This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.
DONALD BARTHELME, CITY LIFE
THE months of three-digit temperatures, of air so humid it might as well have been water, were finally over. On Thursday, September 8, a mild, partly cloudy day, a record number of New York City Democrats turned out to nominate their candidate or at least narrow the field to two.
As night approached, the candidates made their way to their respective locations to await the returns. Abzug barreled confidently into the Roosevelt Hotel, her brown suede hat flopping, to the strains of the theme song from “Rocky.” A few hours later, when her fourth-place finish was all but confirmed, the band struck up a more somber tune, “Eleanor Rigby.” Abzug conceded at a little after midnight.
Abe Beame, stubborn as usual, waited much longer. Not since 1917 had a New York City mayor duly elected to a four-year term
been rejected by his own party. For hours Beame sat, his face creased with fatigue, watching the returns on the twentieth floor of the Americana Hotel before finally coming down to admit defeat at a little before 2 a.m. Now, in the same hotel where New York had gained a superstar less than a year earlier, it was about to lose a mayor.
In a sense, it was losing more than that. “I gave this city every ounce of my strength and my fullest devotion during its most trying years of crisis,” Beame told his dwindling band of supporters. “I’ve not let this city down.” Moments later the usually stoic mayor began to cry. His wife, Mary, hugged him, allowing Beame to collect himself, and he pressed on. As he did, New York’s diminutive leader seemed almost to grow. He was no longer an easy object of derision, a pint-size emblem of the city’s failures, but rather a dignified civil servant, the embodiment of a vanishing New York, a New York in which the sons of socialists overcame poverty and then quietly devoted themselves to making the city a better place to live, where the Democratic Party machine (however corrupt) and the labor bosses (however power-hungry) always took care of their needy constituents.
Meanwhile, at Charley O’s, a nondescript saloon in the theater district, the crowd was chanting “First Lady Bess.” Ed Koch handed a bouquet of red roses to Myerson—“the most important person of the campaign”—and celebrated his narrow first-place victory.
Across the river at a catering hall in the eastern reaches of Queens, second-place finisher Mario Cuomo squinted into the harsh glare of the TV lights and looked ahead to the September 19 runoff. Cuomo had recovered his underdog status but Koch’s margin of victory had been less than one percent. A senior member of his campaign staff, Richard Starkey, felt encouraged. “Mario has nice things to say about all of his opponents save Koch,” Starkey wrote later that night in his diary. “He wants to put an end to the charge that he isn’t substantive enough. He wants to debate ‘Eddie’ every day for the
next eleven days. He talks with a zest for combat that is familiar. Although he is tired he doesn’t let himself become aggressive or arrogant, just self-assured.”
The following morning the feminist Gloria Steinem told viewers of the Stanley Siegel Show that the election results confirmed that the once liberal city had lurched to the right. That was one way of looking at it. Another was that in eliminating Beame and Abzug and choosing Koch and Cuomo, the city’s voters had narrowed the field to the two candidates least encumbered by the past.