The World We Make (Great Cities #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

“We keep trying to understand how all this city business works, and São Paulo explained about constructs, but I keep thinking small. Music tracks, street haggling, Nathan’s hot dogs. Little stuff. But remember when we were kids? That ‘I Love New York’ tourist campaign? I still remember the jingle. I remember Koch basically hitching himself to that slogan and all the imagery associated with it. There was even a Broadway play about him. I heard it was terrible, but the point is that he weaponized the city’s culture. I don’t think he was any kind of great mayor—started out a liberal then turned on the city’s poor—but to this day he’s one of the people who pops into everyone’s head whenever you say ‘mayor of New York,’ even decades later. Koch got political and public support that every mayor since can only dream of, because he made himself an icon of New York.” “And here you are,” Bronca drawls, “already New York, yourself.”