THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990, wasn't that a time?

THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990
JONATHAN MAHLER
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Rating: ?5*?1*?

The Publisher Says: A sweeping chronicle of four years in 1980s New York, a crucible that would transform the city and leave it more divided than ever—a rollicking, real-life Bonfire of the Vanities featuring larger-than-life personalities of Donald Trump, Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani, and countless others

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life.

But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.

Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events—involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters—would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. Jimmy Breslin. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire—the tabloids. In The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these convulsive, defining years.

The Gods of New York is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for Could it be both the great working-class city, lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the very systems intended to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: That was the Manhattan I fell in love with. Not the one where St. Vincent's is a yuppie hutch. I watched the enshittification happen then; I was apparently ineffective in resisting it; now it's the entire country it's happening to, and I still feel ineffective.

Still slugging, though.

Michael Stewart, he of The Man Nobody Killed, kicks us off on our journey through the world that grew Felonious Yam into a cultural icon (mostly spite-driven because we all laughed at him then). After Ed Koch's second term ended, Giuliani became mayor, and shit went downhill fast.

If you know, you know.

The times were a-changin' and the seeds of the political hellscape of today were there and scaring some of us. I still feel bad we didn't stop it. Reading this year-by-year, carefully non-partisan reminder of my generation's abject failures on stages large and small did not fill me with ebullient glee. Fauci's horrific inaction during the AIDS crisis, lack of empathy and flexibility, reminded me of how loud the haters got when he was doing a much better job during COVID. If they'd been around for the ACT UP years....

This isn't history to me, the way it will be to all y'all who didn't live it; it's my past retold. I'm glad I read it. I got closure-sobs for things I'd forgotten I'd forgotten. It's not fun to live in interesting times...but who ever does not? The way the world works is upheaval and change and rage and hate simmer, then boil, then simmer...eternal cycles of it.

I'm so sorry we did not do better when there was a chance to stop the scum from rising above their capacity to understand basic morality. Mea culpa.