The journalist’s The Gods of New York surveys the overlapping crises facing New York City in the last four years of the 1980s.
Why did you focus on the final years of the 1980s?
During the 2016 presidential campaign, I wrote features about the candidates’ histories. Writing about Trump’s past took me to ’80s New York City. I began to realize that so much had happened during those last four years. New York had gone through a traumatic experience in the ’70s with bankruptcy, urban blight, and the fires in the Bronx, and then an amazing recovery and boom in the early ’80s. By the late ’80s, New York had an identity crisis. There was a struggle for the soul of the city due to not only everything it had been through, but with all these explosive events like the Howard Beach racial attack, the Wall Street crash, the birth of ACT UP.
Why did you choose to tell this story by focusing on media-savvy figures like Trump, Al Sharpton, and Larry Kramer?
These figures were masterful at commanding the tabloids to advance their aims. Trump worked to create a public image of himself as the personification of wealth. Sharpton used the media to both elevate his own persona but also to advance the fight for racial justice. Kramer used it to bring attention to AIDS. Giuliani, as U.S. attorney, famously held press conferences to announce indictments and perp walked investment bankers. They all understood the power of publicity and that even bad publicity is good publicity. I focused on this because in many ways we’re still living with the consequences of it. Trump, especially, began to recognize that, even though he’s doing and saying things that are pissing people off, he’s still on the front page. There’s a kind of intentional outrageousness to everything he’s doing—overinvesting in Atlantic City, building the Taj Mahal that everyone knows is going to go bankrupt—while insisting everything is going great. He’s realizing that if you don’t care, if you are shameless, if you act bulletproof, then you are bulletproof.
How do the late ’80s prefigure present-day New York City? The country as a whole?
New York had been a working-class city. After the deindustrialization of the ’60s and ’70s, New York was reborn in the ’80s as a very different place—as the center of global capital. It became a city of entrenched wealth and entrenched poverty, side by side. Deindustrialization meant all that were left were either high-paying jobs in real estate and finance or low-paying service jobs. At the same time, New York also saw a huge influx of immigrants who would take those low-paying jobs. A lot of working-class white New Yorkers became bitter and unhappy, feeling squeezed out, and foreshadowing the national landscape that led to Trump’s rise.
