The Vanishing Mr. Beame
With absorbing footage of gutted apartment buildings and ravaged storefronts, Drop Dead City anatomizes the drama of New York’s descent into near bankruptcy.
Every four or eight years in New York City, on Inauguration Day, a mysterious transmutation takes place: the streets, the schools, the police, the weather, crime, and sometimes death itself suddenly belong to a new mayor, the way a book belongs to its author. Whether he is up to it or not, each mayor is vested with the very substance of the city during his time in office.
Think of Ed Koch (1978–1989), blustery and avuncular, with his high, brash, Bronx-bred self-regard. Under a tweed cabdriver’s cap Koch performed his contagious Yiddishkeit smile. His lasting accomplishment was to create affordable housing by reclaiming derelict buildings from the previous decade. Koch came to love his power so dearly that after voters rejected his bid for a fourth term, he declared that “they will be punished” for their decision, softening the curse with his twinkling satyric eyes.
Or Michael Bloomberg (2002–2013), who ran the city as he’d run the eponymous corporation that made him one of the wealthiest people in America. Bloomberg preferred his Upper East Side town house to the relatively cramped quarters at Gracie Mansion. On weekends he and his girlfriend flew in a private jet to his vacation compound in Bermuda. His vision of the city was as conceptual as an architect’s drawing, but he partially made the concept real, creating bicycle lanes, closing streets to traffic, and generally promoting a welcoming atmosphere for tech workers from both the suburbs and abroad. He openly beckoned billionaires to New York, providing them with the amenities they prized. His grand opus was the superfluous Manhattan development Hudson Yards, for which he squandered funds that could have been better used for affordable housing. This was especially true as the real estate market spiraled out of reach and the rent-stabilized status of Koch’s rehabilitated buildings began to expire, putting the units on the open market. Hudson Yards’ multimillion-dollar apartments and luxury shopping arcade were like a punch in the nose to ordinary New Yorkers.
New York’s current mayor, Eric Adams, brilliantly carved a path to City Hall with the overwhelming support of black and Latino voters in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx in the Democratic primary. (In Manhattan Adams largely restricted his campaign to Harlem and Washington Heights; he swept most of Upper Manhattan.) Big money donors from both parties embraced him. He seemed to be their perfect candidate, a former cop with a pliably populist veneer. But his brazen cronyism betrayed his constituents and eventually the very ethos of the city. In what many New Yorkers saw as an attempt to avoid serving hard time in jail, he gave Trump an open pass to persecute the city’s immigrants.
No mayor I know of embodied the city he presided over more thoroughly than Abraham Beame, who occupied Gracie Mansion during the city’s most dramatic postwar panic, 1974–1977. This is the fiftieth anniversary of New York’s descent into the abyss of near bankruptcy, the year of the indelible Daily News headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” (October 30, 1975). Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost have assembled an absorbing documentary anatomizing the drama that ended with New York narrowly avoiding default. Its tongue-in-cheek title is Drop Dead City.
