Not so long ago: the New York of Mayor Beame, Son of Sam, and Billy Martin

New York City in the '70s. The phrase conjures images of some of the city's seediest days, the New York of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon, and recalls the decadence of Studio 54 and the smoldering decay of the Bronx. The '70s are usually seen as a decade of fundamental transition, and how they are interpreted tends to carry high stakes. Depending on what someone thinks of politics and culture in New York today, the Me Decade can appear as a rougher, but more genuine, time than our own over-commercialized day. They were a nightmarish skirt on the edge of the social abyss, from which we have only just recovered. Or a pioneering age that completed the social revolution that the 1960s began. Or the final failure of the utopian promise of '60s radicalism.

In his first book, New York Times Magazine writer Jonathan Mahler combines all of these characterizations without over-indulging any of them. Though he follows in detail the course of only one year of the 1970s, his book (as his unnecessarily long title suggests) involves the difficult changes that New York, and American society in general, underwent during the entire decade.

He avoids cliches, but Mahler views 1970s New York with some nostalgia. The Bronx is Burning reads like an ode to the New York Mahler first encountered as an eight-year-old Californian Yankee fan, and he writes the book as a sort of journalistic diary. His writing is personal as well as informative, and it has a keen sense of drama.

Mahler focuses on two major stories: the 1977 Democratic mayoral primary (known as the election in those days) and the 1977 Yankee season. The former pitted incumbent Abraham Beame, the heir of an expiring political old guard, against the radical activist Bella Abzug, and two new faces ended up dominating the race: Mario Cuomo and Edward Koch. The Yankee season pitted embattled manager Billy Martin against superstar free agent Reggie Jackson, Boss George Steinbrenner, and just about everyone else. Throughout these two parallel tales Mahler intersperses supporting characters, shorter events, and limited disasters such as Rupert Murdoch and his acquisition of the New York Post, the Son of Sam murders, the summer blackout and ensuing riots, the gentrification of Soho, and the deterioration of Times Square.

All of which makes 1970s New York appear both terribly exciting and spectacularly horrifying. Mahler's breezy style allows the reader to sympathize with a variety of characters, including the uncharismatic but hard-working Mayor Beame, the glamorous but insecure Jackson, and the unglamorous and insecure Billy Martin. As Mahler adroitly weaves together these figures and their stories, his essential point becomes clear: The "battle for the soul of a city" represents the fitful death of one New York, and the concomitant birth of another.

"I gradually came to regard '77 as a transformative moment for the city," he writes, "a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well. New York was straddling eras."

The old era was that of the New York that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had meant to build, with free health care and university education for all, and subsidized city housing, run by an efficient and enlightened municipal machine. That New York was fading. Teetering on the edge of drop-dead bankruptcy, it gave way to a glitzier city. This rising New York would be the city of volatile superstars like Jackson bankrolled by arrogant businessmen like Steinbrenner. Mahler's analysis of the great shift that seized the city in the '70s is not terribly original, of course. But Mahler chose 1977 as his emblematic year in order to use its twin struggles to illustrate his version of a fairly common story: The decrepitude and subsequent rejuvenation of many of America's great 20th century cities.

In a year that exhausted the city, the Yankees, a far cry from today's pretty-in-pinstripes team, gave New York the World Series victory it desperately needed. Mahler highlights the symbolism of that victory, which saw the rotting Bronx Bombers defeat the exiled Brooklyn Dodgers. That the Yankees defeated Los Angeles's Dodgers, who were a significant part of the postwar cultural shift in America to the West Coast, seemed especially gratifying.

And the story, as Mahler tells it, is thoroughly enjoyable. But it is also strangely forgettable. In a way, Mahler does too much and not enough. The spectacle of 1977 is engaging, and he presents it well. But by burdening the show with his ideas about this "transformative" moment in New York's history, he invests many of the events (especially the Yankee World Series) with too much metaphorical meaning.

At the same time, if he wanted to make an argument about the tumult of the decade, he failed to provide much more than a vague outline. Indeed, the '70s are often considered transformative; but Mahler makes the turning point of the revolution the mayoral election and Reggie Jackson's Series-winning three home-run performance. Beyond that, the marvelous spectacle that he conjures, though great fun, does not provide his ideas much depth.

This shortcoming is not really Mahler's fault, however. It reflects an inadequacy of the genre--the journalistic history. Like a series of pieces in the Times magazine, journalistic history can be absorbing, but it only hints at more sophisticated explanations of the events it describes. Such is the nature of journalism, and perhaps it's best to let the subject occupy the stage. Saul Bellow, in a brief rumination written in 1970, discussed the fascination that New York held for Americans: "New York itself is the theater of the nation, showing strange things. Outsiders--the rest of the country--do not tire of watching." The charm of The Bronx is Burning rests precisely with its polymorphous spectacle, which we never tire of watching.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning

1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 354 pp., $16

Daniel Sullivan is a writer in New Jersey.

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