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.

“I think our school system is largely stalled right now,” asserted New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, one of the forum’s three undeclared Democratic candidates along with City Comptroller John Liu and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. “We need a very serious reset.”

De Blasio focused on the importance of early childhood education throughout the discussion, an issue which all potential candidates supported. He called for universal pre-kindergarten programs and expanded extracurricular activities across the city, arguing “that’s the kind of investment we need to make, or we’re not serious about turning the corner with our school system.”

Liu emphasized the necessity of preparing students to not only enter college, but to graduate from it as well. To keep students on track, he proposed hiring more guidance counselors and reducing the current system’s heavy focus on standardized testing—another issue that the potential candidates uniformly agreed needs to be addressed—as well as cultivating better communication with students’ families, whose voices, he argued, are too rarely considered.

“We need to engage the public more in terms of what the schools need, what communities need, what families and parents need,” he said.

Quinn, who is considered an ally of current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, agreed that the current administration still has many shortcomings that need to be overcome. She supported an evaluation system that would weed out bad educators, and argued that reducing testing would grant teachers more freedom and creativity in their lesson plans. “For a child who might not learn in the traditional way,” she said, “having that level of attention on standardized testing significantly reduces or eliminates the moments where that child’s mind might get passion or a spark might get set off.”

She noted, “Clearly progress has been made, but not enough.”

Tom Allon, CEO of the forum’s sponsor Manhattan Media and a declared Republican candidate, advocated what he called a “medical model” of teacher training to ensure that they have proper experience before taking over a classroom. Through a tier-track system and mandatory three-year in-class training period, the city would boost its low teacher retention numbers, he asserted.
“What [the Bloomberg administration] has missed is the fundamental problem of education,” said Allon, “which is that we’re just not properly training teachers before they get into the classroom, and we’re not giving them proper instructions once they get into the classroom.”

The only declared Democratic candidate, former city comptroller and 2009 mayoral candidate Bill Thompson, focused his criticism on chronic school closures, the root of a tension between public and charter schools. He spoke of the particular difficulties of the recently popular “co-location” of public and charter schools in the same buildings, where public schools are often inferior in resources and appearances. “The children feel as if they’re second-class citizens,” he argued, which creates disruptive rifts in what is supposed to be a mutually beneficial approach to learning.
Thompson agreed that early childhood education is essential, and that teachers need more professional development opportunities and support. “Education is collaborative,” he said. “The schools that do better are the schools that have individuals who work together with one teacher to help improve another teacher.”

The forum, held at Fordham University, was the first joint appearance of the five mayoral hopefuls since the presidential election earlier this month, and also since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, a presumed mayoral candidate, announced that he would run for city comptroller instead. The forum was considered an unofficial and symbolic start to the 2013 race, which will conclude next November.

According to an OWS newsletter, Martinez was barred from participating in the debate because he hasn’t raised more than $5,000. Martinez’s has adopted a novel DIY campaign technique drawing upon crowd sourcing and donation of labor and expertise as opposed to dollars, a campaign style he has dubbed “Bum Rush the Vote.”

In the campaign’s eyes, low funding is the whole point. “To us, this represents a victory for people-powered, grassroots politics, not a lack of ‘viability!’ ” argued the campaign in a statement over the weekend.

But NY1 looks to funding and expenditures as evidence of a campaign’s seriousness. The OWS newsletter disclosed a statement from an NY1 senior political producer Michael Nitzky explaining Martinez’s exclusion from the debates, “Every candidate who has been invited to appear in our debates has filed with the FEC and shown that they have fundraised and spent money as a candidate. [Martinez's] campaign has not done so.”

NY1 political director and executive producer Bob Hardt concurred. The Village Voice reported that he said to Martinez’s angered supporters, “Several candidates who are on the ballot in several of the races have filed with the Federal Election Commission but shown no evidence of any campaign activity and have not been invited to participate in our debates. Can you provide any evidence that George Martinez has been running an actual campaign by getting donations from voters in the district and spending the money on basic campaign expenses? If so, we’d reconsider our decision.”