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The Gods of New York

The Gods of New York

Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

About the Book

A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

“A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history . . . a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

New York entered 1986 as a city reborn. Record profits on Wall Street sent waves of money splashing across Manhattan, bringing a battered city roaring back to life.

But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illnesses. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.

The events of the next four years would split the city open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing. And a cast of outsized characters—Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer—would compete to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies.

The Gods of New York is a kaleidoscopic and deeply immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted 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 systems meant 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 is the story of how that happened.
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Praise for The Gods of New York

“A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history, The Gods of New York offers a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results, for better and for worse. . . . A must-read.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

“Jonathan Mahler finds the origins of our own time in the squalor, strife, and sleaze of 1980s New York. Full of pathos and wry humor and replete with a colorful gallery of rogues, winners, losers, dreamers, and killers, The Gods of New York is a triumph of civic humanism. . . . A deeply enviable book.”—John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke

“Expansive yet fast-paced . . . an astute, propulsive history of the ‘entrenched’ inequality and zany politics that came to dominate the city and the nation”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A propulsive, gorgeously reported account of the forces that reshaped New York City in the late 1980s, The Gods of New York is brilliant historical non-fiction that doubles as a warning about the future. With its clashing crew of sharp-elbowed political players—visionaries, provocateurs, and grifters, and sometimes, all three at once—and its juicy, behind-the-scenes details of the tabloid stories that spiked the period like an EKG chart, The Gods of New York is a rollicking ride with a heartbreaking undercurrent.”—Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun

“The Gods of New York may be the best nonfiction book ever written about the city. Jonathan Mahler evokes the names of my youth—Bernie Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Ed Koch, Yusuf Hawkins—but he manages to both personalize the New Yorkers of the fateful years 1986-1990 and to fly over the city in a metaphorical helicopter, giving us a clear map as to how the city changed not just itself, but the country to which it is tenuously attached.”—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

“Jonathan Mahler has pulled off a magic trick, evoking the sepia glory of the decade of me in the city of me while also showing the fatal flaws baked into the revelry. The sunken, lost world of this book died with the corruption disguised as optimism known as the Reagan years, the canary in our civic mineshaft. All this happened both a long time ago and yesterday, undone by the same root causes now sweeping our land, proving that what happens in America, good and bad, happens first in New York. This is a story about the Big Apple, about the tree that birthed this forbidden fruit, and about the worms hiding inside.”—Wright Thompson, bestselling author of The Barn
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About the Author

Jonathan Mahler
Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which was adapted as an ESPN miniseries, and The Challenge, a New York Times Notable Book. His journalism has received numerous awards and been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn More by Jonathan Mahler
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