Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died of congestive heart failure early Friday morning. He was 88. A Bronx native, Koch was sworn in as mayor in 1978, leading the city out of the grim 1970s by rescuing it from bankruptcy and using a tough-on-crime platform. But he left an uncertain legacy: his third term was marred by corruption and internal scandals as well as the lasting legacy of the AIDS crisis in his own neighborhood—not to mention questions about his own sexuality. After leaving office in 1989, Koch spent two years as a judge on The People’s Court and practiced private law.
The master showman of City Hall, he parlayed shrewd political instincts and plenty of chutzpah into three tumultuous terms as New York’s mayor with all the tenacity, zest and combativeness that personified his city.
The former mayor had experienced coronary and other medical problems since leaving office in 1989. But he had been in relatively good health despite — or perhaps because of — his whirlwind life as a television judge, radio talk-show host, author, law partner, newspaper columnist, movie reviewer, professor, commercial pitchman and political gadfly.
Ebullient, flitting from broadcast studios to luncheon meetings and speaking engagements, popping up at show openings and news conferences, wherever the microphones were live and the cameras rolling, Mr. Koch, in his life after politics, seemed for all the world like the old campaigner, running flat out.
Mr. Koch’s 12-year mayoralty encompassed the fiscal austerity of the late 1970s and the racial conflicts and municipal corruption scandals of the 1980s, an era of almost continuous discord that found Mr. Koch caught in a maelstrom day after day.
But out among the people or facing a news media circus in the Blue Room at City Hall, he was a feisty, slippery egoist who could not be pinned down by questioners and who could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: “I’m the sort of person who will never get ulcers,Why? Because I say exactly what I think. I’m the sort of person who might give other people ulcers.”
In retrospect, how did he do? Most important, he is credited with leading the city government back from near bankruptcy in the 1970s to prosperity in the 1980s. He also began one of the city’s most ambitious housing programs, which continued after he left office and eventually built or rehabilitated more than 200,000 housing units, revitalizing once-forlorn neighborhoods.
Politically, Mr. Koch’s move to the right of center was seen as a betrayal by some old liberal friends, but it gained him the middle class and three terms in City Hall. He was also the harbinger of a transformation in the way mayors are elected in New York, with candidates relying less on the old coalition of labor unions, minority leaders and Democratic clubhouses and more on heavy campaign spending and television to make direct appeals to a more independent-minded electorate.
In the end, however, he was overwhelmed by corruption scandals in his administration and by racial divisions that his critics contended he sometimes made worse.
His image on television, his high-pitched voice on the radio, his round shoulders and gangly arms and baggy pants, and especially his streetwise gusts of candor — saying what people said over the dinner table in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn — gave New Yorkers the illusion that he was a rumpled, familiar acquaintance. But for all his self-promoting stream of consciousness, he was an intensely private man who revealed little about himself and had no patience for introspection.
Even at the small dinner parties he gave for close political associates and inner-circle friends, whether at Gracie Mansion or in his postmayoral apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue, there were few real intimacies, some participants recalled. The conversations were eclectic, a dance of politics, public affairs and Mr. Koch’s city of art and culture.
His first term, students of government say, was his best. Confronted with the deficits and the constraints of the city’s brush with bankruptcy in 1975, he held down spending, subdued the municipal unions, cut city services, and restored the city’s creditworthiness, revived a moribund capital budget, began work on long-neglected bridges and streets, and tried to reduce the friction between Manhattan and the more tradition-minded other boroughs.
Re-elected in 1981 with 75 percent of the vote — he became the first mayor in the city’s history to get both the Democratic and the Republican nominations — Mr. Koch markedly improved the city’s finances in his second term. Helped by a surging local economy, state aid and rising tax revenues, the city government, with a $500 million surplus, rehired workers and restored many municipal services. He also made plans for major housing programs, improvements in education and efforts to reduce welfare dependency.
Mr. Koch, riding a huge crest of popularity, was elected in 1985 to a third term, with an amazing 78 percent of the vote. But, for Mr. Koch, the storm clouds had already begun to gather. Weeks after Mr. Koch’s inauguration, his ally Donald R. Manes, the Queens borough president, attempted suicide — he succeeded two months later — in a troubling prelude to one of the worst corruption scandals in city history.
What followed was a series of disclosures, indictments and convictions for bribery, extortion, perjury and conspiracy that touched various city agencies. Much of the skulduggery centered on the Transportation Department and the Parking Violations Bureau. Stanley M. Friedman and Meade H. Esposito — the Democratic bosses in the Bronx and Brooklyn, respectively, and Koch supporters — were convicted. Mr. Friedman went to prison, and Mr. Esposito, who was in ill health, received a suspended two-year sentence and a fine.
Anthony R. Ameruso, the transportation commissioner, was forced to resign, and the scandal snared businessmen, lawyers, parking meter attendants, sewer inspectors and others. Scores of convictions were obtained by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani. No one accused Mr. Koch of any wrongdoing. Most of the accused were not his appointees, and none were senior advisers; he had always kept a distance from his commissioners, letting them run their departments with relative independence. Mr. Koch said that he was shocked, that he had been blindsided by subordinates and associates whose schemes he could not possibly have divined. He always said he had befriended Mr. Friedman, Mr. Esposito, Mr. Manes and others because they controlled votes that could make or break legislation he wanted approved or killed.
But critics said Mr. Koch had become too close to the Democratic bosses in pursuit of his own ambitions, and accusations of complacency and cronyism dogged him for the rest of his tenure.
 |
| Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1983 talking to reporters at Gracie Mansion. |
Also coming to haunt him was his outspokenness. He had always been frank, leaving himself open to charges of callousness. At various times he skewered and provoked the wrath of Jews and gentiles, business and union leaders, blacks and whites, feminists and male chauvinists. He vilified his Tammany foes as “crooks” and “moral lepers,” good-government panels as “elitists,” black and Hispanic leaders as “poverty pimps,” neighborhood protesters as “crazies” and Ms. Abzug as “wacko.” Critics said he could be petty, self-righteous and a bully when his ideas or policies were attacked.
But associates and admirers, pressed to explain how the mayor could be so popular while reducing city services and apparently alienating so many groups, insisted that Mr. Koch had extraordinary political instincts and theatrical flair, and that his candor only reflected what many New Yorkers had long thought themselves.
After the corruption scandals broke, however, the politics of candor paled, and critics said the mayor began to lose his touch, flip-flopping on issues as political winds shifted.
But his housing plan, based on dozens of city financing and ownership programs, would become a notable and long-lasting success. It began with a stock of 10,000 properties abandoned by owners or seized by the city for tax delinquency.
By the end of the Koch administration, 3,000 apartments had been created in formerly vacant buildings, 13,000 more were under construction, and design work had begun on 20,000 more. In the next 15 years, over four mayoral administrations, 200,000 more units were built or restored, the number of vacant lots dropped sharply, and the original stock of 10,000 abandoned buildings was reduced to under 800.
But in Mr. Koch’s final years in office, his programs were all but overshadowed by scandals. As the mayor waffled, prosecutors charged that thousands of parking meter attendants and sewer, electrical and housing inspectors had taken graft. An avalanche of indictments and convictions ensued.
Mr. Koch was also harshly criticized for what was called his slow, inadequate response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Hundreds of New Yorkers were desperately ill and dying in a baffling public health emergency. Critics, especially in the gay community, accused him of being a closeted gay man reluctant to confront the crisis for fear of being exposed.
For years, Mr. Koch was upset and defensive about the criticism. Mr. Koch said that New York had done more than San Francisco for people with AIDS. “But that never got through to the gay community,” Mr. Koch said. “They were brainwashed that they were getting shortchanged in New York City and in San Francisco they were getting everything. And it wasn’t true, but you could never convince them.”
And the administration’s troubles multiplied: 50,000 homeless people crowded into shelters and roamed the streets and subways, and there was a surge of crack-related crimes and growing outrage in minority communities over claims of police brutality.
The scandals and the scourges of crack cocaine, homelessness and AIDS were compounded by a widening rift between Mr. Koch and black New Yorkers. The mayor traced his contentious relationship with black leaders to his first-term decision to close Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, where, he said, the city was paying too much for inadequate care. He would regret the decision.
“It was the wrong thing to do,” Mr. Koch, who rarely second-guessed himself, said in 2009. Closing the hospital saved $9 million, he said, but “there was such a psychological attachment to Sydenham, because black doctors couldn’t get into other hospitals — it was the psychological attachment that I violated.”
Black leaders were also unhappy with Mr. Koch’s decision to cut patronage-laden antipoverty programs, and comments he made that they considered insensitive. He said, for example, that busing and racial quotas had done more to divide the races than to achieve integration.
A series of ugly episodes came to symbolize mounting racial troubles.
In 1984, a white officer with a shotgun killed a black woman, Eleanor Bumpurs, 66, as she was being evicted from her Bronx apartment; he was acquitted. In 1986, a gang of white teenagers assaulted three black men in Howard Beach, Queens, chasing one, Michael Griffith, to his death on a highway. And in 1989, a black youth, Yusuf K. Hawkins, 16, who went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to see a used car, was attacked by white youths and shot dead.
Mr. Hawkins’s death came just a month before Mr. Koch faced Mr. Dinkins, the Manhattan borough president and the only black candidate, in the 1989 Democratic primary. By then, City Hall was lurching from crisis to crisis. The racial divisions, the corruption scandals, the failures to cope with crack and homelessness all contributed to a sense it was time for a change. Mr. Dinkins, pledging to bring the city together again in a “gorgeous mosaic,” narrowly defeated Mr. Koch in the primary and went on to beat Mr. Giuliani, who ran on the Republican and Liberal lines, by a slender margin in the general election.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Koch began his life in politics in 1952 as a street-corner speaker for Adlai E. Stevenson, who lost the presidential election to Dwight D. Eisenhower.In 1956, already in his 30s, Mr. Koch moved out of his parents’ home, took an apartment in Greenwich Village and joined the Village Independent Democrats, a club opposed to Mr.Carmine De Sapio and the Manhattan Democratic organization known as Tammany Hall. Mr. De Sapio, a power broker whose dark glasses gave him a sinister air, could make or break legislators, judges, even mayors. But as district leader in Greenwich Village, he had a narrow base. Mr. Koch, supported by Mayor Wagner, ended the De Sapio era, thwarting his return to power in the district primary elections in 1963 and 1965. Heading a growing reform movement, Mr. Koch won a City Council seat in 1966 and befriended liberal causes, like antipoverty programs and rent controls.
By 1968, he was ready to move up. An opponent of the Vietnam War and a supporter of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s presidential candidacy, Mr. Koch, with Democratic and Liberal backing, upset Whitney North Seymour Jr. in what was called a classic American race — a son of immigrants versus the scion of a family rooted in national history — and became representative for the 17th Congressional District.
He was almost unknown outside his district when he ran for mayor in 1977, facing six people in the Democratic primary, including the incumbent, Abraham D. Beame; Mario Cuomo, then New York’s secretary of state; Representatives Herman Badillo and Bella S. Abzug; the Manhattan borough president, Percy E. Sutton; and Joel W. Hartnett, a businessman and civic watchdog.
But there was wide dissatisfaction with Mayor Beame’s handling of the fiscal crisis in 1975; Time magazine put him on the cover as a beggar with a tin cup. Many New Yorkers were also worried about rising crime and spending on social programs.
Mr. Koch benefited from support by The New York Post, but he made the crucial moves. In one master stroke, he hired the consultant David Garth to run his campaign. Sensing the city’s rightward drift, Mr. Garth devised a more conservative image for Mr. Koch, a formidable task because the candidate had portrayed himself as a liberal, and he had no wife and children with whom to pose for the decorous voter.
To the rumors about his sexuality, his standard answer was that it was no one’s business but his own. Placards sprouted in the 1977 mayoral campaign saying, “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.” Although Mr. Cuomo always disclaimed responsibility for the posters, Mr. Koch never forgave him, as he made clear with a pointedly disparaging reference to Mr. Cuomo in a recorded interview with The Times that was not to be made public until Mr. Koch’s death. Mr. Koch appeared often in the 1977 race with his close friend and adviser Bess Myerson, a former Miss America and a popular former city commissioner of consumer affairs.
He made frequent campaign trips to the boroughs outside Manhattan, where he denounced welfare abuse, unconscionable demands by municipal unions and wasteful spending by city agencies. He vowed to crack down on crime, advocated the death penalty in some cases and promised to abolish the Board of Education as “a lard barrel of waste.”
It worked. Mr. Koch received 20 percent of the primary vote to Mr. Cuomo’s 19 percent. Mr. Koch then won a runoff against Mr. Cuomo and went on to take the general election against State Senator Roy M. Goodman, a Republican.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After leaving office, Mr. Koch gave up his rent-controlled flat for a two-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, but he gave no thought to retiring. He instead became a one-man media show, with forums on television and radio and in newspapers, magazines and books, besides being a lawyer, endorsing commercial products, lecturing and teaching. He earned over $1.5 million a year.
For years Mr. Koch worked out with a personal trainer almost every morning at a gym. He became a partner with Robinson, Silverman, Pearce, Aronsohn & Berman, which in a 2002 merger became Bryan Cave, an international law firm and one of the largest real estate practices in New York. He provided advice and brought in many clients. He gave lectures across the country and abroad, with minimum fees of $20,000 for off-the-cuff talks on race relations, drugs, anti-Semitism or “Koch on the City,” or “Koch on Everything.”