Word: koch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Between the eras of La Guardia and Koch there is a lot of relevant New York City history, including black and Puerto Rican immigration, the strengthening of the unions, the demise of the political bosses...
...mayor's desk was originally used by Fiorello La Guardia. It had to be raised for Koch, who is almost a foot taller than the only predecessor of whom he speaks admiringly ?partly for his ideas, partly for his fame. Raised now, the desk is a bit too high for Koch, thus giving symbolic pleasure to those who think that the current mayor cannot hold a candle to the Little Flower...
Sitting at his too high desk, Koch can gaze straight across at La Guardia in a portrait, who stares straight back with all the severity due a competitor...
...Koch has no time for history. City hall itself, one of New York's most beautiful monuments to the past (the architecture is Louis XVI with sanity), seems fully functional, a museum to work in. Outside city hall the Wall Street area that now gambles for the world was once the whole city, when New York was a Dutch town veined by canals and hemmed in by a wall (thus the name of the street). Koch shows no interest in such things, any more than he seems to notice the plaque located on the sidewalk in front of city hall...
...Koch may not have time for history, but he would like to make history, and there is a good chance that he will. History, in turn, has made him?the immigrant boy, the shoe salesman, the Stevensonian, civil rights-defending liberal Democrat "mugged by reality" in Editor Irving Kristol's phrase, until eventually he became the most recognizable kind of figure in modern American politics: the neoconservative, the crypto-Republican, the Tough-Man Entrepreneur