The City at Auction: A Glimpse of the Koch Era
The №7 train surfaces and climbs above ground after passing under the East River, winding through glistening newly-encroaching skyscrapers and glorious graffiti-bombed lowrises before turning into the straightaway over Thomson Avenue. From the station at 33rd Street it’s a short walk to the nondescript campus of La Guardia Community College, a series of interconnected buildings which could easily be mistaken for warehouses, storing the city’s strivers and dreamers. A New York Army National Guard Career Center stretches across three storefronts on the second storey just across the street.
On a Thursday morning the lobby is more or less empty except for the security guard who waves me through when I tell him I’m here to visit the archive. The building is clean and modern and the classrooms seem empty. The La Guardia and Wagner Archive is tucked away in a corner of the second floor, near the college’s performing arts center.
The archive began in 1982, with a history of the local community (including dozens of oral history interviews) compiled by a professor at the college. When Marie La Guardia, the widow of Fiorello La Guardia, died two years later, the legendary mayor’s papers became the foundation of the archive’s collection. Since then it has steadily expanded to include papers from the Wagner, Beame, Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani administrations (though the papers of the last have proven every bit as contentious as the mayor who produced them; after prolonged legal wrangling, only some of them are available, and only after they’re screened by the archivist).
I’m working on a book proposal about housing and community development in New York City, and the city’s long road back from its near collapse in the seventies. More than 800,000 people fled the city over the course of that decade, and before it was over the city government was bankrupt and struggling to deal with more than 100,000 units of housing in buildings on which it had foreclosed. Neighborhoods were wracked by waves of arson and abandonment. Koch’s mayoralty arguably set the city on that road back, and so his papers seem like as good a place as any to start researching the period. As it turns out, a conversation with the archivist clarifies that the former mayor’s papers include his correspondence from both before and after his mayoralty. It’s the “Departmental Correspondence” that contains the kind of material that would be relevant.
The subject tags are broad (“culture”, “education”, “law”, “intergovernmental”, “taxi”, “housing”, “urban renewal”) and defined by the archival staff, leaving the initiate at their assiduous mercy. Running a wildcard search through the database for documents related to housing in 1978, the first year of Koch’s mayoralty, returns just upwards of fifty hits, about half of which seem potentially interesting. I submit a request for the items, and not long after the archivist strolls over to where I’ve made camp.
“You want to see the microfilm?” The archivist looks at me like I’m crazy. “Can I ask why? We’d just be interested to know. It helps us to understand how people are using the collection.”
It seems just about everything in the Koch collection is available online in PDF. For that matter, on closer scrutiny of the individual records in the database, it appears that the vast majority of the Koch’s original papers are actually held in the city’s Municipal Archives. La Guardia’s claim to fame seems to be making it possible to search through them online. I explain that ideally I’d like to see the documents in context, to get some sense of how the work flowed and how different items might have related to each other. The archivist nods in bemused assent and heads back to the files to bring me the first reels.
Even after several decades of montages in film after film in which our heroes hit the library to do some action-packed research, it’s hard to appreciate at this distance how microfilm must have changed that process. Liberated from sifting through stacks of disintegrating newsprint, it must have been a revelation once, speeding up the sift and cutting down the time involved. (Its real virtues lay on the other side of the equation, freeing up space in the stacks and allowing records to be accessed in more than one place.) Now it seems impossible not to find it cumbersome: the slow, linear unspooling of the film; the hit-or-miss quality of the search; the painfully gradual circling in on what you’re after.
Slowly, it becomes clear that Koch’s departmental correspondence includes the papers of his aides, sorted alphabetically, and then, for each of them, chronologically.
So on the microfilm, the 1978 memos of Koch’s press secretary, Maureen Connelly, are preceded by half a reel of documents generated by another staffer at the end of the mayor’s tenure in 1989. A letter to a mayor in Colombia expressing condolences for the murder of the governor of Antioquia is followed by a clipping from the Washington Post (“Witness: D.C. Mayor Did Crack”); somewhere in between, just a few days after the Fourth of July, there’s a proposal to draft legislation for the state government, “Re: Flag Desecration”.
Then there are letters from the San James Realty Corporation, arguing against the appraisal of city land it was planning to purchase and develop. The city had taken to auctioning land that had come into its possession, which San James argued was inflating its sales price. “The policy of establishing land values based on auctions sales,” they wrote, “will ultimately prove to be one of the City’s major obstacles in the redevelopment of economically depressed areas.” It’s exactly the sort of opposition that I’d suspected the city’s policies might yield.
It’s a jarring juxtaposition with a document that surfaces not long after, a note from David Reese, the man in charge of purchases for Gracie Mansion, to Koch’s then chief of staff, Diane Coffey:
We are now the proud owners of a beautiful faux bamboo bureau, ca. 1880 which matches the bed in the State Bedroom. Mrs. Johnson refused our first offer of $7500.00, but after a few days of discussion agreed to it if we assumed the cost of moving and polishing. Our entire expenditure was $7,650.00, and the bureau is already in place. I am very pleased with the purchase.
As the city struggled to haul itself back from the brink, its government bought antique furniture.
