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Demographically, the city grows ever more polarized as the middle-class buffer is driven out. Raymond Horton, a Columbia University professor of business who heads the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, fears outright conflict between rich and poor. "This city is a densely conglomerated group of people living on top of each other. If 25% are poor and x% are rich and getting richer, that's potentially a very bad thing."
The city's population is projected to be 60% nonwhite and Hispanic by the year 2000, and neither group sees Mayor Koch as its champion. Every week for 92 weeks the city's leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, has front- paged a demand for Koch's resignation. The mayor alienated the black community when he closed a Harlem hospital in 1980 and cut back services to the poor. Minorities have not forgiven him for calling some black and Hispanic welfare workers "poverty pimps." Dean Robert Curvin of the Graduate School of Management at the New School for Social Research faults Koch for failing even to have a black adviser involved in day-to-day policy decisions. "Koch," says Sternlieb, "is a polarizer instead of a unifying force, sometimes going out of his way to flex his muscles." The atmosphere makes it certain that if Koch runs in 1989, he will be challenged by a black politician, possibly Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins.
Koch's high visibility makes him a natural target for blame. But with New York's array of problems, could any other mayor have done better? Most urban experts give Koch good marks for his first two terms, but suggest he is suffering from "third-term syndrome." Horton observes that "third terms have never been very kind to New York City mayors -- even Fiorello La Guardia. The city wears men down and the press eventually turns. Mayors get a one-term honeymoon. Koch kept it for two terms." Those who were Koch supporters for three elections have turned ornery, with special-interest groups battling his every proposal, whether to get the mentally unstable homeless off the streets for professional care or to revitalize tawdry Times Square. Sympathizes Martin | Steadman, until recently a senior aide to Governor Mario Cuomo: "Koch has done a good job, given the problems. New York is a monster headache for anybody who would be mayor."
After suffering a minor stroke in August, Koch seemed to lose heart under his physical and political burdens. Subdued, he planned his own funeral: at a large synagogue (to accommodate the crowd) with a eulogy by his friend John Cardinal O'Connor (with whom he is writing a book on their often conflicting views of current issues). His gravestone is to read: "He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York. He fiercely loved the people of the City of New York."
Koch is not only fierce, he is also resilient. He used to half joke that his goal was to be mayor for life. Although that now seems too much a joke to be funny, on Dec. 10 he will celebrate his 63rd birthday at a fund-raising dinner where 550 guests will ante up the perfect gift: $1,000 a plate -- $2,000 for best seats -- for a man with his eye on a fourth term and on history.