Quote of the Day | August 6, 2008: Straddling Eras

From Jonathan Mahler's 2006 Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City.

At the same time, though, as it sank to a new low in the summer of 1977, the city was also revealing its endless capacity for regeneration. I gradually came to regard '77 as a transformative moment for the city, a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well. New York was straddling eras. You could see it everywhere: in the mayoral race, which featured a hotheaded radical (Bella Abzug), an aging creature of the city's smoke-filled political clubhouses (Abe Beame), and a pair of unknowns who went on to play starring roles in the modern history of New York (Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo). You could see it in Rupert Murdoch's reinvention of the New York Post, formerly a dutiful liberal daily, as a celebrity-obsessed, right-wing scandal sheet and in the battle to stop the spread of porn shops and prostitutes across midtown.

You could see it in the Yankees too. The team's two biggest personalities, Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin, were locked in a perpetual state of warfare, and it was hard not to see race, class, and the tug-of-war between past and future at the root of their dispute. Reggie Jackson was New York's first black superstar. He was also a perfect foil for the scrappy, forever embattled Martin, the hero of New York's fed-up working class and a powerful reminder of the team's -- and the city's -- less complicted past, the yellowing image of what New York had been and the still blurry image of what it was becoming.

Tags: Jonathan Mahler, The Bronx is Burning