Frank Sinatra’s famous song “New York, New York,” is only mentioned once, in passing, in Jonathan Mahler’s new book, The Gods of New York. But the lyrics kept running through my head as I read it.
Two lines in particular:
I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps
And find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.
That lyric, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb in 1977, was always meant to be an homage to the idea that anyone who wanted to make something of themselves had to move to New York, to test themselves against the best. After all, as the song continues, “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.”
But The Gods of New York, which is a portrait of life in the city in the last four years of the 1980s, caused me to read those lines in a different, less pleasant way. Mahler’s contention is that the period between 1986 and 1990 was when New York went from being “a city that once aspired to provide a safety net and a foothold to all its residents” to “a gladiatorial arena for those with the biggest appetites, the loudest voices, and the most outsized ambitions.” These were years that saw new extremes of wealth—and of poverty—and racial resentments and fears that boiled over time and again.
