Why is New York City so endlessly compelling? Its residents – an army of the brash, unpretentious and hilariously unapologetic – certainly know how to make a drama out of a crisis. Many New Yorkers seem to think the world revolves around them (to be fair, sometimes this is true). In the 1980s, New York was plunged into a series of social crises that would be mirrored across the United States in the decades that followed. When the battles over the fate of New York came to a close, many of the figures moved on to the national stage and even the presidency.

Jonathan Mahler’s new book, The Gods of New York, tells the story of the city’s experiences in the explosive last four years of the 1980s, when its extraordinary resurgence from near societal collapse and bankruptcy in the 1970s began to falter. Financial titans had been enticed to the city in the early 1980s through business-friendly tax incentives and zoning laws. These laws encouraged the development of massive offices in Manhattan and helped confirm its status as the financial capital of the world, the home to innovative and risky new financial instruments such as derivatives. The hope was that positioning the city in the vanguard of the Reagan-inspired financial revolution would bring in wealth that would not only help the city government to balance the books but also improve the lives of ordinary residents.

In fact, it led to widespread housing shortages and rental price controversies and massively increased inequality in the city. New York also emerged as ground zero in the new, terrifying AIDS epidemic, witnessed an extraordinary crime wave associated with crack addiction and was plagued by a series of racially inflected