(9 of 11)
He told this story in his office in city hall, stretched full-length in a black leather chair to one side of the fireplace, where he customarily talks to visitors. The office is well proportioned: 18-ft. ceilings and six high arches containing the windows and doors. The paintings vary—an uninteresting abstract consisting of parallel lines; a Matisse of a languishing nude; a study by Isabel Bishop of "Two Girls," young women really, the one in the red hat looking concerned toward the one in the black hat, who is holding a letter, perhaps conveying bad news. The room is a trove of bric-a-brac: a bogus Oscar inscribed to "Ed Koch, Mayor for Life"; a trophy from the Friars Club; sheet music of an old song called "How'm I Doin'?" (Koch seems curiously remote from these toys, as he does from the bizarre Pee Wee, a giant black-and-white wooden rabbit that sits in his bedroom in Gracie Mansion.) There is a sculpture of Romulus and Remus under the wolf, and a photo of the mayor on top of a camel in Egypt.
The mayor's desk was originally used by Fiorello La Guardia. It had to be raised for Koch, who is almost a foot taller than the only predecessor of whom he speaks admiringly —partly for his ideas, partly for his fame. Raised now, the desk is a bit too high for Koch, thus giving symbolic pleasure to those who think that the current mayor cannot hold a candle to the Little Flower.
Sitting at his too high desk, Koch can gaze straight across at La Guardia in a portrait, who stares straight back with all the severity due a competitor.
Between the eras of La Guardia and Koch there is a lot of relevant New York City history, including black and Puerto Rican immigration, the strengthening of the unions, the demise of the political bosses.
Koch has no time for history. City hall itself, one of New York's most beautiful monuments to the past (the architecture is Louis XVI with sanity), seems fully functional, a museum to work in. Outside city hall the Wall Street area that now gambles for the world was once the whole city, when New York was a Dutch town veined by canals and hemmed in by a wall (thus the name of the street). Koch shows no interest in such things, any more than he seems to notice the plaque located on the sidewalk in front of city hall: "In this place 24 March 1900, Hon. Robert Van Wyck made the first excavation for the underground railway"—the onset of one of the mayor's great headaches commemorated under his nose.
Koch may not have time for history, but he would like to make history, and there is a good chance that he will. History, in turn, has made him—the immigrant boy, the shoe salesman, the Stevensonian, civil rights-defending liberal Democrat "mugged by reality" in Editor Irving Kristol's phrase, until eventually he became the most recognizable kind of figure in modern American politics: the neoconservative, the crypto-Republican, the Tough-Man Entrepreneur