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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Irascible ex-mayor saved NYC
Budget cuts brought city back from brink
frank franklin / the associated press archives Ed Koch bragged in his autobiography he didn�t get ulcers, �I give them.� (CP)
NEW YORK -- When Ed Koch was mayor, it seemed as if all of New York was being run by a deli counterman. Koch was funny, irritable, opinionated, often rude and prone to yelling.
And it worked, for a while at least.
With a Bronx-born combination of chutzpah and humour, Koch steered New York back from the brink of financial ruin and infused the city with new energy and optimism in the 1970s and '80s while racing around town, startling ordinary New Yorkers by asking, "How'm I doing?" He was usually in too much of a hurry to wait for an answer.
Koch died of congestive heart failure Friday at 88, after carefully arranging to be buried in Manhattan because, as he explained with what sounded like a love note wrapped in a zinger: "I don't want to leave Manhattan, even when I'm gone. This is my home. The thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me."
Tributes poured in from political allies and adversaries, some of whom were no doubt thinking more of his earlier years in city hall, before many black leaders and liberals became fed up with what they felt were racially insensitive remarks.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement that although they disagreed on many things, Koch "was never a phoney or a hypocrite. He would not patronize or deceive you. He said what he meant. He meant what he said. He fought for what he believed."
During Koch's three terms from 1978 to 1989, he helped New York climb out of financial crisis through tough fiscal policies and sharp budget cuts, and subway service improved enormously. To much of the rest of America, the bald, paunchy Koch became the embodiment of the brash, irrepressible New Yorker.
He was quick with a quip or a putdown, and when he got excited or indignant -- which was often -- his voice became high-pitched. He dismissed his critics as "wackos," feuded with Donald Trump ("piggy") and fellow former mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("nasty man"), lambasted the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and once reduced the head of the city council to tears.
"You punch me, I punch back," Koch once observed. "I do not believe it's good for one's self-respect to be a punching bag."
Or, as he put it in Mayor, his bestselling autobiography: "I'm not the type to get ulcers. I give them."
New Yorkers eventually tired of Koch.
Homelessness and AIDS soared in the 1980s, and critics charged that city hall's response was too little, too late. Koch's latter years in office were also marked by scandals involving those around him and rising racial tension. In 1989, he lost a bid for a fourth term to David Dinkins, who became the city's first black mayor.
Edward Irving Koch was born in the Bronx on Dec. 12, 1924, the second of three children of Polish immigrants. During the Depression the family lived in Newark, N.J.
The future mayor worked his way through school, checking hats, working at a delicatessen and selling shoes. He attended City College of New York and served as a combat infantryman in Europe during the Second World War.
He received a law degree from New York University in 1948 and began his political career in Greenwich Village as a liberal Democratic reformer.
Koch was elected to the city council and then to Congress, serving from 1969 to 1977 as the representative from the wealthy East Side's "Silk Stocking" district.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 2, 2013 A22
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