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 defining years.
Mahler casts light on how New York moved from being one kind of metropolis to quite another and how the often-shocking events of the period continue to reverberate today ... Mahler expertly captures the relentlessness and simultaneity of incident that characterize life in New York. History, in his telling, becomes a mosaic of interlocking tragedies ... Mahler’s storytelling retains a thriller-like pace ... Vivid and immediate ... I wanted more...on Ward, who drastically changed the demography of the NYPD ... But to gripe would be to deny Mahler’s achievement, which is the wholesale reanimation, in compulsively readable prose, of a pivotal chunk of history that turns out to have a lot to say to readers today.
Mahler’s storytelling is most powerful precisely where it digs the deepest. His writing on homelessness is particularly strong ... A deeply political book. It records, in its dramatic leaps and juxtapositions, the coincidence of great fortune and mass marginalization. But Mahler too often avoids inferring any causal link.
