I was a teenager when Koch was elected to his first term, and I thought his chutzpah, moxie and general bluster was admirable and probably just what the city needed when the collective morale of New Yorkers bordered on outright despair. Edward I. Koch was bold, he was optimistic, he knew New York was better than its financial crisis and crime statistics.

He lifted our city out of its financial woes, embarked on an ambitious public housing program, made some innovative criminal justice reforms and gave New York its swagger back. When I went off to college in upstate New York in 1980, I felt that I was leaving a city on an upswing, with a mayor who was steering us to a better place.

Then in 1982, Koch overreached, and the Greenwich Village pol set his sights on the Statehouse, a job that required living in upstate New York. He stumbled, making an ill-conceived joke about the sterility of the suburbs, and my college newspaper in Ithaca wisecracked in the headline of its endorsement for governor: “Koch for Mayor.”

The people of upstate and my colleagues on the college newspaper editorial board sent the fish-out-of-New York-harbor-water a message: Stay in the five boroughs, where you belong. Koch went on to re-election in 1985, the same year I returned to the city and became the editor of a weekly newspaper, The West Side Spirit, which not only covered the mayor, but had a weekly political columnist, Dick Oliver, who was one of Koch’s chief antagonists.

Koch, in his third term (there were no term limits then) started collecting lots of enemies and critics. His administration was beset by scandal, from the Parking Violations Bureau mess that led to the suicide of Queens Borough President Donald Manes to the imbroglio over Koch’s close friend, Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson, whose romantic life with an alleged mobster led to one of the more bizarre scandals in NYC history.

Like a marriage that goes sour after a decade, Koch’s relationship with the city and its various constituencies curdled in his third term. The African-American community attacked him for his racial insensitivity, and Wilbert Tatum, the publisher of the city’s largest black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, put “Koch Must Resign” on his front page every week. For two years.
I was an eager young journalist, in my mid-20s, who was still awestruck to be covering larger-than-life figures like Koch and his ilk. I decided in 1987, two years before his ill-fated third stab at re-election, to write a long cover story: “Can Koch Make a Comeback?”

Unintentionally, Koch taught me one of my most valuable journalism lessons when he refused to grant me an interview because my newspaper— particularly columnist Dick Oliver—had continuously bashed him.

Undeterred, I did a “write around,” interviewing more than 25 people in the administration and in the New York punditocracy, and it became one of my proudest pieces of journalism: a balanced and thoroughly reported picture of a once-mighty mayor on the ropes and hanging on for dear life.
In 1989, David Dinkins dethroned Koch in the primary and unceremoniously sent him back to private life.

In the following years, when well-wishers on the street told Koch they missed him, he would reply: “The people have spoken. And now they must be punished.”

One year after he left office, I decided to write another profile of Koch. My last question in that interview was a throwaway line: “So now that you have all this free time, how do you spend it?”

Koch replied: “I go to the movies two or three times a week.”

The next morning, I phoned Koch.

“Hey, Ed,” I said, “how would you like to be the West Side Spirit’s movie reviewer?”

“What would you pay?” Koch replied.

“How about $50 a week?” I said sheepishly, knowing that I was already committing a high percentage of my weekly freelance budget.

“Fifty dollars a week?! I wouldn’t cross the street for $50 a week!”

“But we’re a small paper,” I said plaintively.

“Well, call me when you get bigger,” he said and then dropped the receiver.

The Spirit had recently become part of a chain of five weeklies in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and the Hamptons. I phoned each publisher about my idea, asked them to contribute $50 per week for a syndicated movie column—and presto, a critic was born.

“How about $250?” I offered the next day.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll start today. But I have some ground rules: I don’t do openings. I don’t do cinematography. I just tell the reader whether the movie is worth the price of admission.”

For the next 23 years, Edward I. Koch reviewed a movie or two each week, with his trademark + or –, symbolizing his thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the everyman’s film experience.

One night a few months after he started, a friend called to tell me he saw Koch on the Johnny Carson show saying he had seven jobs in his post-mayoralty career but his favorite one was writing reviews for a chain of weekly newspapers.

Now that we all mourn the loss of a colorful New Yorker and a man who relished being called Hizzoner, I take some comfort that a young editor’s gimmicky idea to grab attention in a tough media town gave Koch some joy.

If they serve popcorn in heaven, I hope Koch has found his seat and is taking mental notes on the show unfolding before him.

This time, perhaps he’ll notice the cinematography.

Tom Allon, a 2013 candidate for New York City mayor, is the former editor and publisher of this newspaper.

Think of it this way: Democracy is hard to do. To achieve true democracy, you need to have an educated electorate. If citizens don’t know what their public officials are up to, they can’t make intelligent choices. In fact, they can be led around like donkeys. When that happens, public officials can put anything out there, take a bow and say, “We did it and you should thank us.”Take the case of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. After New York got the reputation of being dysfunctional, Cuomo came in and set things right—at least he said he did.

Among his other accomplishments, he got the state Legislature to establish a single ethics commission governing all public servants. Good stuff—really. Among other things agreed to in its establishment were that the Legislature would appoint many of the members and that the Senate Republicans, in or out of the majority, would get the lion’s share of the picks for commission, now and in the future. That would be like agreeing that if the Democrats win the next election, the Republicans will be allowed to pick the Supreme Court justices after each vacancy. No matter; Cuomo got the bragging rights for having done the impossible. The more he says it, the more people believe it. The more people believe it, the higher his popularity soars.

There is also the question of redistricting and the efforts to put an end to the insidious self-serving gerrymandering that allows legislative majorities to draw districts where they have the best chance of winning. Cuomo ran for office on that one—“I will veto that bill,” he intoned time and again. In fact, he said it so many times that I believed it. I admired him for it and said so, in my columns and on the radio.

The problem was that the redesigned Cuomo, now a sort of Blue Dog Democrat, appears to like the Republican conservative-moderates in the majority in the state Senate. If he stuck to his guns and vetoed the bill and everyone got a fair chance in Democratic New York, the Democrats would win big and have the kind of majority they enjoy in the state Assembly. Now, I admit that the Democrats don’t deserve any rave reviews for their past performance. Nevertheless, we are talking democracy here. If the game is rigged—and believe me, it is—you don’t have democracy.

Into all of this comes old New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has said all along that he supports Cuomo for his determination to veto the corrupt, morally repugnant, anti-democratic redistricting bill. Cuomo and Koch have had their problems in the past but they made up, I am sure, partly based on Cuomo’s assurance that he would veto the terrible gerrymander.

But, politics being what they are, Cuomo began to waver. He began to hint that in politics, you have to give something to get something. The question then is whether what you give is more than what you get. In this case, the agreement seemed to be that in 10 years (!), there would be a very bad constitutional amendment that would allow the legislative minorities to continue to do then what they are doing now. But if Cuomo gets an agreement, he will once again say that he has won.

So the technique is now established. Cuomo’s very high popularity numbers have begun to dip. Two groups are very angry. The New York teachers believe that they have been very badly treated by the governor, as do the labor unions representing the state’s public servants. His popularity drop has only been a few points—by itself, a five- or six-point drop in the polls is nothing. But if the numbers continue to drop, the Cuomo folks will take notice. If Cuomo is anything, it is tough.

If he has to make concessions, he will. But Team Cuomo doesn’t take nicely to those who oppose them. Like the Cuomo staffer said to gutsy Governor Dannel Malloy from Connecticut, “We operate on two speeds here: Get along and kill.”

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.