PROGRAM

Roosevelt House is proud to present a conversation with bestselling author Jonathan Mahler about his new book, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990. The book chronicles four tumultuous years in the 1980s that changed the city forever, and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation. The author will be in conversation with New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante.

New York entered 1986 as a city reborn, Mahler writes, as record profits on Wall Street brought a battered city roaring back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack: thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over. The events of the next four years, writes Mahler, would split the city open: Howard Beach, Black Monday, Tawana Brawley, the crack epidemic, the birth of ACT UP, the attack on a Central Park jogger, and the release of the film Do the Right Thing. Featured in the book are a cast of outsized characters—including Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, and Larry Kramer—who competed to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies.

The Gods of New York is an immersive portrait of a city whose identity, as Mahler illustrates, was suddenly up for grabs. Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the monied capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when so many of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986, and, as Mahler shows, something very different at the end of the decade. The Gods of New York delivers the remarkable story of how that happened.

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

Ginia Bellafante has served since 1999 as a reporter, columnist, and critic at the New York Times. For 14 years, she wrote the paper’s Big City column, which focused on politics, policy, life, and culture in New York City. She has also written for the culture and style pages as well as the book review and New York Times Magazine. Prior to joining the Times, Bellafante was a senior writer at Time magazine.