Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, by Jonathan Mahler

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning,” is as ambitious, varied, and entertaining as the city it focuses on. 

The book’s title, taken from a Howard Cosell declaration made on national TV during the World Series (as an abandoned building burned nearby), is pitch-perfect, so to speak. 

New York City was a tumultuous, turbulent, and facinating place—not to mention pretty dangerous—in the 1970s, and no time moreso than 1977, the year which is the focus of the book. Nineteen seventy-seven was a year New York nearly broke down, and later, broke though. 

ESPN liked the book so much it created a mini-series based on the New York Yankees’ ‘77 pennant chase.

The focus here is on so much more than just the Yankees, with a wide net cast to gather together all the components of a city in crisis: 

• Government social policy and budgeting

• The debut of Studio 54

• The emergence of punk rock

• The histories and personalities of Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, and Reggie Jackson

• Urban planning theory

• Terrorism

• Rampant arson

• The crimes, media manipulation, and eventual capture of serial killer Son of Sam

• The strategy and politics of city zoning

• The gentrification of SoHo

• The blackout riots, looting, and police response to the New York City blackout of July 13, 1977

• The electrical grid strategy of New York City

• The 1977 mayoral race, candidates, and strategies 

• Highway planning

Even that list is incomplete. The book covers a lot of ground.

I won’t summarize the book here—there are too many topics. But I will share some insights from some of the major events within, and below the post you will find my Kindle highlights from the book itself. 

The 1977 New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary

Amidst crime and financial disaster, four candidates, including Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, Bella Abzug and incumbent mayor Abraham Beame, squared off in a bloody Democratic primary full of sniping, back-biting, and backroom deals.

But as vicious as the race was, I’m struck by the tone and content of Koch’s TV commercials.

Koch was seen as the most confrontational candidate, but these ads are so vanilla they would be ignored today:

Amazingly, Koch won the democratic primary running against the teachers and police unions, and taking a pro-death penalty stance. He sounds very conservative in these ads, which ran during the primary where he was trying to capture only left-leaning voters. 

Koch went on to be mayor New York until the end of 1989. 

George vs Billy vs Reggie

In 1977, Billy Martin was in the first of his four runs as Yankees manager, and many days it looked like he wouldn’t keep his job for the entire season. Martin, as mercurial as any manager who ever led a team, was sandwiched between his combustable and jealous owner, George Steinbrenner, and his preening and insecure superstar—who was new to town—Reggie Jackson.

Together, the three of them barked at each other in the press and in person, and schemed behind each other’s backs.

Famously, Martin and Jackson nearly came to blows in the Boston dugout after Martin pulled Jackson mid-inning following a Jackson flub in right field:

Martin not only kept his job after this incident, but the team rallied. The Yankees came from behind in the standings to overtake the Red Sox in the division and bested Kansas City in the ALCS before beating the Dodgers in the World Series.

The blackout of July 13, 1977

It’s not easy to make one of the world’s largest cities go dark, requiring a potent mix of circumstance and bad decisions:

• A lengthy heatwave, pushing temperatures over 100, while tempers and demands on the power grid climbed right along with it.

• Clean-air regulations pushed power plans well outside the city limits.

• A tenuous feeder system bringing power into the city from those plants with too few lines and little redundancy.

• Some lightning, taking out feeder lines.

• Poorly maintained emergency generators.

• A board operator who froze, failing to disconnect subsections of the city, which would have reduced the overall power draw into the city grid and prevented total failure.

The result was disastrous: the entire city went dark. Every borough.

Mass looting and fires followed in certain areas, particularly in the South Bronx and a subsection of Brooklyn called Bushwick.

As a result, an area of poverty and high unemployment destroyed itself—creating worse poverty and unemployment. Seven years later, the area was still rebuilding, as detailed in this 1984 New York Times article:

A tangible recovery is building in the bombed out heart of the neighborhood around St. Barbara's. It can be traced to construction of what amounts to a small village of public housing units, ordered by Mayor Koch at a cost of $58 million, and to a revival in a private real- estate market that has spilled over from the adjoining neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens.

Little noticed by those outside Bushwick, this insular community has, along with sections of the South Bronx and some other parts of Brooklyn, become an example of a downtrodden community, seemingly at the end of its line, that for all its problems has quietly managed to negotiate an upturn.

[…]

''There has been a definite turnaround and it's going on just all over the place,'' said Elliott Yablon, director of the Bushwick Neighborhood Preservation Office of the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. ''I think it's own momentum is going to carry it through. If we walked away, the recovery might not be as planned, but it would happen anyway.''

Bushwick’s slow recovery was a microcosm of the entire city’s resurgence.

In 1977, New York seemed to be on the brink of collapse. And while many people thought New York was in its death throes, it was really going through birthing pains.

The restoration—of Bushwick, of law and order, and of the cities finances—snowballed into a renaissance for New York, the tailwinds of which still carry the city forward today.

Just another example that it truly is darkest—pitch black, even—before the dawn.

Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

You can buy “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning,” at Amazon.

---

Book notes
(Kindle Highlights)

PROLOGUE

When I first embarked on this book four years ago, my intention was to write about the ’77 Yankees against the backdrop of New York during this infamous era of urban blight. As the months passed, though, the city slowly advanced into the foreground, and the two stories became one.

I gradually came to regard ’77 as a transformative moment for the city, a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well. New York was straddling eras.

PART ONE

1.

the thirty-seventh Democratic National Convention. The last two—Chicago ’68 and Miami ’72—had been notoriously rancorous, but this one was guaranteed to be a love fest. The party’s presidential candidate, the genteel Jimmy Carter, had already been anointed, and the city was primping for its close-up. Special repair crews were sent out to patch potholes in midtown, the Transit Authority changed its cleaning schedule to ensure that key stations would be freshly scrubbed for the delegates, and more than a thousand extra patrolmen and close to one hundred extra sanitation men were assigned to special convention duty. With the help of a hastily enacted antiloitering law, the police even managed to round up most of the prostitutes in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden.

2.

The clinical term for it, fiscal crisis, didn’t approach the raw reality. Spiritual crisis was more like it. The worst part was that Beame had seen it coming. As the comptroller to his predecessor, John Lindsay—the equivalent of being lookout on the Titanic, as the columnist Jack Newfield once quipped—Beame knew just how precarious things were.

“The man left us with a budget deficit of $1.5 billion,” snorted Beame, slapping the paper with the back of his hand for effect

By February ’75, Beame was supposed to have gotten rid of twelve thousand of the city’s three hundred thousand employees. A New York Times investigation revealed that only seventeen hundred were gone; the rest had merely been shifted to other budget lines.

Reminders of the city’s decline were already everywhere. In 1972 the Tonight Show had moved from midtown Manhattan to Burbank, California.

As for Beame, the time for tiptoeing was over. He gave thirty-eight thousand city workers, including librarians, garbage collectors, firemen, and cops, the ax. In anticipation of the layoffs, the police union had already distributed WELCOME TO FEAR CITY brochures at Kennedy Airport, Grand Central Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal,

Fear City also became Stink City when ten thousand sanitation workers walked off the job to protest the layoffs. The piles rose quickly, and ripe refuse was soon oozing from burst garbage bags and overstuffed trash cans,

Mayor Beame ended 129 years of free tuition at New York’s public colleges, including his alma mater, City College, the fabled gateway to middle-class life.

By the end of his second term Lindsay had become, in the words of one especially memorable magazine headline, AN EXILE IN HIS OWN CITY. Thus did Beame’s moment arrive. There was no seductive rhetoric, no risk of dashed expectations. He was New York’s rebound lover. What’s more, he was a bookkeeper, and New York’s books were in desperate need of attention.

3.

New York had been though hell, but in the summer of ’76 there was reason for hope. It was a feeling more than anything, palpable, if not quantifiable, that the embattled city was on the edge of a new day.

Los Angeles could have The Tonight Show; New York now had Saturday Night,

The counterculture was starting to migrate from San Francisco to New York, a trend evidenced by Rolling Stone’s plan to relocate from Haight-Ashbury to midtown Manhattan in the summer of ’77.

As for Beame, the pained expression that he’d worn for the better part of the last two years was finally giving way to something approaching a smile. “I think we’ve turned the corner and seen the light at the end of tunnel,” the Mighty Mite told reporters in the fall of 1976. By now the city had an election of its own approaching, the ’77 mayoral election.

4.

What Martin lacked in talent he made up for in grit. The same determination that had propelled this juvenile delinquent out of the sandlots of a dirt-poor, fatherless childhood near the docks of Berkeley—his grandmother had floated over from San Francisco with all her household possessions on a raft—drove him to overachieve as a big leaguer.

Martin would have done anything to avoid losing, but winning came at its own cost. In short, his emotional makeup was not equal to the pressure, external or internal, of playing so far above his head.

Martin fought insomnia, hypertension, and what was then known as acute melancholia. His churning stomach kept him from eating for long stretches. What he did eat, he’d often puke back up. Martin tried to cope, popping sleeping pills and drinking bottomless glasses of scotch, but nothing could quite cure the distemper.

They got it. Martin managed the game just as he had played it: personally, emotionally, intensely.

As the wins piled up, the stakes mounted, and the prospect of losing became that much more sickening. Martin, who was always skinny, was now more gaunt than ever. Over the course of the ’76 season, he shed 20 pounds from his six-foot frame, dropping to a mere 154. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, which had first appeared during his playing days, deepened.

The brand-new ballpark was in tatters. Huge chunks of turf were uprooted, every base had been stolen, and the field was littered with garbage, from newspaper shreds to empty bottles of Hiram Walker brandy and Jack Daniel’s. The Yankees had won their first pennant in twelve years.

to make matters worse, he and his second wife, Gretchen, a former airline stewardess and the belle of her sorority at the University of Nebraska, split up shortly after the season ended.

He spent the winter of ’76–’77 alone in the Hasbrouck Heights Sheraton

he was worrying about his teenage daughter from his first marriage, who’d been thrown in jail in Colombia after being accused of trying to smuggle cocaine out of the country in her panty hose.

5.

WHEN news of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post first hit the Daily News and The New York Times—the sleepy Post had been scooped on its own sale—on November 20, 1976, the city’s response was a collective “Rupert who?”

The Post’s own founding father, Alexander Hamilton, had himself never been one to underestimate the dark side of human nature, or what he preferred to call its “impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice and of other irregular and violent propensities.”

(Ernest Hemingway had the Post sent to him in Cuba so he wouldn’t miss the offerings of its emotional star columnist, Jimmy Cannon.)

the Post was soon faltering as well. By the middle of the seventies the very notion of an afternoon newspaper seemed antiquated, particularly now that Vietnam and Watergate, which provided daytime copy that seemed too urgent to wait until the following morning to read, were passing into history.

Earl Wilson was still dutifully filing “It Happened Last Night,” but by the middle of the seventies the column had come to seem quaint, anachronistic. The rest of the media were busy discovering the new celebrity culture: Time Inc. launched People, Andy Warhol launched Interview, the Daily News hired people spotter Liz Smith.

It’s hard not to read something else into the paper’s aimlessness. The trauma of the Lindsay years had eroded the populace’s faith in New York’s civic culture, which the Post had so assiduously nurtured with its expansive, old-fashioned liberalism. By the mid-seventies New York’s predominantly liberal middle class was becoming an increasingly conservative lot. Somewhere along the way the Post had lost its raison d’être, and Rupert Murdoch, who like any self-respecting publishing tycoon yearned to sink roots in New York, had apparently found his.

6.

At a few minutes past midnight Reggie Jackson stepped off the plane and into the bracing East Coast air with a blonde on his arm. The cameras were now rolling. A Grandstand reporter approached his six-foot, 207-pound subject and poked a microphone in his bespectacled face: “Welcome to New York, Reggie!” Jackson looked at the reporter, grinned, and asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I once had a long talk with Reggie about his childhood, and I asked him what he had gotten out of living in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood,” recalls Newsday’s Steve Jacobson. “He fiddled around with the question for a while and came up with ‘aspirations.’”

During Jackson’s sophomore year, his only season of varsity ball at ASU, he broke the school’s single-season home run record with fifteen. It doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was unheard of, largely because most colleges, including Arizona State, considered baseball a low priority and bought cheap, lightweight bats. He also became the first collegian to hit a ball out of Phoenix Municipal Stadium.

Reggie Jackson was the second player chosen in the 1966 draft. He might well have gone first, his coach at ASU informed him, had the New York Mets not been put off by a line in his scouting report that said he had a white girlfriend.

The following year, 1967, Jackson was bumped up to the A’s AA franchise in Birmingham.

Jackson spent a couple of weeks sleeping on the couch of the apartment of a couple of his white teammates, Joe Rudi and Dave Duncan. Rudi told Jackson that their landlord had threatened to evict them if “the colored” didn’t leave.

six hundred feet is only the estimated length of the one Jackson hit in the ’71 All-Star Game in Detroit.

The ball would have sailed right out of the ballpark if it hadn’t crashed into an electronic transformer on top of the roof in right-center, making the titanic blast only more dramatic; it looked as if sparks were actually going to fly.

“I wasn’t sure the first time I saw him,” Ted Williams said in 1970. “The second time I was amazed. He is the most natural hitter I have ever seen.”

Reggie adhered to a different motto: If you don’t blow your own horn, there won’t be any music. “When you take over a pitch and line it somewhere, it’s like you’ve thought of something and put it with beautiful clarity,” Jackson told a writer for Sports Illustrated, finishing the riff with a line that couldn’t have made SI’s headline writer’s job any easier: “Everyone is helpless and in awe.”

Everywhere they went, people were calling out to Reggie. “I had been there before, but I really hadn’t been there before. It was as if I had seen New York across some crowded room, caught her eye, but never got the chance to talk to her,” Jackson remembered in his 1982 autobiography, co-authored by Mike Lupica. “Now I was talking to her, feeling her. Being seduced by her.”

Reggie Jackson’s new manager, Billy Martin, followed the Steinbrenner-Jackson courtship in the papers with a growing sense of disgust.

But what bothered the fatherless Martin most was all the attention that Steinbrenner had lavished on Jackson. “George was taking Reggie to the ‘21’ Club for lunch all the time, and I was sitting in my hotel room the entire winter and George hadn’t taken me out to lunch even once,” Martin later complained in his autobiography.

7.

ON a cold, snowy night in the waning days of 1976, former New York congresswoman and noted liberal firebrand Bella Abzug summoned her closest confidants to her red-brick town house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. After stomping the snow out of their boots and stripping off their overcoats, they filed into the parlor, which, with its worn velvet couches and peeling red paint, resembled nothing so much as a Venetian bordello. It was time to discuss Bella’s future. The question was whether she should run for mayor. Private balloting would have revealed a landslide against the notion.

The joke around Congress went that asking Abzug to sponsor a piece of legislation was the best way to ensure its defeat.

The only oppressed minority that Abzug had no sympathy for was her staff. It wasn’t just the twenty-hour days; it was the emotional torture in the form of expletive-streaked abuse.

8.

HAVING already gobbled up one New York journalistic institution, Rupert Murdoch was now hungry for another. His eyes alit on New York magazine.

As 1977 got under way, Rupert Murdoch took control of three major New York journalistic institutions,

9.

All winter the New York papers had been filled with speculation about how Reggie and Munson were going to get along. The forecast called for storms.

10.

IN all of Billy Martin’s years playing for Casey Stengel in the fifties, the Yankees had never put together a winning record in the Grapefruit League. Martin saw the logic inherent in this. The regular season was long enough.

It wasn’t to be. Not only did Steinbrenner expect his manager to win grapefruit games, but he didn’t like his living so far from the ballpark, nor did he approve of his driving to games instead of taking the team bus.

“I ought to fire you right now,” Steinbrenner answered. “I don’t give a shit if you do fire me, but you’re not going to come in here and tell me what to do in front of my players.” The players quickly rallied to Martin’s defense.

The Daily News’s Dick Young speculated that the Yankees’ owner had paid off kids and cabdrivers to yell out to Reggie when he first brought him to New York for lunch at ‘21.’

“If I lead the league in homers and runs batted in and win the M.V.P. award and we win the World Series, they’ll say, ‘He should have done that. Look what they’re paying him,’” Reggie told Murray Chass, the beat man for The New York Times. “If I don’t do it, if I come short of it, if we don’t win, it will be my fault. ‘Steinbrenner fouled up, Jackson’s no good, he hurt the club, he created dissension.’”

Reggie pointed out that the old Bronx Bombers were all white and that their front office was racist and bigoted. “They didn’t want no black superstars,” Reggie snapped, deliberately letting his usually proper grammar lapse for effect. He was hedging his bets: If he didn’t become a hero, at least he could be a martyr.

11.

AMBITION was about the only thing that Edward Irving Koch, the latest entrant into New York’s 1977 mayoral race, had going for him.

Only 6 percent of the city had any idea who Ed Koch was.

The few New Yorkers who did know Ed Koch in the spring of 1977 thought of him as a lumpy liberal from Greenwich Village. A middle child, he’d been born in the Bronx, though his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, had started their New York journey in a scabby, peeling tenement on the crowded Lower East Side. Koch’s

Sergeant Koch returned from the war in 1946, a heady time for middle-class New York. Mayor La Guardia’s handiwork was everywhere: prepaid health insurance for all New York residents; twenty-two municipal hospitals; subsidized housing cooperatives; a five-cent subway ride that zigged and zagged across four boroughs. La Guardia spoke endlessly about beautifying New York, about finding new ways to lift the spirit of its citizens. His successor, William O’Dwyer, picked up right where La Guardia left off.

When Koch ran in a local assembly race in 1962, he dubbed his platform “SAD” after its three linchpin issues: sodomy, abortion, and divorce. (He was for making gay sex and abortion legal and for rewriting the state law that considered adultery the only viable grounds for divorce.) Despite an endorsement from Eleanor Roosevelt, Koch got his clock cleaned,

but the following year he ran for district leader against the neighborhood’s longtime Democratic power broker, the man known as the Bishop, Carmine De Sapio.

Koch had won the election by 41 votes.

Koch clambered up onto the platform and cut through the racket. There was no time to celebrate. “This election can be stolen from us,” Koch said. “Every captain must return to the polls right away with an able-bodied man. See that those machines are not tampered with.”

few noticed that as the sixties wore on and the Village’s once-quiet streets became more crowded, Koch began absorbing some of the conservative values of longtime locals. He was evolving in small but portentous ways, as he reconsidered his position on local hot-button issues like the concentration of gay prostitutes on Sixth Avenue and the endless proliferation of noisy coffeehouses.

In 1968, Koch ran for Mayor Lindsay’s old congressional seat in Manhattan’s so-called Silk Stocking district.

Once he was elected, his friends told him to hunker down and become a ten- or twelve-term member of Congress,

Orange highlight | Page: 93

Koch, like Beame and Abzug, aspired to more. He’d dreamed of becoming mayor for years—“I

12.

the ’77 team was going to start five blacks. Center field, where DiMaggio, Mantle, and Murcer had once roamed, was the province of a young man from the Miami ghetto, Mickey Rivers. Second base belonged to rookie Willie Randolph, who had grown up in the Samuel J. Tilden housing project in Brownsville, Brooklyn. And the new right fielder was of course Reggie Jackson.

Reggie had other plans. One of Steinbrenner’s real estate mogul friends set him up with a $1,466 corner apartment on the nineteenth floor at 985 Fifth Avenue, a white-brick building just down the block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He was the only Yankee who lived in Manhattan,

As of mid-May, Reggie Jackson was hitting .250, with a mere five home runs.

13.

IN the middle of May, New York’s already crowded mayoral race absorbed one final candidate.

But where Mario Cuomo was concerned, most people who knew him were inclined to be charitable.

This, at least, was the picture of tranquillity that prevailed until 1966, when word spread through the community that the high school going up in nearby Lefrak City was going to force the condemnation of sixty-nine houses in Corona. The residents hastily mobilized and hired a thirty-three-year-old lawyer, Mario Cuomo, to help them take on City Hall. Four years and dozens of briefs later, the bulldozers were moving closer to Corona. Cuomo had exhausted his legal options with no visible progress. The whole business might have passed unnoticed into history—another community plowed under by City Hall, another idealistic young lawyer disillusioned along the way—had not a stocky, rumpled caricature of a newspaperman named Jimmy Breslin tumbled into the picture. One Sunday night in November 1970 a friend of Breslin’s persuaded the writer to come along with him to a Corona homeowners’ meeting at the headquarters of the local volunteer ambulance corps.

After the meeting Breslin took this man, Mario Cuomo, out for a cup of coffee.

With Breslin’s help, the so-called Corona Fighting 69 became a cause célèbre. Newspapers as far-flung as the Los Angeles Times editorialized in their defense.

In the end Cuomo decided not to run for mayor in ’73. He made his first bid for elective office a year later, losing the Democratic nomination for the lowly job of lieutenant governor. It was a humiliating defeat for a man with so much political promise.

Fortunately, the new governor, Hugh Carey, recognized that promise and asked Cuomo to be his secretary of state.

In early 1977 Carey came to Cuomo with a new task: running for mayor.

After a few months of hemming and hawing, Cuomo reluctantly agreed.

14.

Sport scheduled the story—REGGIE JACKSON IN NO-MAN’S LAND—for its June issue.

Several years later, when Reggie published his autobiography—in vintage fashion, he dedicated the book to his biggest fan, God—he claimed that the whole conversation at the Banana Boat had been off the record, and that he had been misquoted to boot.

15.

Such was the state of the rivalry, reborn anew for every generation, between the Yanks and the Sox, on the afternoon of May 23, 1977. If a pair of outfielders, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, had personified the battle in the 1940s and 1950s, the teams’ warring catchers did that day: the tall, even-tempered, urbane Carlton Fisk and the stumpy, grumpy, caustic Thurman Munson. Boston versus New York in a nutshell.

16.

ON the morning of June 16, 1977, the city woke up to the news that the Mets had traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds.

The loss of Seaver felt like the loss of hope, not for the Mets, who already were hopeless, but for the city itself. It was more than the man; it was the moment the man represented, that improbable pennant run during the glorious summer of 1969, when John Lindsay owned New York and the city still felt full of possibility.

17.

A 1977 New York City Planning Commission report counted no fewer than 245 pornographic institutions in the city. In 1965 there had been 9.

Mayor Beame, who was old enough to remember when the marquees along West Forty-second Street billed George M. Cohan’s latest musical rather than “live nude girls,” had been vowing to “reverse the blight in this vital center of our city.” But between the loopholes in city and state laws, the dwindling number of city policemen and prosecutors, and the need to avoid violating the civil liberties of his citizens, it had not been easy.

In 1977, Times Square saw the opening of Show World, its biggest sex institution yet. Situated on the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the heart of Times Square, Show World was a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot multistory sex arcade complete with video booths, live sex acts, and private rooms where naked women sat behind thin sheets of Plexiglas. Most sex emporiums were dark, mysterious. Show World, which announced its presence with a blinking neon sign, was bright, garish. Some four thousand people passed through its doors each day.

New York’s middle class was absorbing its appreciation for sexual excess not from Park Avenue but from the West Village. Sandwiched between the arrival of AIDS on New York’s shores during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and the first reported cases of the virus in 1978, 1977 was the last great year of unprotected, nonreproductive sex in the city.

18.

Before entering politics, she worked as an attorney, defending alleged Communists—McCarthy called her one of the most subversive lawyers in the country—and a thirty-six-year-old black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi, on whose behalf Abzug appeared in court eight months pregnant. Abzug became an early champion of gay rights during her 1970 congressional race,

Nothing got Abzug hotter than Westway, the city’s plan to rebuild the West Side Highway south of Forty-second Street. The blueprints called for burying the highway in a concrete tube beneath the surface of the Hudson, then extending the deck above out into the river to make room for parks and office and apartment buildings.

Naysayers needed only point to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s magisterial 1974 biography of Robert Moses, to underscore just how destructive overzealous city planners could be.

She sponsored a clever piece of legislation that would enable cities to swap federal funds earmarked for interstate highways for mass transit money. Instead of getting $1 billion from Washington to build an interstate highway, New York City could opt for $550 million to rehabilitate its subway system, a needy case if ever there were one. Framed as a choice between automobiles and subways, between lining the pockets of real estate developers and improving the lives of workaday New Yorkers, Westway became a perfect foil for Abzug, who saw her beloved city as an overgrown village, a place where the power belonged to the people, not to the men with green eyeshades and pocket protectors who had the nerve to talk about the “greater good.”

19.

ON June 17, 1977, a warm, foggy Friday night at Fenway, Catfish Hunter had the worst outing of the worst season of his career.

All Jimmy Hunter needed was a nickname. Finley settled quickly on Catfish. He’d tell the press that Hunter had been missing one night and that his folks found him down by the stream with one catfish lying beside him and another on his pole. Hunter himself didn’t see what was wrong with “Jim,” but he wasn’t going to argue with the guy who was about to write him a check for seventy-five thousand dollars.

He estimated that he could put the ball within three inches of his catcher’s target 90 percent of the time; others figured his margin of error closer to one or two inches. The key to his control was his repetitive motion. “If you go out

to the mound after he’s pitched a game you’ll see three marks: one where he stands when he’s on the rubber, one where his left foot lands, one where his right foot lands,” his former teammate Doc Medich told J. Anthony Lukas for a 1975 New York Times Magazine profile. “Most players leave the mound all scratched up like a plowed cornfield.”

Hunter struggled in spring training in ’77, his fastball hovering in the low seventies.

Hunter made his June 17 start at Fenway, but he didn’t survive the first inning.

20.

THE fog cleared overnight. Saturday was sunny, hot, and humid. noon the narrow streets surrounding Boston’s cozy bally-ard were choked with people as the temperature climbed toward a hundred degrees.

“Uh-oh,” interrupted Messer’s longtime broadcast partner, Phil Rizzuto. “I’m sorry, Frank, but I think Billy’s calling Paul Blair to replace Jackson, and Jackson doesn’t know it yet. We’re liable to see a little display of temper here … It’s Reggie’s own fault really. On that ball he did not hustle.”

The Fenway crowd caught sight of Blair trotting across the field and let out a roar. Reggie, who was chatting with Fran Healy, his arms draped casually over the green fence of the bullpen, was practically the only guy in the ballpark with no idea what was going on. Healy told Reggie to turn around. Reggie glanced over his shoulder and saw Blair coming toward him. Reggie pointed at himself—You mean me?—in disbelief. Blair nodded. “What the hell is going on?” Reggie asked. Blair shrugged. “You’ve got to ask Billy that.” The NBC cameras followed Reggie off the field and into the dugout. Initially, he looked more puzzled than angry bounding down the dugout steps with his hands spread, palm side up, in an expression of utter confusion. Martin was waiting for him, neck cords bulging, knees bent, arms dangling impatiently at his side. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing out there?” he asked.

Martin started after Reggie. “There they go!” said Garagiola. Ray Negron quickly threw a towel over the lens of the dugout camera, only it was the camera in center field that was recording all the action.

“You don’t like me—you’ve never liked me,” Reggie yelled back at Martin as he made his way down the ramp. “I was livid,” Reggie recalled later, “but I wasn’t going to fight him in the dugout.” He was going to fight him in the locker room. Reggie stripped down to his undershirt and uniform pants, leaving his spikes on so he wouldn’t lose his footing on Fenway’s clubhouse carpeting, and waited for the game to end.

but Healy eventually persuaded Reggie to shower and leave the ballpark before the game ended. Negron came down to the clubhouse to check on Reggie and to ask if he needed a cab back to the hotel. Reggie wanted to walk.

A little later, Newsday’s Steve Jacobson called from the lobby to ask if he could come up. His deadline was approaching, and he didn’t want to file his copy without a quote from Reggie.

“Thank God I’m a Christian. Christ got my mind right. I won’t fight

the man. I’ll do whatever they tell me.” Before long, though, Reggie’s emotions had taken over. “It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. I’m a good ballplayer and a good Christian and I’ve got an IQ of 160, but I’m a nigger and I won’t be subservient. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle. They’ve never had a nigger like me before.” The exception was Steinbrenner: “I love that man. He treats me like somebody. The rest of them treat me like dirt.” Reggie dropped down to his knees and began gesticulating wildly, the paranoid preacher who spied the devil’s shadows all around him. “He was talking about how everybody wanted a piece of him and was coming after him and how nobody understood him,” Pepe recalls. On and on he went as Torrez sat silent and the writers scribbled madly. “I’m going to play the best that I can for the rest of the year, help this team win, then get my ass out of here.”

21.

THE image that had been seared on the nation’s consciousness, courtesy of NBC Sports, was now plastered on sports pages across the country: the brawny black slugger, his glasses removed and set aside, standing chest to chest with his scrawny white manager.

Yet the race issue was not so easy to set aside, especially considering that this wasn’t Martin’s first clash with an outspoken black player. When he

arrived in Detroit in 1970, Martin had inherited the outfielder Elliott Maddox, a University of Michigan graduate and convert to Judaism whom Martin dumped as quickly as he could.

“Billy was a racist and an anti-Semite,” Maddox says now. “He had a drinking problem, and he had psychological problems stemming from his childhood.

For the most part, New York was proud of Martin—their working-class hero, their link to a better era—for standing up to the arrogant, overpaid slugger.

The dugout incident at Fenway proved to be something of a turning point for Reggie. Over the years he came to sound very different on the subject of race, speaking eloquently about how his own coming of age had traced the arc of the postwar emergence of his race: “I was colored until I was 14, a Negro until I was 21, and a black man ever since.” He spoke out, forcefully and persuasively, against baseball’s failure to integrate at the executive and managerial level.

22.

Even before he’d had to be restrained from attacking his right fielder on national television, Martin was having problems. His heavily favored team was struggling to stay in the pennant race.

Since the start of the season Steinbrenner had been calling him on a nearly daily basis to share his unsolicited opinion that Reggie Jackson should be batting cleanup, which of course only strengthened Martin’s resolve to hit him fifth or sixth.

There was no reason to expect Martin was going to survive the Fenway crisis. He had met with Reggie and Gabe Paul, the unofficial liaison between Steinbrenner and Martin, first thing in the morning and it had not gone well. Martin’s first mistake was referring to Reggie as “boy,” which an even more sensitive than usual Reggie interpreted as a racial slur. Martin insisted that it was just an expression, but Reggie was not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

23.

IT wasn’t all bad being Reggie Jackson in the summer of 1977; if nothing else, he’d made a new friend, Ralph Destino.

Destino, the chairman of Cartier, was living in a swanky penthouse on Seventy-ninth and Park Avenue, just a couple of blocks away from Reggie.

the Stork carried New York from the dark days of the Depression through its postwar optimism, Maxwell’s, with its stained glass kaleidoscope ceiling, Tiffany lamps, and human buffet of bachelors and bachelorettes, arrived just in time to spirit the city through the swinging sixties and sordid seventies.

Reggie and Destino tried Maxwell’s a couple of times, but once they had to wait for a table they vowed never to return. It was just as well. Maxwell’s may have had swinging singles, but McMullen’s had models.

Rudy Giuliani (then a young prosecutor), Donald Trump, and Cheryl Tiegs all were fixtures at McMullen’s, as was Steinbrenner, but Reggie was the only ballplayer who ate there. “I used to get mostly professional tennis players—Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert, John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis,” recalls McMullen. “It really was more of a hangout for tennis players. Baseball players tend not to be very sophisticated.”

By 1 a.m. twenty black limousines would be lined up out front on Third Avenue, waiting to transport revelers seamlessly to their next nocturnal playpen, Studio 54.

“We went to Studio 54 like it was part of the evening,” says Destino. “It was so hot then that there would always be a throng on the sidewalk begging, trying to get in, doing anything that they possibly could. But Reggie would walk through that crowd like Moses through the river. The sea would part.”

Reggie was starting to dread the game he loved. He was waking up in the middle of the night and wandering out to his balcony twenty stories above Fifth Avenue, where he’d stare out at the New York City skyline and wonder how he was going to make it through the summer.

What upset him was his failure to understand why. ‘Why are they doing this to me?’”

24.

“NOW is the summer of our discotheques,” wrote night-crawling journalist Anthony Haden-Guest in New York magazine in June 1977. “And every night is party night.”

Studio 54, the discotheque that defined an entire era of nightlife, had opened two months earlier, and Paramount Pictures had just begun filming Saturday Night Fever.

Like any fad that seems to erupt into the national consciousness, this one had been percolating below ground for years: in gay hot spots along the abandoned West Side waterfront, in the vacant sweatshops south of Houston Street, in the dingy recreation rooms of Bronx and Brooklyn housing projects, in the empty ballrooms of aging midtown hotels. If New York’s disco scene had a party zero, it was David Mancuso’s Love Saves the Day bash on Valentine’s Day 1970.

“The whole scene was a response to the sixties,” says Michael Gomes, an early disco devotee who moved to New York from Toronto in 1973. “Instead of changing the world, we wanted to create our own little world.”

The Bronx’s own fledgling dance culture, one that eventually blossomed into hip-hop, was simultaneously gestating. It was less formal than the new wave of discotheques; a DJ might set up his table in a playground, run extension cords into the nearest lamppost, and start playing.

None of the hard-core dance clubs sold alcohol, but there were always plenty of drugs, chiefly acid, amyl nitrate, pot, mescalin, coke, Quaaludes (also known as disco biscuits), and speed.

Carmen d’Alessio

Since coming to New York in 1965, the Peruvian-born d‘Alessio had worked as a translator for the United Nations and logged a stint in public relations for Yves Saint Laurent, but in more recent years she had discovered her true calling, party planning. When Rubell and Schrager first spotted her in the winter of ’76, she was wearing a bikini and dancing on the shoulders of a tall black male model at a Brazilian Carnival theme party she’d organized.

Rubell and Schrager persuaded d‘Alessio to come work for them.

In addition to any celebrity whose address she could beg, borrow, or steal, d’Alessio sent invitations to everyone on the mailing list of the Ford Modeling Agency, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the Islanders, a group of several thousand gay men who summered on Fire Island. Come opening night, the place was mobbed. “My mother had to be carried in over the crowd,” d’Alessio recalls. Studio 54 took the escapist ethic of the disco scene to its absurd extreme. An

this wasn’t about avoiding reality as much as it was about obliterating it.

“I don’t know if I was in heaven or hell,” Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy, reflected on her first visit there. “But it was wonderful.”

New York’s disco DJs were playing to bigger crowds than ever before, yet paradoxically, their power was slipping. Radio stations were now catching on to disco, so the record companies no longer needed to cultivate club DJs.

all the new clubs served booze, which made the dancing sloppy. Michael Gomes, who was now publishing a newsletter for DJs called Mixmaster, referred derisively to the drunk and stoned dancers at Studio 54 as “discodroids.”

If disco music was euphoric, hypnotic, punk rock was assaultive, relentless; if discos like Studio 54 provided an escape from the ugliness of New York, its punk analog, a urine-stained dive on the Bowery called CBGB, embraced and indulged it.

Other protopunk acts including Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, soon followed. At a time when rock ‘n’ roll connoted suburban stadiums, a rock scene was born on, of all places, the Bowery. “Broken youth stumbling into the home of broken age,” wrote Frank Rose, noting the irony in The Village Voice in the summer of ’76.

The Talking Heads, another one of the most popular bands at CBGB, wasn’t doing much better. Their 1977 album, Talking Heads ’77, barely broke 100. Touring the country that summer in the wake of its release, the band found itself playing mostly at pizza parlors.

25.

WITH Bella Abzug and Mario Cuomo now in the race, David Garth adjusted the odds for his candidate, Ed Koch, from twenty to one to forty to one.

Reflecting on the ’77 campaign years later, Garth opted for a different metaphor: “Koch … was never the flashy guy who went out for the long pass. He was the Bronko Nagurski of politics, three yards and a cloud of dust.”

Not only was Koch funny-looking and not especially charming, but he lived in Greenwich Village, had no girlfriend, and had never been married.

Garth’s plan was to keep the focus on the issues, to somehow make a virtue of his candidate’s lack of charm. Koch was unknown, but at least he wasn’t disliked. It was no secret that New York was on the ropes. For the purposes of political narrative anyway, it was easy to put the starry-eyed Lindsay and the special interest–beholden Beame as the one-two punch that landed it there. The result was the made-for-TV tagline: “After eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence?”

26.

IN the early summer of 1977, as the mayoral candidates started jockeying in earnest to present themselves as the answer to the city’s problems, New Yorkers were already creatively exploiting the very neglect that the politicians were decrying. Just as the gay community had colonized the abandoned West Side piers and graffiti writers were transforming unguarded subway cars into art installations, painters, sculptors, and entrepreneurs were repurposing empty factories and sweatshops in the area below Houston Street.

Rockefeller, the head of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, envisioned SoHo as a gateway to Wall Street, complete with office buildings, luxury apartment towers, even a sports stadium.

The derelict lofts of SoHo were also becoming popular among avant-garde jazz musicians

a formidable antiexpressway lobby was materializing, led by author–cum–neighborhood superheroine Jane Jacobs and a loose-knit coalition of Greenwich Village activists that included an ambitious young politician named Ed Koch, all of whom considered the expressway a threat to an indigenous New York neighborhood.

in 1969 the expressway plan was finally scotched.

To a city already casting about for ways to shore up its eroding tax base, SoHo’s artistic community was looking more and more like an economic boon.

the neighborhood was officially declared a landmark district, ensuring that it would forever remain out of harm’s way.

For years people had been calling SoHo the new Montparnasse. The twenty-six-hundred-square-foot Dean & DeLuca would be its fromagerie, patisserie, and boulangerie all rolled into one.

In later years the proud pioneers who had settled—or resettled anyway—this urban frontier would point darkly to the day, identifying it as the tipping point, the moment when their beloved neighborhood made the irreversible transition from scruffy artists’ colony to theme park for the taste-fetishizing upwardly mobile.

these buildings that had once stood as ghostly reminders of the disappearance of manufacturing from New York were now being transformed into monuments to the city’s resilience, powerfully evoking the past even as they hinted at a postindustrial future.

PART TWO

27.

WILLIAM Jurith left for work in the early afternoon of Wednesday, July 13. He was supposed to have the day off, but when a colleague told him that he needed to take care of some personal business, Jurith, who was putting his son through law school, volunteered to pick up his colleague’s four-to-midnight shift.

Jurith was a system operator for Consolidated Edison. He had no training as an engineer,

the company served all five boroughs and most of Westchester County, a total of nine million people.

The city’s stringent clean-air regulations made it prohibitively expensive to depend on local generators that were required to burn costly low-sulfur oil rather than cheaper alternatives like coal. So Con Ed built plants outside the city and bought power from neighboring states rather than make it. Most of that power came from the north—from

Power failures, or at least the fear of them, had been a rite of summer in New York since 1965.

The system’s first major test of ’77 was now on its way. A blanket of hot, muggy weather was descending on the city like a giant steam iron.

Unlike gas, electricity can’t be stored; it has to be used as it is generated. So as a day got hotter, the system operator had to anticipate the growing demand for power and find the most efficient ways to meet it. That meant bringing up generation with the help of gas turbines and special reserve generators known as peaking units, as well as contracting to buy additional power on the spot market. On July 13 demand peaked at 7,264 megawatts at 4 p.m.,

At 8:37 p.m., Jurith looked up

Two circuit breakers had tripped in Westchester County, and a pair of high-voltage transmission lines had opened.

A horn blared. Jurith glanced at the mimic board. A needle was falling like the pressure gauge on a deflating tire—nine hundred megawatts, eight hundred megawatts, seven hundred megawatts—all the way to zero. It was Indian Point, his “nukie.”

Either the mimic board was malfunctioning, or something was very, very wrong. Jurith punched a button on his communication console and was patched right through to Westchester’s district operator. “Yeah, Bill,” Westchester confirmed, “it looks like we lost the entire south bus [Buchanan], including Unit 3 [Indian Point] … The station operator tells me he saw lightning.”

The breakers were supposed to open the affected lines and isolate the problem until the fault dissipated. The fault did dissipate in less than a second, but the circuit breakers never reclosed to allow the flow of power to resume.

with three transmission lines out of service, the remaining lines were going to be shouldering a much bigger energy burden than they were built to handle.

At 8:40 p.m. a high-pitched alarm sounded on Jurith’s desktop monitor. A key feeder connecting the Con Ed system to New England was exceeding its limit by a hundred megawatts. If the line wasn’t deloaded right away, it was going to fry.

28.

Studying the big board, Kennedy could see no alternative. Con Ed was going to have to unplug some customers. He called Jurith.

At 8:59 Kennedy called him again. This time he was a little more insistent: “Bill, I hate to bother you, but you better shed about 400 megawatts of load or you’re going to lose everything down there.” “I’m trying to,” Jurith answered. “You’re trying to?” Kennedy asked incredulously. “All you have to do is hit the button to shed it and then we’ll worry about it afterwards—but you got to do something …” “Yeah, right,” Jurith answered. “Yeah, fine.” Jurith still refused to activate the load-shedding panel. He may have resented the fact that Kennedy, who wasn’t really his boss, was telling him what to do. He may have been clinging desperately to the hope that those three last feeders could support the system long enough for another solution to emerge. Probably he just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Jurith’s job was to keep people’s lights on, not to shut them off. “We got the impression that he was disintegrating,” recalls Carolyn Brancato,

At 9:08, Jurith’s boss, Charles Durkin, called in.

Jurith didn’t notify Durkin that the power pool had been urging him to shed load for more than ten minutes. Instead, he told Durkin about his plans for Feeder 80. “Where’s the power going to go if you cut it out?” Durkin replied. “You can’t cut it out.” While Jurith was on the phone with Durkin, Kennedy called again on the green phone, a special dedicated hotline for emergency use only. Jurith’s deputy, John Cockerham, answered. “Tell Bill to go into voltage reduction immediately down there,”

At 9:19, Feeder 80 drooped into a tree. Circuit breakers were tripped, and the line opened. Con Ed had lost its only connection to the north.

Kennedy made his final call to the Con Ed control room at 9:27. Cockerham picked up. “I’m going to tell you one more time …”

No more than thirty megawatts were shed. Something had obviously gone wrong. In all likelihood, Jurith failed to operate the load-dumping equipment properly.

The Con Ed system was now officially islanded, cut off from all external power sources. It shifted much of its load to its biggest in-city generator, Big Allis, a thousand-megawatt steam unit in Queens. Like a circular saw fighting a losing battle with an oversize piece of wood, Big Allis’s turbines ground to a halt.

Seconds later the generator automatically shut itself down. The city’s nine remaining generators buckled instantaneously under the increased load.

Ten thousand traffic lights blinked off. Subway trains froze between stations. Elevators, water pumps, air conditioners—everything sputtered to a halt. All five boroughs and most of Westchester County were suddenly without power.

29.

OFFICER Wilton Sekzer, a broad, mustachioed man, about five feet ten, with jowly cheeks and rheumy hazel eyes, was in the living room of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, when the lights went out. On the way into the kitchen to check his fuse box, he peeked out the window. The whole block was dark. Sekzer ran up three flights and swung open the metal door to his roof. The whole neighborhood was dark.

Sekzer had been sent to the Eighty-third Precinct from Emergency Services in the summer of ’75, when the city’s fiscal crisis forced the Police Department to lay off five thousand officers.

Down five thousand men at a time of soaring crime, the city’s depleted precincts were going to need all the beat cops the department could muster.

The Eighty-third Precinct was not exactly a desirable assignment in 1977. The prior year it had confronted more criminal activity than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. Many truck drivers insisted on police escorts when making deliveries in the neighborhood.

It didn’t help that the fiscal crisis had virtually eliminated Police Department support staff. It took anywhere from ten to fourteen hours for a cop to process a single perp.

Rookies were taught a few important lessons when they reported for duty at the Eight-Three. Don’t walk too close to the buildings (someone might drop a brick on you). Don’t let neighborhood kids wear your hat (lice). Always check the earpiece on call boxes before using it (dog shit).

30.

nothing could have prepared them for what greeted them on Broadway. Thousands of people were already out on the street; thousands more were pouring in from every direction. “If they had turned on the lights,” one cop remembers, “it would have looked like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

According to one police report, the looting had started at 9:40 p.m., only minutes after the onset of darkness. Marauding bands were sawing open padlocks. They were taking crowbars to steel shutters, prying them open like tennis-ball-can tops or simply jimmying them up with hydraulic jacks

The most expensive shops were hit first: jewelry, electronics, and furniture stores. A teenager attached a chain to the bumper of a stolen truck and tore off the gates of a luxury item shop called Time Credit. He pitched a garbage pail through the window and filled the truck with TVs, air conditioners, and a rack of watches.

For the cops, there was no time for paperwork. All the stolen merchandise was piled up in the property room in the back of the station house. Polaroids were snapped of the cop with his perp. Time and place of arrest were scribbled on the backs. The prisoner was stuffed into a holding cell, and the arresting officer headed back out into the mayhem.

Bullets, as well as bricks and bottles, were raining down from rooftops.

For some reason, though, the Eight-Three received no backup from any of the city’s quieter precincts.

31.

MAYOR Beame had just started in on a campaign reelection speech to a standing room only crowd of five hundred at the Traditional Synagogue in Co-op City when the lights went out.

The mayor climbed into his Chrysler and was spirited down to Gracie Mansion, where a candlelight strategy session was already in progress.

When he returned to police headquarters at a little after 5 a.m., Beame held another press conference in which he called on religious leaders to get into patrol cars and calm their communities. One of those who did, a priest in the Bronx, had his altar stolen while he was gone.

Police Commissioner Codd had ordered all officers to report for duty immediately, only instead of insisting that everyone try to find a way to get to his command, Codd told them to report to the nearest precincts.

This proved to be an enormous mistake. Ever since the 1962 repeal of the Lyons Law, which had required all cops to live in the city, police officers had been moving to the

suburbs in droves. Most of those who continued to reside in the city lived in Queens or on Staten Island, so in the early hours of the blackout, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of idle cops hanging around quiet precincts.

Morale in the department had been on the skids ever since the ’75 layoffs.

as the looting peaked between midnight and 4 a.m., some ten thousand cops, 40 percent of the force who were neither on vacation nor on sick leave, had yet to check in.

32.

THE looting was by no means citywide. In some of the tonier areas of Manhattan, restaurants moved tables outside to escape the heat. Several stretches of First Avenue on the Upper East Side might have been mistaken for streets in Paris, were it not for the angled cars, headlights on, that made it possible for diners to identify what they were eating.

To this day the blackout looting of 1977 remains the only civil disturbance in the history of New York City to encompass all five boroughs simultaneously.

The Bronx was hit even harder than Manhattan. By 11 p.m., the showroom windows of a Pontiac dealership on Jerome Avenue had been smashed, and fifty of the fifty-five new cars parked inside driven off into the black night.

473 stores in the Bronx were damaged; 961 looters were arrested.

Still, the character of the chaos in Bushwick was unique. “The crowds on Broadway in Bushwick seemed to possess a special kind of hysteria as the evening wore on,”

It was a spirit born of the poverty and desperation of ghetto life. Yet what was so remarkable about Bushwick was that it had been a sturdy middle-class enclave just a decade earlier. The speed of its decline was dizzying.

33.

IN Bushwick the arrests peaked at about 1:30 a.m. By then there were two shifts’ worth of cops—4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m.—out on the streets.

“You just wanted to stop the riot, so you beat up the looters with ax handles and nightsticks,” recalls Robert Knightly, a bearded, mild-mannered veteran of the Eight-Three who is now a defense attorney for Legal Aid.

34.

More than twenty fires were still burning along Broadway come Thursday morning, ten hours after the blackout had begun. The stifling heat was made more oppressive by the blanket of black smoke that hung heavy over the neighborhood.

“what was most upsetting was that you worked in this precinct. You worked with these people, you had taken care of them, and yet here they were, burning their own stores down.

35.

BROADWAY separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was once a middle-class enclave too, a neighborhood of stickball, brownstones, and postwar optimism. As the fifties wore on, though, more and more of Bed-Stuy’s working-class white families migrated to the suburbs.

In 1965 the Department of Housing and Urban Development called Bed-Stuy “the heart of the largest ghetto in America.”

Bushwick was less dependent on the dying navy yard for jobs than much of the borough.

Some of Bushwick’s working class pulled up stakes, in most cases pushing east into Long Island. Others dug in their heels.

Even those all too aware of Bushwick’s woes couldn’t have predicted what was coming next. When a house near St. Martin’s burned down in 1969, neighbors expressed their condolences to the owner. Nobody thought arson. “We felt sorry for him,” says St. Martin. “Insurance or no insurance, you didn’t burn your own house down and put other people at risk. It was unthinkable. It just didn’t happen.”

1972, Bushwick’s two ladder companies, 124 and 112, went on more then six thousand runs, the unofficial benchmark of a severe social crisis.

The fires were set by landlords who were tired of trying to evict delinquent tenants.

They were set by vandals who intended to return for the plumbing systems, which were easier to extract and sell once the firemen had knocked down the walls. They were set by idle kids who wandered the streets aimlessly after school.

Most of Bushwick’s buildings had been built for German immigrants before 1910. More than half of them were made of wood and designed with air shafts over their stairwells. They burned like furnaces.

As Jim Sleeper wrote in The Closest of Strangers, his trenchant 1990 book about liberalism and race in New York, “By the mid-1970s, Bushwick was … a prison of traumatized welfare recipients reeling in rage and despair.” In the darkness of July 13, 1977, that rage and despair found an outlet.

36.

IN the days after the blackout a damp, acrid smell permeated Bushwick. Fire-damaged buildings sloughed off large chunks of debris. Broken pipes burped brown water onto sidewalks. In the litter-strewn streets, people filled shopping carts with abandoned packages of meat.

During a few successive roll calls, sergeants asked if anyone had used his gun that night. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that accompanied every shot fired, not to mention the elaborate examinations and reenactments mandated by the Weapons Discharge Review Board.

William Bracey, the commanding officer for North Brooklyn, came through the Eight-Three to offer his commendation for a job well done, and without firing a single shot.

“It is here, in the dirt and the smells and the heat,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, “that New York must struggle to keep a crucial part of its city from falling apart.” Martin

For the Eight-Three, the bad summer got worse. In late August one of precinct’s most beloved cops, a black officer named Joseph Taylor, Jr., the father of a three-year-old daughter, was killed in the line of duty.

37.

NEW York’s long night of looting was followed by another hot day, with temperatures climbing into the high nineties. The power still wasn’t back.

Here and there a building burned for no apparent reason.

High-density areas were the first priority, creating a perverse situation: The depleted slums were among the last to get their power back.

The Daily News borrowed several generator-powered klieg lights from the crew of Superman, which was being filmed in the lobby of its building (the huge globe made it the picture-perfect newspaper lobby) and managed to publish a late edition.

But it was the local news broadcasts that really brought the story home, the searing images of tenements in flames, of twisted metal and broken glass, of shirtless young men strutting brazenly down crowded streets, pushing shopping carts filled with TV sets, or balancing new couches on their backs like seesaws.

The conservative social critic Midge Decter likened the sensation to “having been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.”

It was the largest mass arrest in the city’s history, yet it had barely dented the momentum of the looting. As

All 3,776 prisoners had finally been arraigned. But the reckoning with the damage, both physical and psychic, had only just begun.

38.

Union Carbide was in the process of moving its corporate headquarters out of New York City—not, as a company spokesman later pointed out, merely because of the crime and high cost of living but because of its “changing ethnic mix, which makes some people uncomfortable, and the graffiti on the subways, the dirt on the streets, and a lot of other things.”

Between 1973 and 1976 the city had lost 340,000 jobs. How many more were sure to follow now?

As a candidate Carter had criticized President Ford for having “no urban policy.” To date, Carter’s own urban policy had been one of studied indifference. Most noteworthy had been his failure to make good on, or even acknowledge, his campaign pledge to assume the city’s welfare costs, which were currently exceeding its education budget. (Even Mayor Beame had written off the president. “Jimmy Carter still loves me,” the mayor joked at the annual follies put on by the City Hall press corps. “The last time I met with him, he told me he had a whole list of items to help the city. But he left the list in his other sweater.”)

39.

BACK up off the canvas, if still a little woozy, in the weeks after the blackout New York found itself groping to understand the nature of the beating it had just endured.

comparison. “In ghastly contrast to 1965, when a spirit of unity and common sacrifice brightened every section in the darkened city,” the New York Post editorialized on July 16, “New York was transformed into a series of seething battlegrounds.”

Either the looters were heirs to the urban rioters of the sixties, members of what one columnist termed “the most significant class uprising in this decade,” or they were hoodlums.

black and Hispanic teenage unemployment was hovering at 70 and 80 percent respectively,

At its best, the backlash took the shape of an enlightened awareness that it was possible—no, imperative—to feel the pressing need to do something about New York’s hurting neighborhoods, to find ways to create full-time long-term jobs and

promote urban renewal from the ground up, without excusing the looters from taking responsibility for their actions.

40.

FROM the start some of the most unequivocal denunciations of the looters had come from the black community, where one difference between the disturbances of the 1960s and the blackout looting seemed especially apparent. In the sixties rioters had spared merchants with the foresight to mount “Soul Brother” signs in their windows. During the looting of ’77 not only were black- and minority-owned businesses not spared, but they bore the brunt of the destruction.

“Buy black” had been the mantra during the struggle for civil rights in the fifties and sixties. Now local church leaders and politicians were urging the community not to buy black if the merchant in question was hawking stolen goods.

“we must forthrightly and adamantly condemn it.” Manhattan borough president and mayoral candidate Percy Sutton shared this view.

Sutton already knew he was finished. The blackout looting was not racially motivated, yet the vast majority of those arrested were black. The white backlash would be impossible for any black candidate to overcome.

There had been seventy-five felonies committed every hour in New York in 1976, making it the worst crime year in the city’s history.

In the wake of the blackout Sutton’s frustration at his inability to bridge New York’s racial gap turned to anger. His mayoral dreams deflated, his faith in the integrationist ideal dented, he accused the white press of ignoring his campaign:

At the end of 1977 a bitter Sutton resigned “forever” from public life, saying simply, “I no longer want anything from the city.”

PART THREE

41.

TO Osborn Elliott, whose job as New York’s deputy mayor for economic development was to attract business to the city, the real disaster wasn’t the blackout looting. It was the New York Post’s coverage of it.

Murdoch was an active presence in the newsroom, writing and rewriting headlines, peering over reporters’ shoulders, even answering telephones.

Mayor Beame denounced the paper’s arriviste publisher, calling Murdoch an “Australian carpetbagger” who “came here to line his pockets by peddling fiction in the guise of news.” The Post, the mayor continued, “was making Hustler magazine look like the Harvard [Law] Review.”

less. The Post’s July 15 blackout special exceeded the paper’s usual Friday sales by seventy-five thousand. It was safe to say that the city was on the brink of its first newspaper war since the fifties.

the mighty Yankees were running third behind the streaky Red Sox and an overachieving Baltimore Orioles team that started no fewer than five rookies.

By now Martin, never a fan of the free press—“if writers knew any goddamn thing, they would be managers,” he once said—was getting more fed up than usual with the media. In Martin’s day the papers didn’t use quotes that made the team look bad. What’s more, ball clubs were covered through their managers. Between his bigfooted owner and loudmouthed players, even those who were only trying to help, Martin never had a clue to what was going to be in the papers, especially when it came to the scandal-mongering Post.

Steinbrenner produced a list of seven qualifications, which the newspapermen promptly named “the Seven Commandments,” that he expected Martin to meet if he wanted to hang on to his job. Two stood out: “Is he emotionally equipped to lead the men under him?” and “Is he honorable?”

there comes a time when even the fans wake up.” The only thing that New York’s fans were waking up to was a deep and abiding hatred of George Steinbrenner. After all, who was a man found guilty of making illegal donations to the Nixon campaign, a man whose company was being investigated by the Justice Department for fraudulent billing practices, to tell Billy Martin about honor?

42.

For the past twelve months a serial killer, New York’s first since the 1930s, had been preying on young women (chiefly brunettes) in the outer boroughs (chiefly Queens). Since July 29, 1976, when he first attacked two young women on a residential street in a working-class Italian neighborhood in the North Bronx, the so-called Son of Sam had killed five and injured six.

March 10, reporters packed into the 112th Precinct station house in Forest Hills for a news conference. With Mayor Beame standing beside him, Police Commissioner Codd made the announcement: The bullets that killed Voskerichian, Freund, and Lauria and that wounded DiMasi, Lomino, and Denaro all had been issued from the same .44-caliber revolver. “Be careful,” Codd warned, “especially the young women.” In the weeks that followed, the side streets of Forest Hills were deserted by dusk.

on April 17, the .44-caliber killer returned to the North Bronx. The victims were parked in a Mercury Montego on a dark service road off the Hutchinson River Parkway. When the detectives pulled their bodies out of the car, an envelope addressed to Captain Borrelli fell to the ground. Inside was a four-page letter, handwritten in slanted block letters. The NYPD refused to make its contents public, but the Daily News learned enough for a front-page story the following day: KILLER TO COPS: “I’LL DO IT AGAIN.”

The ensuing psychological profiles—the killer is a paranoid schizophrenic, a loner who lives in a cheap furnished room, who feels rejected by women and may even consider himself possessed—didn’t help investigators much, but when leaked to the press, they immediately enhanced the suspect’s aura of mystery and stoked the city’s sense of fear.

in early June the .44-caliber killer decided to communicate with the city again.

It was Jimmy Breslin’s secretary at the Daily News, Ann Marie Caggiano, who first noticed something strange about the letter—namely,

The front page of the News hinted at its contents for days—NEW NOTE: CAN’T STOP KILLING; .44 KILLER: I AM NOT ASLEEP; COPS: .44 KILLER IS TAUNTING US—all the while promising that the paper’s star columnist would answer the letter on Sunday, June 5. When he did, Breslin urged the killer to turn himself in, “to me, if he trusts me.”

In early July, Mayor Beame added more men to the Omega force. The city had only a thousand detectives, down from three thousand before the fiscal crisis, but the pressure to catch the killer was intensifying. Omega now had fifty detectives working the case,

It was easily the largest manhunt in New York history.

On the morning of Wednesday, August 3, as Stacy Moskowitz was being eulogized in a crowded chapel on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, bombs planted by

the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN exploded in two midtown Manhattan office buildings. An additional wave of bomb threats quickly followed, and a hundred thousand people were evacuated from more than a dozen buildings.

“For those who have lived through this mad week in New York there is a shared sense of outrage and impotence,” the Times editorialized on Friday, August 5. “Is New York City, after all, a failed ultraurban experiment in which people eventually crack, social order eventually collapses, and reason ultimately yields to despair?”

In recent weeks discotheques in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx had been reporting an 80 to 90 percent drop in business and were, according to a story on the front page of Billboard magazine in early August, “teetering on the brink of financial disaster.”

The Enchanted Garden, which had been averaging a thousand people a night only a couple of months earlier, was now logging barely over a hundred.

43.

One mid-July evening in Kansas City, after hustling into the right field corner to retrieve a Hal McRae line drive, Reggie bobbled the ball like a Little Leaguer as McRae raced around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. When Reggie returned to the dugout at the end of the inning, Sparky Lyle told him to get his head out of his ass. “He was speaking for the whole team, and we were both fully aware of that,” Reggie reflected later.

In New York, Reggie had been signing autographs after the All-Star Game when a thirteen-year-old kid called him a motherfucker. Reggie chased the kid across the parking lot. Moments later the kid was on the asphalt. Criminal harassment charges were filed.

Come August 5, he was hitting .291 with eighteen home runs, ten stolen bases, and fifty-eight RBIs,

The Yankees, for their part, were in the tank. After pulling within one game of the Red Sox and Orioles at the end of July, they had proceeded to lose four of their next six.

44.

THE first real break in the Son of Sam case came a couple of hours before sunrise on August 1, the morning after the attack on Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante,

“You got me,” said Berkowitz. “Who are you?” Falotico asked, his heart pounding. “You know met.” “I don’t.” “I’m the Son of Sam.”

45.

THE convoy of police vehicles arrived at Centre Street at around one the following morning. The plaza was already choked with reporters, camera crews, and cops. Roone Arledge, the head of ABC News, was on the scene, personally directing his network’s coverage with a walkie-talkie.

Mayor Beame, who had been awakened in Gracie Mansion minutes after the arrest, was waiting upstairs for Berkowitz to enter the building. When he did, the mayor rushed down to congratulate the arresting officer. Mistaking Berkowitz for a detective, Beame moved toward the killer and tried to shake his manacled hands. “The photo op from hell,” as the mayor’s press secretary, Sid Frigand, later described it.

A portrait of Berkowitz quickly came into focus. He had been adopted and raised by a childless Jewish couple, Nathan and Pearl, in the Bronx. He

graduated from high school and logged one year at Bronx Community College, as well as several months as an auxiliary police officer, before joining the army, where he learned to handle an M-16 rifle and experimented with hallucinogens.

After a stint with an infantry division in South Korea, Berkowitz finished out his tour in Fort Knox. While he was stationed in Kentucky, he attended a church with an army buddy and became a fervent Baptist overnight.

SAM SLEEPS.

But with those two words, the Post had done much more. In an essay a few years later in Harper’s magazine, Ron Rosenbaum captured the headline’s tabloid genius: “How do we know that any of us ordinary citizens—looking just as ordinary on the surface as Sam there—might not be harboring a Sam sleeping within us. SAM SLEEPS might be the single most grim and poetic summation of the horror of the whole case.”

Not since the days of Hearst, Pulitzer, and the Daily Mirror had New York’s newspapers pandered so shamelessly to the city’s id. Yet in his own hamfisted, irresponsible way, Murdoch deserved at least a little credit for reminding New Yorkers that reading the newspaper, like living in the city, was an emotional experience.

46.

“There is naked fear here,” wrote Evans and Novak on August 4, “that the looters may reassert their impunity some ordinary evening at sunset without waiting for a power blackout.”

Koch was doing more than simply exploiting New York’s bloodlust. Much as the city’s beloved baseball team and its cherished tabloid, he was changing colors with New York’s temper like a mood ring. Koch’s metamorphosis had been under way for more than a decade. In August ’77, even

his campaign manager, David Garth, was a little surprised by how far he’d come. “I felt as though I had made the same mistake as the rest of the city,” Garth recalls, “which was mark him down as a Greenwich Village liberal when in fact he was more conservative than that.”

Championing capital punishment, pummeling the unions, decrying government waste: This was not your typical liberal rhetoric.

Koch’s steady drumbeat of clever commercials, produced in Garth’s state-of-the-art three-monitor studio—“Mayor Beame is asking for four more years to finish the job. Finish the job? Hasn’t he done enough?”—coupled with the eighteen-hour days campaigning in a Winnebago blaring “N.Y.C.,” the hit song from the Broadway musical Annie, were having their intended effect. Koch could feel himself gaining momentum.

Then Koch got his biggest break yet.

The Post, Murdoch told Koch, was going to endorse him. In the event, the paper did much more than that, playing the editorial on its front page and generating enough pro-Koch copy in the ensuing weeks to prompt fifty Post reporters and editors to sign a petition complaining about their tabloid’s biased coverage.

47.

Having taken his rightful place in the lineup, Reggie was flourishing.

Reggie showed off his once-feared arm, cutting down Bobby Bonds, one of the fastest men in baseball, when he tried to score the go-ahead run

The Yankees were winning, and more often than not with a maximum of theatrics.

Guidry did some mop-up work during the first few weeks of the season. On April 29, with the Yankees set to host the Mariners at the stadium, Martin found himself in a bind. His scheduled starter, Mike Torrez, whom the Yankees had just acquired for Dock Ellis, had not yet reported to New York. Martin’s only rested starters, Catfish Hunter and Don Gullett, both were hurt. An hour before game time Torrez was scratched. Guidry would be starting for the first time since the Carolina League, circa 1973.

He went on to pitch a 3–0 shutout.

The more Guidry threw the slider, the more it came to resemble Lyle’s, only harder. By the middle of August, Guidry was leading the team in strikeouts, and his ERA was just a shade above 3.00. He was still unknown, untested, so no one dared say it out loud, but the way the left-hander dispensed with hitters—hypnotizing them with heat and then bringing them to with that hard, tumbling slider thrown from the identical arm angle—was reminiscent of Sandy Koufax’s fastball-curve one-two.

The Yankees returned to New York early the next morning. They were fourteen of their last sixteen,

and twenty-three and nine since the All-Star break. With a little help from the suddenly slumping Red Sox, they led the American League East by a half game.

48.

ON August 24, two weeks before the Democratic primary, the results from the most recent New York Times / Channel 2 News survey put Abzug and Beame in a dead heat, with both Cuomo and Koch within striking distance.

As July gave way to August, Abzug’s popularity was ebbing. That one of the candidates gaining ground on her was Ed Koch made her all the more spiteful.

Abzug and Koch were enemies of long standing.

Their feud had begun in 1968, when

Koch refused to march in an anti-Vietnam protest organized by a group Abzug chaired, not because he was in favor of the war but because he believed the group was a Communist front.

49.

IN 1860 an Illinois lawyer and Republican presidential candidate named Abraham Lincoln gave his first speech in New York—his soon-to-be-famous “Right Makes Might” address—in the Great Hall at Cooper Union College. Some fifty years later, in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, thousands of immigrant workers gathered in the same room for the rally that launched one of the most important uprisings in the history of the labor movement. And on August 30, 1977, an event far less memorable yet still irresistibly symbolic took place within these hallowed halls. In the waning moments of a debate for the upcoming mayoral primary, an evening punctuated by frequent intervals of hooting and jeering, a chubby, balding man rose from his seat and hurled an apple pie at Mayor Beame.

The press was merciless. “To hear His Honor tell it, he was nothing but an innocent bystander, a detached observer,” the Daily News sputtered in an August 19 editorial headlined SIMPLY INCREDIBLE. “This, remember, comes from a man who won election in 1973 by convincing voters that he knew municipal finances from A to Z, could put more cops on the street, improve services and balance the books … With that attitude at the top, it’s a wonder New York didn’t wind up being auctioned off at a sheriff’s sale.”

Everyone

knew that averting bankruptcy had come at a terrible cost, self-rule. Had the state not intervened in 1975, transferring the management of the city’s financial affairs from City Hall to the Emergency Financial Control Board, a group that comprised more nonelected businessmen (three) than city officials (two), New York would surely have fallen into receivership.

the SEC report focused almost exclusively on a narrow five-month window, from the fall of ‘74 through the spring of ’75. “It [the fiscal crisis] wasn’t anything that occurred during that period,” Beame later reflected, accurately, if defensively. “It was the result of moves which had been made in years gone by … The city had a big heart, bigger than its pocketbook.”

50.

ALL summer Mario Cuomo had been denying that he was Governor Carey’s Mario-nette, an apparatchik dispatched from Albany to help the statehouse tighten its grip on City Hall.

Cuomo had absorbed his own story: the smart, tough, proud kid from the outer boroughs who owed his success to intelligence and fearlessness, not to the benefits of entitlement.

Rafshoon soon had some complaints of his own, chiefly that his candidate “kind of looked down on politics.” (A few years earlier, when he was first toying with the idea of running for mayor, Cuomo had penned a poem for his family called “Politics.” It began: “Politics, an incredible game, A lusting for power, money and fame. The rules are bizarre, the logic convoluted—Intentions inconstant, invariably polluted.”)

There was an intense competition for Cuomo’s ear that reflected the paradox at the candidate’s core: His conservative, outer borough instincts were perpetually at war with his loftier liberal ideals. “He thought the liberal ideals were more admirable—he aspired to them—but by instinct and impulse he was not a liberal,” recalls Cuomo’s pollster, Robert Sullivan.

Cuomo managed to keep his temper in check for most of the summer, save for one hot night in August, when Mike Long, an ex-marine and vocal street-corner conservative, accosted him after a speech at a high school in Brooklyn. When Long called Cuomo a liar, the candidate lunged at him, pushing him through the swinging doors at the back of the auditorium. They continued to shove and grab at one another in the hallway outside, and were about to start trading punches when the police broke it up.

Daily News, the paper that first urged Cuomo to enter the race, had abandoned him, endorsing Koch instead.

As the campaign entered its final week, the polls showed Cuomo, Koch, Abzug, and Beame running in a virtual dead heat. A runoff was now a near certainty.

51.

Koch was busy campaigning with his own sidekick, one enlisted to protect a very different soft spot. Bess Myerson, who was out of town for much of August, had been summoned back to New York for the final push. During the waning days of the campaign the two were inseparable.

With the exception of Bella Abzug, Myerson was the city’s most public woman, a former commissioner of consumer affairs who might well have been elected to the Senate in 1974 had her bid not been derailed by an eighteen-month bout with ovarian cancer.

52.

On Thursday, September 8, a mild, partly cloudy day, a record number of New York City Democrats turned out to nominate their candidate or at least narrow the field to two.

“I gave this city every ounce of my strength and my fullest devotion during its most trying years of crisis,” Beame told his dwindling band of supporters. “I’ve not let this city down.” Moments later the usually stoic mayor began to cry. His wife, Mary, hugged him, allowing Beame to collect himself, and he pressed on.

Ed Koch handed a bouquet of red roses to Myerson—“the most important person of the campaign”—and celebrated his narrow first-place victory.

second-place finisher Mario Cuomo squinted into the harsh glare of the TV lights and looked ahead to the September 19 runoff.

53.

ED Koch and Mario Cuomo had landed in first and second place in the September 8 primary, but they had managed to capture just 39 percent of the votes between them. The remaining 61 percent was now up for grabs, setting off a furious ten-day scramble for support

Cuomo’s indignation carried over into that night’s Channel 13 debate. He promptly went on the offensive, assailing Manhattan for turning its back on the outer boroughs and chiding Koch for supporting the death penalty. “I went into that debate feisty and as near to angry as I ever get, and it showed,” Cuomo remembers. “I was impolite. I was extremely tough on Koch. I did an awful job.”

54.

THE same night the Yankees and Red Sox were locked in their own standoff in the second of three high-stakes games at the stadium. Only ten days earlier the Yanks had opened their lead on the Sox to four and a half.

the streaking Sox, who had won ten of their last eleven, to pull within one and a half games before boarding their charter plane for New York.

Writing a month later in The New Yorker, Roger Angell invested the Boston series with two-pronged significance. It was the moment the Yankees won their pennant and the moment he stopped feeling comfortable bringing his wife and son to the Bronx ballyard. During the third game a group of fans in the upper deck showered their fellow spectators with beer, hurled darts and bottles onto the field, and engaged in a near riot with the stadium police. “There was nothing fresh or surprising about this,” Angell remarked; “it happened all the time this summer at Yankee Stadium.”

55.

Political candidates had once worried about alienating municipal labor bosses, but the fiscal crisis had inverted the equation. In agreeing to help save the city from bankruptcy by steering billions of pension fund dollars into New York–backed securities, the civil servant unions had become the city’s largest creditor.

Again and again Cuomo refused to participate in the sort of deal making that had long been part of the city’s political culture. It was true that New York’s five county leaders, once the kingmakers of the city’s electoral process, weren’t the men they used to be. There were fewer municipal jobs and contracts to parcel out, and the changing racial and ethnic mix of their respective boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, in particular—was eroding their once-unchallenged authority.

56.

EMBARKING on his run for governor in the spring of 1982, Mario Cuomo would blame all of the perceived problems with his candidacy on the dark days he had endured in September 1977.

I understand the theory that he didn’t want to win, but I don’t buy it,” says Sullivan—and by what happened next: Cuomo ran in the general election as the candidate of the Liberal Party.

Cuomo ran a superb campaign, the notable exception being his handling of the innuendos of Koch’s homosexuality. (Cuomo’s failure to prevent outer-borough field operatives from investigating the rumors and from posting the infamous handbills reading VOTE FOR CUOMO NOT THE HOMO may have been forgivable; his suggestion in one debate that Koch supported the right of gay school teachers to “proselytize” was definitely not.)

Come the November general election, Cuomo managed to capture more than 38 percent of the vote, pummeling the Republican candidate, giving Koch a scare, and salvaging his nascent political career.

in 1982, when Coumo resurfaced as a gubernatorial long shot, he got the better of Koch in a statewide rematch.

57.

THIS was Koch’s moment, though. Pete Hamill filed his postrunoff column in late September from Bushwick. More than two months had passed since New York’s long night of looting, and the damage had been absorbed into this bleak landscape. A steady drizzle added to the gloomy scene—the charred, gutted buildings; the abandoned cars that had long since been stripped bare. “This is the city that Ed Koch will have to cure,” Hamill wrote, “a city abandoned, a city unrepresented, a city cynical, the ruined and broken city.”

He eventually was haunted by the ghosts of the ’77 campaign. In the late eighties, three of his commissioners, Esposito cronies all, were convicted for corruption, and Bess Myerson unraveled, publicly, in a bribery scandal the tabs gleefully dubbed “the Bess Mess.”

But first, Koch—along with the rest of New York’s emerging titans: Reggie, Steinbrenner, and Murdoch—would lead the city into a new era.

They were flawed, farsighted, self-made men who intuitively understood the city’s desire for drama and conflict because they shared it. They were not idealists but egomaniacs.

between 1977 and 1985, the private sector created more jobs in the city than in the fifties and sixties combined.

a new Ed Koch, one that Garth had intentionally suppressed for fear that

it might alienate voters, quickly came into focus. This was Ed Koch the irrepressible, wisecracking cabbie, the city’s mascot as much as its mayor.

As for Bushwick, its recovery was slow, halting, to this day incomplete, yet inexorable.

The play-offs would be a rematch of ’76: the Yankees versus the Royals.

Martin declined to talk about his opponents for fear of saying something that might help them. But he was more than happy to talk about everything else, including what he called the turning point of the season, standing up to Reggie in the dugout at Fenway. And his boss. If the Yankees went on to win the World Series, Martin told the writers gathered in his office, and Steinbrenner didn’t

both sweeten and extend his three-year, three-hundred-thousand-dollar contract, he was going to have to think seriously about asking for permission to talk to other clubs.

the fans stood and cheered themselves hoarse. “This is in recognition of Billy telling off his boss,” Dick Young wrote in the Daily News, “by 55,000 people who dream of telling off the boss.”

59.

He was a couple of months late, but the president, in town to address the United Nations, had finally decided to pay a surprise visit to one of New York’s worst ghettos, a neighborhood that had been ignored by most of the borough’s blackout looters. By July 1977 there was virtually nothing there to steal.

By the time of Carter’s visit local community development groups with mottoes like “Don’t move. Improve,” had already begun to form. They beat back the city’s wrecking crews, rebuilt battered buildings, and fought for the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law requiring banks to provide loans in low-income neighborhoods.

61.

Healy, who’d been to the plate sixty-seven times all season, wasn’t expecting to be told to be ready to play. He wasn’t. Martin had an even more surprising request: “I’m sitting Reggie tonight, and I want you to tell him.” “I’m not telling him, you tell him,” an incredulous Healy replied. “You’re the manager.” “I don’t want to tell him.” “Why don’t you have one of the coaches tell him?” Healy asked. “They don’t want to tell him.”

The three-million-dollar slugger wasn’t hitting for “spit” (as the papers wrote it), and he was butchering balls in the outfield. “If I played him and he dropped a ball that cost us the game, I wouldn’t forgive myself for the rest of my life,” Martin said.

Reggie was in the grip of a one-for-fourteen postseason swoon,

As the newspapermen stalked Reggie, hoping for a more honest comment, another bomb was ticking away. The Yankees’ leadoff hitter, Mickey Rivers, was holed up in the trainer’s room refusing to get dressed. He’d been having problems with his wife all year. Earlier in the season she’d reportedly chased him from their apartment in New Jersey up to the stadium and then repeatedly smashed into his car until a parking lot attendant intervened.

Now she had racked up a huge shopping bill in their Kansas City hotel, and the front office was refusing to advance Rivers the money to cover it.

They won it in the ninth.

62.

THE Yankees’ charter touched down at Newark Airport

Martin was the first to disembark. He descended the ramp, which was swarming with drunk fans, to chants of “We love Billy!” Martin’s stature, never in doubt, was now more exalted than ever.

63.

WHEN the Dodgers still played in Flatbush, the Bums provided the color and the Bombers provided the class. These days the two teams had taken the shape of their respective cities: the friendly, easygoing Dodgers and the tired, neurotic Yankees.

64.

GAME two was humbling for the Yankees—Catfish Hunter, pitching on thirty-two days’ rest but still shaky, was torched—and humiliating for the city.

About an hour before the first pitch, a fire started in Public School 3, an abandoned elementary school a few blocks west of the ballpark. By the time ABC began its broadcast at 8 p.m., orange flames were licking toward the sky.

“There it is, ladies and gentlemen,” announced Howard Cosell, who later misidentified the building as an apartment complex, “the Bronx is burning.”

By the late innings the fire had grown to five alarms, and Yankees’ fans were getting restless. Play was stopped repeatedly while stadium police chased fans across the field. Rolls of toilet paper, whiskey bottles, and firecrackers rained down on the field. The residents of the upper deck dumped beer on the owners of the box seats below. A cop was assaulted when he asked several fans to lower a banner that was obstructing the view of those behind them. One fan pulled down his pants and hung from the scoreboard. Another tossed a smoke bomb from the stands that beclouded the outfield in an electric green haze. New York’s nationally televised degradation was still not complete. During the final out of the game, a fan pegged Dodgers’ rightfielder Reggie Smith in the head with a hard rubber ball.

Reggie, hitless on the night and three for twenty-two in the postseason, was less supportive when a reporter asked him about it: “How could the son of a bitch have pitched him?”

65.

magazine story. The new issue of Time, which contained a story headlined NICE GUYS ALWAYS FINISH … ?, greeted the Yankees on their return to New York on the cold, rainy morning of Monday, October 17. In a single page of text the magazine had Steinbrenner saying that several Yankees had pleaded with him to fire Martin; Martin saying that if Steinbrenner fired him, he’d never live it down with the fans (“a little Dago like me fixed his ass”); and Reggie saying he would refuse to play another year for Martin. To most of America and all New York none of this came as any surprise. By now everyone just wanted to see how this bizarre drama would end.

66.

IN the days that followed, some said it had to end like this, but watching Reggie Jackson’s game six performance now, it seems like an odd conclusion to this long season of tension and torment, not anticlimactic, but somehow unbaseball-like.

Reggie simply strides to the plate three consecutive times against three different pitchers and, before the commentators can even properly set the scene, strokes the first pitch he sees into the seats.

For this one night the all-too-human Reggie Jackson glowed with superhuman greatness.

up a pair of fingers, mouthing the word two. In the home half of the eighth, a standing ovation greeted Reggie as he walked toward the plate. The din continued as he smoothed the dirt in the batter’s box with his spikes. Then, for a split second, after Reggie reached down for Charlie Hough’s diving knuckleball, a good pitch, the crowd fell silent—“choking on its own disbelief,” as The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell would write. This time Reggie knew. He stood and watched as the ball sailed toward dead center, touching down about halfway up the stadium’s blacked-out bleachers, some 475 feet from where it had collided with his bat. As Reggie glided around first, Dodgers’ first baseman Steve Garvey applauded softly into his glove.

Reggie’s last home run put the Yankees on top 8–3. The Yankees’ first World Series in fifteen years was almost won, and the Bronx ballyard was ready to explode.

67.

ONLY Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in a single World Series game (twice, in fact), but never in consecutive at bats, let alone on three pitches.

As for Reggie, he didn’t see why he should be limited to one interpretation. In the dozens of interviews he gave in the ensuing weeks, his game six performance became a triumph of the Lord (“God allowed me to do that”), a humanitarian gesture (“I’ll tell you what I was thinking … I did this for all of us. Take it. Enjoy it. And let’s do it again”), and, naturally, an emphatic telegram from the once-embattled superstar to his enemies, real and imagined: “Those home runs delivered a simple message: Let me up now—I’m no longer gonna be held down.”

A few hours before the first pitch, Martin had been given a thirty-five-thousand-dollar bonus, a Lincoln Continental, and the assurance that he’d have his job in 1978. Now he’d won his first World Series as a manager. But he still couldn’t enjoy himself. He was exhausted, and the party was too crowded. Martin flung his scotch to the floor and repaired to a quiet bar nearby.

Reggie eventually showed, pulling his blue Volkswagen up onto the sidewalk on Third Avenue. At around 2 a.m., Governor Carey arrived with a small entourage. The two parties merged and proceeded to drink champagne and eat cheeseburgers into the morning. Sometime after 3 a.m. Carey summoned two state troopers to guard Reggie’s car and assured Jim McMullen that the rules that govern after-hours drinking had been suspended for the night.