Thank You, Edward I. Koch

I'm 45 and I've been in love twice. Once with a woman and once with a city. I fell in love with the woman at 42. I fell in love with the city around fourth grade. It is the city of my birth, but federal employment removed my father and mother, both native New Yorkers, to the Washington, DC suburbs before my third birthday.  Instead of navigating New York the way cousins and friends did through the hard years of the 70's and 80's, I loved it from afar, coveting visits and planning the eventual triumphant return as a Grown-Up that would be my destiny.The problem was that fourth grade, the year my heart opened and I knew love for the first time, was 1977. Haunted by a serial killer and crippled by a blackout, '77 was the year that, by most reasonable measurements, the object of my affections was declared dead.It wasn’t just the crime stats and socio-economic shifts of the 70’s that told me so.  It was also the mantra I heard incessantly through conversation aimed both at me and above my head, either in my father’s house or at the houses of my relatives back in the 212.  My ubiquitous childhood memories are of the spicy smell of tomato sauce in the kitchens, the mustiness of wood paneling in basement rec-rooms, and the god-awful, never-gonna-turn-it-around, descent into white-flight, urban blight, talk of the Death of the City. The past was great. The present was awful. The future looked worse. All that I loved about the city, I was told with the occasional wagging finger, had the depth and breadth of a yellowing photograph of smiling relatives dressed in black beside an impossibly large and equally black car. All that was good about it, I was told, was no longer.  Best to look toward the cities that had a future. Boise. Charlotte. Anywhere in California.  New York was gone, the leader of a band of lesser rust-belt cities like it, marching toward the graveyard in a funeral dirge.A giant of a mayor named Fiorello H. LaGuardia signed the birth certificates of my mother and father, one of whom was born to a man whose "usual occupation" was that of fruit peddler. They arrived in dark times, but to a great city. Mine was signed by John V. Lindsey. Lindsey called being mayor of New York "the second toughest job in America" and then seemed to demonstrate that difficulty by presiding over a slide that looked more like free fall by the time he dumped what was left into the lap of Abe Beame in 1973.But then there was Ed Koch, seizing control over the spiral in the winter of 1978, that frigid and dark reflection of the steaming, violent summer that preceded it. Koch loved New York unashamedly and unabashedly. His cheers for the city were louder in my ears than the head-shaking disparagement, the insistence on the superiority of the Sun Belt, and the cynical drone of disco. He made it okay for me to remain secretly in love, and I love him still for it.Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have reaped most of the credit for the relative Disneyland that is the New York City to which I have finally returned. Their initiatives, the work of visionaries like William Bratton, the relentless draw of New York come hell or high water, and host of other factors have quieted the dirges.Neither Koch nor his successors have been miracle workers; Intractable problems remain in the city I love, and I count among my proudest accomplishments the tiny role I was able to play battling crime in its poorest, still toughest borough. That brief, two-year stint as a Bronx ADA and New York City employee pales in comparison to the efforts of hundreds of colleagues and millions of fellow New Yorkers who continue to work, officially or unofficially, to make the city's heart beat as strong as ever.Still, I was grateful for the chance to do my part, and I remain eternally grateful to the man who gave me the secret inspiration as a child in love to do so. God bless and keep you, Your Honor.