Ed Koch, Mayor of New York - 12 August 1988

The other morning, caught on Fifth Avenue in a hopeless traffic jam, the driver and I panting away in the furnace of his taxi which must have been well over 100 degrees, the driver said, “If you’ll excuse me, Mister, but I’m going home”.

I didn’t blame him. I paid him off and padded down the avenue with all the alacrity of a Boy Scout tiptoeing through a minefield.

Later in the day I had occasion to be going by Gracie Mansion, the mayor of New York’s graceful colonial house that sits in a little park on the edge of the East River. The ordeal of the morning, the traffic jam, and the sight of the mayor’s white house bristling like a mirage among the trees made me think back to a time, I think the last time, I was a guest in the house with the then mayor and one or two of his young aides.

We were going on about the increasing traffic density everywhere in the city and I was complaining, as I’ve been doing ever since, about the meaningless signs posted every two blocks on Park and Fifth Avenues which say in bold print "No commercial traffic".

No truck driver I can remember has ever been stopped and I suggested there was an enormous amount of revenue available from a campaign to enforce the signs and hand out hefty fines. The trucks and vans, I said, go 10, 20, 40 blocks, two miles down Fifth Avenue and nobody does anything. The mayor shook his head. “It’s not possible” he said “to do anything any more. You’d have unholy congestion on every avenue that allows commercial traffic.”

Well that must have been 20 years ago and presumably Mayor Koch feels the same way. As we tilted our drinks that evening long ago and gave up yet another local issue as a bad job, I suggested “Why don’t you do what they did in Rome – prohibit all commercial deliveries between sunset and dawn?”.

“Say,” said the youngest of the aides “how about that?” The mayor looked pityingly at this young, this very young, politician and said, “Great, first you’d be paying golden time – triple pay – to all the truck drivers. The price of everything would shoot up. Then you’d have protest marches about the city’s inflation rate being way above the national average. Pretty soon, I can imagine, somebody in Albany getting out a bill, the Teamsters Marital Compensation Act for all the drivers whose marriages went bust through the guy sleeping by day and being out all night.

"The parent-teachers association would move in on that one and citizens groups protesting all those delivery vans and trucks barrelling through the streets in the dead of night and extra help needed at the toll stations and the tunnels across the rivers at double pay. Shall I go on?”

“Well,” said the young aide “ they did it in Rome.” “When?” asked the mayor. "I think," I said, "it was around 30, 40 BC."

Another bright idea bit the dust.

The other night I watched the present mayor, the beleaguered but indestructible Ed Koch, in a packed schoolroom up in Harlem doing what he does once a week, which is primly described as "The Mayor’s Question and Answer Show" on the city’s TV station.

You might have thought you were present at an interrogation session on the West Bank between Israeli soldiers and a pack of young Palestinians. Everybody was fanning himself, herself in the atrocious heat. The mayor was continually mopping his face and neck with a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth and the questioning, so-called, a screaming siren of protests about the drug pushers taking over this bit of a park, no street lights in that lady’s block on Staten Island, an old man threatened with eviction and what was the mayor ever going to do about extra night police at such an intersection, and why was a big condominium, a high rise for the well-off going up by a tenement that had no water pressure?

The questions were very rarely put as questions. They were defiant, disgusted speeches bawled at this sweating figure at a rostrum and the mayor paused or backed away.

“Listen, lady, if you listen... when this meeting is over get a hold of Commissioner So and So, he’s right here, and give him the details. You, no the man in the red shirt – OK, OK, lady, that’s enough, shut up. Next, the young woman over there, what’s your complaint?”

She was the one screaming about the street lights on Staten Island and she also joined in on the water pressure problem which the mayor said was absolutely unavoidable with the enormous draw on the power grid in this heat. “You’ll be lucky if you don’t wake up one night with all the lights out.” The young woman, a Hispanic with blazing black eyes, howled, “My father tell me don’t go live New York, it’s hell on earth”. She was screaming on and on and the mayor cut in, “OK, listen to your father next time. You, the old lady in the corner there, yes madam?”

Now there are many mayors of cities, governors of states, who regularly submit to the questions of citizens from all over, but in the air-conditioned sanctuary of a television studio with an MC monitoring the incoming calls and the questioners, the attackers, at the safe long distance of a telephone wire.

I don’t know of another politician who goes through this face-to-face, nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw performance more than once in a while as an unpleasant necessity of political office, but to Mayor Koch it’s a necessary weekly joust which he fervently believes is the essence of his being – being a politician.

When the meetings are over, within a few days, his office is flooded with letters from people who saw the show on television and the various officials who stood warily beside him that night are confronted by the complainers who were told to take their troubles to the responsible department. Now all of this, of course, is a mere item in the Mayor’s daily grind which starts at dawn and is lucky to end at midnight.

Just now, today, for instance he’s trying to recruit 700 new policemen in the narcotics division of the city force to stem the outrage over open drug dealing on the streets of many neighbourhoods. He’s just apologised for the excessive force he believes the police used in putting down a demonstration against a curfew in a small but dangerous park.

He’s just begged people to stop giving money to street panhandlers and contribute instead to city charities. He’s ordered the hospitals to report on their methods for disposing of hospital waste which has been washing up in noxious quantities along some of the Jersey and Long Island beaches – and now, by the way, has appeared lapping the shores of Lake Eyrie 700 miles inland in Cleveland, Ohio. That has spurred the United States Senate to get out a bill prohibiting, from 1990, on the disposal of hospital wastes in all seas and lakes.

Meanwhile the mayor faces a constant battle with the people in every borough who want new prisons but don’t want them in their neighbourhood, rather like the aroused citizens of several New England states who believe in principle in nuclear power but have mobilised to resist having an essential nuclear waste dump in their neck of the woods.

Two or three evenings a week the mayor has in theory time off, which means attending a dinner to distribute to eminent immigrants the city’s Medal of Freedom, then ducking into an Italian-American dinner, then a Puerto Rican dinner and last week an Irish protest meeting about his outrageous remark that the British in Northern Ireland did not constitute an army of occupation.

That observation alone probably lost him 100,000 Irish votes in next year’s election, and the unreal, the incredible, thing is he wants to run again, after 11 years of presiding over this seething cosmopolis and after two years of fighting charges of corruption in his administration. During that time several of his closest aides and city officials have gone to jail, resigned under fire, or committed suicide. He has, by his own admission, too often put his trust in the wrong people.

But why would he want a shot at another four years? Because, I think, after all the wear and tear of trying to take care of seven million people he remains an irrepressible romantic who's had the tonic experience of sometimes seeing romance turn into reality.

He did pluck New York from the brink of bankruptcy and is not going to let you forget it, but unlike President Reagan, another romantic, he does not cling to an old and simpler picture of America and yearn to restore it. He gets as excited over the prospect of housing 100 homeless families in a run-down Harlem hotel as Mr Reagan does over the vision of Star Wars.

Mayor Koch, in his racy, egotistical and never dull autobiography wrote, “The city of New York includes near 200 religions, races, national groups. It used to be said that New York city was a melting pot. It never was and it isn’t today. Our fathers and mothers and some of us wanted to believe we’d lost our own racial and ethnic traditions and had become homogenised. That never happened.

"What happens is you gain respect for the traditions of others but don’t lose your own. Today black is beautiful. Spanish is the language of the future. Women want to be astronauts and are. Jews play golf. God made us whatever we are. Being mayor of the city is a very special experience and I’m lucky.”

By the way the mayor, obviously one of the leading Democrats of the nation, did not go to the Atlantic convention sobbing rhetoric, and a thousand balloons are not his style. As for the weekly brawl with those rocking, bawling, aggrieved citizens, the mayor finds it a stimulus. If nobody had ever invented the now worn-out phrase, he could truthfully say “that’s what government is all about”. If he were a demagogue which he isn’t, he might call it “democracy in action”.

As it is, if you put it up to him he would say, with a stoical smile, his eyebrows up, his shoulders shrugging, “Well it’s nothing else”.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.