He was the right guy at the right time — during one of the most turbulent periods of New York City’s modern history.
“He had the right temperament,” said Mitchell Moss, an NYU professor of urban planning. “Koch was the spirit of New York when New York needed someone to go pump it up.”
The year Koch first ran for mayor was a pivotal time in New York. The city was in financial ruin after years of mismanagement. A major blackout pitched all of Gotham into darkness. Violence was rampant, and Son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz was terrorizing the streets.
“Before he became mayor, New York was heading for a disaster,” said lawyer Barry Slotnick.
But before the decade was over, the city was back on its financial feet and poised for a period of strong economic growth and falling crime statistics.
“I always thought he was a great executive. He was just very special,” added Slotnick, one of several Koch observers and confidants who shared their memories of New York’s iconic mayor with The Post yesterday.
Maurice Carroll, a former New York political reporter who now heads up polling at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University, also praised Koch’s handling of the city’s fiscal crisis.
“John Lindsay had managed to send the city into near-bankruptcy, [ex-Mayor Abe] Beame punted, and when Koch got in he straightened it out,” Carroll said.
“He was a real honest-to-God New Yorker if there ever was one. That’s one of the things people liked about him so much.”
But Carroll also pointed out that not everything was rosy on Koch’s watch — saying racial healing “was not his strong point, that’s for sure.
“The mayor presides over all this stuff, good and bad,” he said.
But Slotnick, who represented subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz after he shot four young men who tried to rob him on a 2 train in December 1984, remembered Koch as a conscientious and compassionate leader.
“I always thought he was a great executive. He was just very special,” he said.
About the Goetz case, Slotnick added: “He was torn; he clearly understood that I had a client who was in fear and protecting himself. He just couldn’t reconcile the idea that he shot four people.”
And Moss said one of Koch’s greatest achievements was cleaning up the judiciary.
“He got rid of political hacks and he got rid of all the clubhouse cronies in the judiciary. He was every man’s New Yorker, He gave New York a national identity. He was champion for the city when it was on it’s knees,” Moss said.