangover, but he did have a head cold. Still, no running nose was going to keep him from enjoying the historic day ahead.
His historic day. In a matter of hours, he would become the third person in modern history to serve three terms as mayor of New York City, and he'd been re elected in a landslide with seventy eight percent of the city wide vote. Koch's success was a tribute to him his w work, ethic and unerring political instincts, but also to New York and really America. His father, Louis nee leb, had arrived at Ellis Island in nineteen oh nine, a Jewish child of peddlers from a dirt, poor hamlet
in the Austro Hungarian Hungarian Empire. He started as a lowly pantsmaker in a Lower east Side sweatshop, even sleeping for a while in the factory, and eventually built a solid middle class life for his family in a leafy section of the Bronx. His mother, Joyce nee Yetta, was a Jewish immigrant from similarly humble roots who had come to New York in nineteen twelve. She also worked in the garment trade before they were married and had their
second child, Edward, in nineteen twenty four. Kotch had benefited from the Cities and Countries Largesse, enrolling at the tuition free City College of New York in Uptown Manhattan when he was just sixteen before being drafted to serve in World War II in March nineteen forty three. Three years and two commondations later, he was back in the city, living with his parents on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Instead of finishing college, he went straight to New York University
School of Law courtesy of the GI Bill. At law school, he fell in love with Greenwich Village, its inexpensive restaurants, tree lined streets, and countercultural ferment. He was no beatnik but he had progressive ideals. He took up folk guitar and was involved in the Right to Sing Committee, which campaigned against the ban on musicians performing in Washington Square Park.
He also fell in love with politics. Kotsch was now running his own law practice, but at lunchtime during the nineteen fifty two and fifty six presidential elections, he could be found atop a soapbox on busy street corners extolling the virtues of the Democratic candidate Adelai Stevenson. Derided by Republicans as an egghead, he soon discovered that he was a natural public speaker, shrill and nasal, but compelling and persuasive.
I think it's interesting to me to read that. I'm glad you read that because it highlights for me in my lifetime in New York, how some mayors were mayors who had a distinct personality. Yeah, and coach No one had more personality, so to say, than coches. And some of them I wonder if they survived, not because they don't have any personality. You don't really know very much about Adams other than he's a cop. That's true. Policies.
The Blasio was kind of in negative integers. In terms of his personality, Bloomberg had a personality, but it was always framed in dollar bills, in terms of his wealth, his wealth, his smarts. I Bloomberg is an exceedingly bright man and successful man, but that eclipsed everything in terms of what we know. What was he?
I mean, he had a profile, but not a personality in a way, right.
Right, coach may be the last. Coach may be the last. No, I can't think of anyone had a very bright personality anyway. My thanks to you, the Gods of New York, a great analysis of New York in eighty six to nineteen ninety and my best to luck to you with whatever you're gonna do next. Thank you so much, Alcol, so much fun. My thanks to author and journalist Jonathan Maller. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.