I wish to pay tribute to an outstanding political leader, a courageous and principled man, a brash and decisive reformer---the late three-term New York City Mayor Edward Koch who died at age 88.
Ed Koch had demonstrated through his life and sterling public service record that one could be proud of ethnic heritage and still be a patriot of one's adopted country---having been Jewish and also American.
Read the two eulogies by a Bloomberg News columnist and another by the New York Times below.
(This image below sourced from wtsp.com)
(Image below sourced from nytimes.com)
(Image below of New York City sourced from blogs.villagevoice.com)
(Image below of New York City sourced from everaftermiami.com)
Here is an eloquent eulogy by Jeffrey Goldberg, a columnist of Bloomberg News:
Ed Koch had demonstrated through his life and sterling public service record that one could be proud of ethnic heritage and still be a patriot of one's adopted country---having been Jewish and also American.
Read the two eulogies by a Bloomberg News columnist and another by the New York Times below.
(This image below sourced from wtsp.com)
(Image below sourced from nytimes.com)
(Image below of New York City sourced from blogs.villagevoice.com)
(Image below of New York City sourced from everaftermiami.com)
Here is an eloquent eulogy by Jeffrey Goldberg, a columnist of Bloomberg News:
Ed Koch, Proudest of Jews
One of the reasons I adored Ed Koch (with eyes open -- I knew that his last term as mayor was a sad one, beset by corruption and hubris, and that he could have tried much harder to create a functional relationship with the city's black community) is that he reviewed movies like my grandmother reviewed movies. People may not remember this, but Koch had a long and illustrious post-Gracie Mansion career as a very bad movie reviewer. (A characteristic teaser Tweet: "Drive, don't run, to see Ryan Gosling in 'Drive.'")
My grandmother, who died several years ago and who also adored Koch -- even though Koch, unlike my grandmother, betrayed the city by living outside of it for parts of his life (my grandmother rarely ever budged from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn) -- devoured movies, too, and her reviews had Koch's same slashing forthrightness and practical outer-borough sensibility. When I asked her what she thought of "Titanic," she answered, "Enough with the water already."
Many years ago, I gave my grandmother a moment of real joy when I told her that Koch had driven me home the night before from a dinner (his very loyal NYPD protective detail did the actual driving).
"Did you tell him I love him?" she asked. Actually, no. "Did you say thank you for saving us?" This was her unshakable view, and the view of many hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers: Ed Koch saved us. The city was in seemingly permanent decline when he took over City Hall, and he lifted up New York through sheer will, irrepressible optimism and hot air. He didn't make it perfect. But he did, in fact, save it.
There was one other aspect of Koch's gargantuan personality that moved New Yorkers like my grandmother. He was the proudest of Jews. He was just saturated with ethnic feeling, and rambunctious in his pride. His devotion to Israel was total, and he despised what he saw as an Upper West Side tendency to cringe and wring hands. He felt about the Jewish people, and their reborn homeland, the way he felt about New York.
Koch will be buried in Manhattan, of course -- he wouldn't have had it any other way. And on his gravestone, he decided several years ago, will be the words of the "Hear, O Israel" prayer, and these lines: "My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.” These words are not his own; they were the last words spoken by Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Even in death, Koch will be celebrating the two most important aspects of his epic life: his city, and his people.
(Image below sourced from courant.com)
Below is an eloquent obituary of the New York Times on this remarkable mayor:
My grandmother, who died several years ago and who also adored Koch -- even though Koch, unlike my grandmother, betrayed the city by living outside of it for parts of his life (my grandmother rarely ever budged from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn) -- devoured movies, too, and her reviews had Koch's same slashing forthrightness and practical outer-borough sensibility. When I asked her what she thought of "Titanic," she answered, "Enough with the water already."
Many years ago, I gave my grandmother a moment of real joy when I told her that Koch had driven me home the night before from a dinner (his very loyal NYPD protective detail did the actual driving).
"Did you tell him I love him?" she asked. Actually, no. "Did you say thank you for saving us?" This was her unshakable view, and the view of many hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers: Ed Koch saved us. The city was in seemingly permanent decline when he took over City Hall, and he lifted up New York through sheer will, irrepressible optimism and hot air. He didn't make it perfect. But he did, in fact, save it.
There was one other aspect of Koch's gargantuan personality that moved New Yorkers like my grandmother. He was the proudest of Jews. He was just saturated with ethnic feeling, and rambunctious in his pride. His devotion to Israel was total, and he despised what he saw as an Upper West Side tendency to cringe and wring hands. He felt about the Jewish people, and their reborn homeland, the way he felt about New York.
Koch will be buried in Manhattan, of course -- he wouldn't have had it any other way. And on his gravestone, he decided several years ago, will be the words of the "Hear, O Israel" prayer, and these lines: "My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.” These words are not his own; they were the last words spoken by Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Even in death, Koch will be celebrating the two most important aspects of his epic life: his city, and his people.
(Image below sourced from courant.com)
Below is an eloquent obituary of the New York Times on this remarkable mayor:
Remembering Ed Koch
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times On the brink of power: Ed Koch on primary day in 1977, two months before he was elected to his first term as mayor.
With the death on Friday of Edward I. Koch , the “little Jewish kid from the Bronx” who grew up to govern New York City through 12 of its most memorably turbulent years, remembrances of the man, his deeds, his words and his 88 years flowed in from all over the world in every possible form.
Today on City Room we are curating moments from Mr. Koch’s seemingly infinite public life, and the reaction to his passing.
12:58 P.M. | On Koch's Tombstone, Daniel Pearl's Last Words (Image below sourced from hfba.blogspot.com)
The last words of journalist Daniel Pearl, kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan while investigating al Qaeda in 2002 for the Wall Street Journal, are inscribed on Mayor Koch’s tombstone.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Daniel Pearl
“My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”
Mr. Pearl, as the journalism blog Poynter points out, died 11 years ago today.
In a 2008 interview with the Associated Press, Mr. Koch said he was moved that Mr. Pearl had chosen to affirm his faith as his last words.
He also said in the interview that he bought his plot at the Trinity Church Cemetery because it was the only graveyard left in Manhattan with room. “I don’t want to leave Manhattan, even when I’m gone,” he said. “This is my home. The thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me.”
On the tombstone, Mr. Koch also included a Jewish prayer. And there’s no “How’m I doin’? ” inscribed. Instead, he wrote:
He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved its people. Above all, he loved his country, the United States of America, in whose armed forces he served in World War II.
12:22 P.M. |The Mayor of the Underground
Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times Where the action was: Mr. Koch handing out leaflets outside a subway station in 1975, when he was a Congressman.
Mayor Edward I. Koch ventured underground in his jacket and tie, spoiling for someone, anyone, to tell him how he was doing. When graffiti-addled subway cars presented an eyesore, he proposed dispatching dogs — or better yet, wild wolves — to patrol the yards where trains were often vandalized. And as he prepared for the moment that arrived Friday morning, when Mr. Koch died at age 88, the three-term mayor took care to ensure that the city’s transit riders were properly considered.
“He wanted to be buried near a subway,” said Richard Ravitch, who led the Metropolitan Transportation Authority during Mr. Koch’s first term and became a close friend, “so that people could come to his grave easily.”
His plot at Trinity Church Cemetery is a short walk from the No. 1 train.
There are few figures in the city’s history so synonymous with its signature mode of transportation, and few who took such an active interest in its finer details. On Friday, transit advocates credited Mr. Koch with cajoling the transportation authority to improve announcements, doubling the city’s commitment to an agency rebuilding program, and securing over $1 billion for city subways and buses in 1985.
But perhaps most memorable was Mr. Koch’s campaign against subway graffiti, even if his most imaginative plan never quite came to fruition.
His proposal was simple: build a fence, perhaps two fences, around the perimeter of the train yards, and place dogs inside to dissuade marauding vandals.
In an interview released by La Guardia and Wagner Archives, Mr. Koch recalled his detractors’ concerns: “Oh dogs, they’ll bite,” they would say. “I said, ‘well, that’s what dogs are supposed to do.’”
Then he had another idea.
“Instead of dogs, put in wolves,” he told them. “There is no recorded case of a wolf in the wild state ever attacking a human being in North America. It’s happened elsewhere, but not in North America.”
Alas, wild wolves never came to protect New York City’s subways. But some dogs were recruited. In 1981, days after he announced the use of German shepherds at a yard in Corona, Queens, the mayor was informed that one of the guard dogs had given birth to four puppies.
“Now that’s productivity,” he said.
Mr. Ravitch said Friday that the reduction in graffiti had more to do with the purchase of stainless steel cars, which were easier to clean, than with menacing animals. But Mr. Ravitch recalled Mr. Koch as a sparring partner and a friend, an occasional cheerleader for the system but a man who “often used to say on television, ‘If you don’t like the subways, don’t blame me, blame Ravitch.’”
Once, Mr. Ravitch recalled, Mr. Koch called the city’s transit workers “loungers and loafers.” After Mr. Ravitch defended the workers — and the city’s editorial boards defended Mr. Ravitch — the two decided to call a truce. Mr. Ravitch invited the mayor to his home on a Sunday night, for Chinese food. “We ordered spare ribs and egg rolls,” Mr. Ravitch recalled.
Mr. Koch also waded into other corners of transportation policy. Decades before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s bike lanes sprouted along the city’s thoroughfares, Mr. Koch installed experimental lanes of his own — inspired by a trip to Beijing, where he admired the bicycle’s prevalence. Mr. Koch later reversed course, and in 1987 moved to ban bicycle use on sections of Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues during many weekday business hours.
But the subway always remained near to his heart. In a recent interview, Mr. Koch marveled at how cordial riders had become since his administration ended, recalling a crime-riddled age when “the rule was, avert your eyes because eye contact meant battle. Like two animals.”
In recent years, he said, even pregnant women had begun offering him seats.
“I always say no,” he said.
(This old photo of Ed Koch below sourced from globalgrind.com)
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