GODS OF NEW YORK with Journalist Jonathan Mahler

New York, 1986: Record profits on Wall Street sent money splashing across Manhattan, as thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, dying of AIDS, and nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the poverty line. Could New York City simultaneously be the city of immigrants and culture AND the money-soaked capital of global finance?  

The events of 1986 - 1989 would split the New York City wide open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing. And a cast of outsized characters—Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer—would compete to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies. Journalist Jonathan Mahler tells a story of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened. Elm Street Books will be on site for book sales and signing. 

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