NEW YORK — Edward I. Koch, the outspoken threeterm New York mayor who led the biggest U.S. city from the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1970s and boosted the spiritsof crime-weary residents, has died. He was 88.
Koch died at 2 a.m. Friday of heart failure at NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia Hospital, spokesman George Arztsaid. Koch had been hospitalized in September for anemia, and in December for pneumonia and flu, and was moved into intensive care Thursday afternoon. The funeral will be held Monday at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan.
Serving from 1978 through 1989, Koch presided over the Wall Street-fueled economic boom of the 1980s, turning a $1 billion budget deficit into a $500 million surplus in five years. He restored the city’s credit, doubled the annual budget to $26 billion and oversaw $19 billion in capital improvements. His subsidized housing plan produced more than 156,000 new and renovated units.
“Through his tough, determined leadership and responsible fiscal stewardship, Ed helped lift the city out of its darkest days and set it on course for an incredible comeback,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday in a statement. He called Koch “an irrepressible icon, our most charismatic cheerleader and champion.”
Koch’s in-your-face style, straight talk and catchphrase “How’m I doing?” endeared him to New Yorkers racked by the lingering fiscal crisis, the Son of Sam serial killings,and the arson and looting that broke out after a blackout in July 1977.
Commuters walking across the Brooklyn Bridge during the first day of an 11-day transit strike in 1980 were startled to find the bald 6-foot 1-inch mayor cheering for them. He called critics “wackos,” welfare advocates “poverty pimps,” told visiting Soviet schoolchildren that their government was “the pits” and said a crack-smoking lawyer accused of killing his daughter should be “boiled in oil.”
A documentary about the former mayor by Neil Barsky, Koch, opened Friday in Manhattan.
He was “some mad combination of a Lindy’s waiter, Coney Island barker, Catskills comedian, irritated school principal and eccentric uncle,” writer Pete Hamill said in 2005 during a panel discussion at the Museum of the City of New York, which hosted an exhibition on the recovery since the 1975-76 fiscal crisis. “He seemed to be everywhere at once.”
By 1985, Koch, a Democrat, had become the most popular mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia four decades before, winning 75 percent of the vote in his bid for a third term.
Four years later, after corruption scandals rocked his administration and his criticism of civil-rights leader and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson angered some black voters, Koch was defeated by David Dinkins in the Democratic primary. Koch maintained that his loss had nothing to do with the scandals or accusations that he had become a polarizing figure.
Edward Irving Koch was born in the Bronx on Dec. 12, 1924, the second of three children of Russian-Jewish immigrants Louis and Joyce Silpe Koch. His father was in the garment business. Koch attended City College of New York from 1941 to 1943, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army and saw combat in World War II. He was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant in 1946.
After the Army, Koch entered New York University School of Law, receiving his degree in 1948 and opened a law practice.
Koch became active in Democratic politics, working for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 and becoming a member of the Greenwich Village Independent Democrats, a dissident liberal faction of the party. Koch challenged the old-line Democratic organization that was still known as Tammany Hall.
After serving two years on the City Council, Koch in 1968 won election to the U.S. House, a victory considered an upset against the Democratic machine. During his nine years in Congress, he spoke out against the war in Vietnam and advocated federal aid for mass transit and health care for the elderly.
Koch entered a seven-person Democratic mayoral primary in 1977, beating chief rival and future New York Gov. Mario Cuomo for the nomination. The September primary was marred by attacks on Koch such as posters saying “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo,” an apparent attempt to say the unmarried Koch was a homosexual. The Cuomo campaign denied it was behind thesigns.
Koch took office as mayor in January 1978 after winning the November general election against Cuomo, who ran on the Liberal Party ticket.
Information for this article was contributed by Henry Goldman and Freeman Klopott of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/02/2013