Did the whole country just become late 1980s New York City? One is left with that impression after reading Jonathan Mahler’s new book, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990.
The New York that Mahler describes is unstable, vulgar and dangerous. Substance abuse and homelessness are public health emergencies. Histrionics and tribalism have become the coin of the realm in politics. Mass media fans the flames engendered by political and cultural divisions. Any shared mythology or communal consensus has split off onto parallel tracks of race, class and nationality. The city’s different communities seem to intersect only when they respond in aggressive fashion to high-profile and divisive criminal cases, such as the Bernie Goetz shootings, the Tawana Brawley case and the prosecution of the Central Park Five.
Down on Wall Street or up in the city’s skyscrapers, investors and entrepreneurs make fortunes despite not actually making anything. The beneficiaries of this new economy regard themselves as visionaries and rely on eager media outlets across the political spectrum to keep the public informed of their insights. The much-hyped “rebirth” of the city creates an overnight housing crisis as upscale building projects replace a range of affordable options. The simultaneous divestments from many long-tenured civic institutions, including the city’s mental health services, leave the city’s streets filled with dangerous, disturbed people.
In fact, one of the defining figures of 1980s New York was also the defining political figure of the past 10 years. Mahler demonstrates the degree to which Donald J. Trump has been singing the same song since his days as a real estate hustler. For years, The New York Times heaped praise on Trump and his high-end building projects, often expressing admiration for his efforts to Make New York Great Again.
It’s hard not to read Gods of New York as batting practice for the most recent decade of American life. Mahler says as much in the prologue: “The arrival of the global economy, the surge of immigrants, the nostalgia for a simpler time, the desire for order and authority—New York saw it all first.” In addition, New York saw a coarsening of public life in the late 1980s that has been matched in the last decade by a coarsening of the nation’s political culture.
But there is much more to The Gods of New York than these broad brushstrokes. This is the story of Ed Koch’s difficult third term as mayor of New York (1986-89), told primarily through the lives of figures like Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee and the AIDS activist Larry Kramer. For the most part, the men on this list are what Mahler calls “crisis opportunists,” who pushed distinct agendas by cultivating bombastic public personas. The “Gods” were transformed into larger-than-life figures by the metropolitan area’s four largest newspapers: The New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News and Newsday.
The center could not hold in such polarized times. Koch was elected to a third term as mayor in 1985 with 78 percent of the vote. But after serving two terms as a force for stability in a city on the mend, he developed a reputation in his third term as an ineffectual leader. Many citizens considered his response to the surge in crime amid the crack epidemic to be insufficient, while racial minorities as well as members of the gay community came to see Koch as lacking empathy for their often-overlapping plights.
Political corruption, racial strife and wealth inequality were regarded by many residents as Koch hallmarks. But according to Mahler, there was not much the new mayor could do in the short term to change the course of the economic and cultural shifts that took place amid what was touted as an economic revival in late 1980s New York. In 1989, Koch lost the Democratic primary to David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. Dinkins would eke out a victory over Republican nominee Giuliani in a racially charged election that serves as the book’s denouement.
By the time Dinkins was sworn in as mayor on Jan. 1, 1990, the forces that would remake the city were already firmly in place. The high-end housing that the likes of Trump helped develop in New York had displaced a range of more affordable units, inaugurating the city’s transformation into a “luxury product” (in the words of Michael Bloomberg) that is served by a permanent underclass.
The Gods of New York is the perfect title for this book, which is male-focused from beginning to end. The women featured most prominently are Jennifer Levin, victim of the 1986 “Preppy Killer” Robert Chambers; Tawana Brawley, who concocted a rape hoax in 1987; and Linda Fairstein, who oversaw the prosecution of the Preppy Killer and the Central Park Five. While this clear gender imbalance is almost certainly reflective of the city’s power dynamics at the time, the reader is left wondering what many of the 3.5 million women who resided in the city were doing during the home stretch of the 1980s. If you are looking for a comprehensive social history of New York in this era, this is not the book for you.
Nevertheless, Mahler captures the chaos of this historical moment in punchy narrative prose that resembles one of the great artifacts of late 1980s New York, Tom Wolfe’s era-defining novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. His affection for Koch is evident in a manner not dissimilar to Robert Caro’s presentation of Lyndon Baines Johnson in his esteemed biographies. Coincidentally, the disaster of Ed Koch’s third term resembles nothing so much as the back half of L.B.J.’s full term as president.
Toward the end of the book, the reeling realtor Trump purchases a full-page ad in all four of the city’s major dailies calling for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five. Appropriately, the text of Trump’s ad was presented largely in all caps and read just like one of his tweets: BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY! BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
Trump’s response to the collapse of his real estate empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly his efforts to remake Atlantic City into an East Coast Las Vegas, was the beginning of his current persona. Slowly but surely, Trump transformed into a populist provocateur who trafficked in the same kind of shamelessness and self-aggrandizement he had as a real estate mogul.
Mahler is best known for his 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, one of the finest works of cultural history ever written. In that book, he created an imaginative, thoughtful portrait of New York in 1977 that juxtaposed the “Bronx Zoo”-era Yankees, the terror and titillation of bankruptcy-era New York, and a mayoral contest that pitted Ed Koch against Mario Cuomo. While Gods of New York is a fascinating portrait as well, it doesn’t quite capture the spirit of its times in the way that Bronx Is Burning did for 1977.
Perhaps Mahler attributes too much of the polarization of New York to the tabloids. Strikingly absent from the book is talk radio, which played a major role in reshaping the political culture of New York (and the nation) beginning at this very moment. The names of Don Imus and Howard Stern are not mentioned in the book despite their shared role in helping to create the kind of “locker room talk” populism that Trump brought to national politics.
Trump was, for many years, a regular guest on Stern’s show, though Stern now recoils from him as thoroughly as anyone. Once Imus and Stern captured the New York airwaves with discussions ever more vulgar and racially charged, they developed national audiences through massive syndication deals in the 1990s. In 1994, Stern even briefly ran for governor of New York on a platform of bringing back the death penalty. Could it be that the Shock Jock had more to do with setting the stage for MAGA than Rush Limbaugh, who was preaching largely to the already politicized and converted?
There is one other notable omission in this book. Where is Andrew Dice Clay? The bard of Sheepshead Bay was arguably the most popular standup comedian of the late 1980s. He parlayed his outer-borough neighborhood bully act into capacity crowds at Madison Square Garden a mere month after Ed Koch left office. If populist resentment had a poster boy before Trump but after Archie Bunker, it was Clay, donning a leather jacket, lighting a cigarette, telling naughty nursery rhymes and depicting every woman’s voice as Edith Bunker’s.
Despite a few lapses like this, The Gods of New York is an engaging and eye-opening history that can be appreciated through a local or national lens.
This article appears in July/August 2026.
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