Greg David | Modern New York - Cast of Characters

Cast of Characters

John Lindsay

Mayor from 1970-1977, Lindsay took advantage of the first Wall Street boom to greatly expand city government. He pushed through a tax overhaul that laid the foundation for the city’s enormous tax burden and greatly worsened the terrible 1969-1977 recession. He also saved rent regulation during the election year of 1969.
Paul Volcker

A New York banker and head of the Federal Reserve Bank, Volcker was named chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979 as inflation ravaged the country. He broke the inflationary cycle and set in motion the bond market rally of the 1980s that led to the rise of Salomon Brothers and the second great Wall Street boom of the era.
Ed Koch

Mayor from 1978 to 1989, Koch rebuilt the city government after the devastation of the Fiscal Crisis and revived the city’s spirit. He did so by a radical break with his predecessors, putting the city’s economy and the needs of its businesses at the top of his priority list.
John Gutfreund

The CEO of Salomon Brothers who built his firm into the Goldman Sachs of the 1980s and who paid himself and others unprecedented bonuses in the era when Wall Street discovered how good greed could be. By the standards of later decades, he was very underpaid.
Lou Ranieri

The key figure at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, this trader popularized housing securitization, produced most of Salomon’s profits and affirmed the triumph of traders over investment bankers.
J.W. Marriott

Bill Marriott laid the foundation of the modern New York tourism industry. Hearing reports of very high occupancy at an older hotel in Times Square, he decided to build the Marriott Marquis at a time when Times Square was overwhelmed with porn, crime and prostitution. He gambled his company that New Yorkers would clean up the area. When he was proved right, his hotel became the biggest success in the worldwide chain.
David Solomon

Half of the husband and wife duo who came to the city to do architecture but jumped into development and showed how much money could be made from speculative construction. David and Jean Solomon became the symbols of the 1980s real estate boom and bust.
David Dinkins

Mayor from 1990-1994, Dinkins was elected in hopes that he could heal the city’s racial divisions. Instead, he was in office as the crime rate soared and the economy endured a severe recession. His lack of leadership made the city’s problems worse.
Rudy Giuliani

Mayor from 1994-2001, Giuliani took office promising to reduce crime and revive the economy by reducing the size of city government. He and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, drove down crime dramatically. Giuliani reduced the budget in the early years by cutting taxes but allowed it to balloon when another Wall Street boom sent billions in taxes into the city’s coffers.
Bill Bratton

Named police commissioner by Rudy Giuliani, Bill Bratton revolutionized policing by convincing cops that their job was not to arrest criminals but to prevent crime. While critics of Giuliani try to attribute the city’s sharp decline in crime to other factors, the evidence shows that Bratton’s strategies were the primary reason for making New York the safest big city.
Alair Townsend

Koch’s deputy mayor for economic development, Townsend was instrumental in keeping companies from leaving New York. As publisher of Crain’s New York business, she often spoke for the city’s business community and criticized Dinkins and Giuliani when others were too afraid to do so.
Todd Krizelman

Krizelman founded his web startup in his Cornell dorm room and took advantage of the Internet boom to take theglobe.com public; it was the biggest one-day surge in an Internet stock in the era. The company never had a viable strategy and eventually disappeared, as did most of the city’s new media stars of the 1990s.
Henry Blodget

One of the most well-known Wall Street analysts of the Internet era, Blodget became famous for saying Amazon.com’s stock price would soar and turned Merrill Lynch one of the most important investment bankers for tech companies. Blodgett was eventually forced to leave Wall Street for misleading Merrill customers but resurfaced as a financial journalist and Wall Street critic.
Kevin Ryan

A classmate of Blodgett at Yale, Kevin Ryan became CEO of the city’s most important Internet company of the 1990s—the ad firm DoubleClick. He both led its growth and ensured its survival in the bust. In the next decade, he launched a series of Internet startups including the largest—Gilt Groupe.
Michael Bloomberg

Mayor of New York since 2002, Michael Bloomberg became one of the city’s richest men by founding the information company that bears his name. He used that fortune and the political fallout from the 2001 terrorist attacks to win a narrow victory in 2001. Firmly in the tradition of Koch and Giuliani, he has put expanding the city’s economy at the top of his agenda with great success.
Lloyd Blankfein

The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Blankfein’s enormous pay for 2007 set a new standard for Wall Street, nine times the once scandalous amount of money that Salomon’s Gutfreund received in the 1980s. Whether he can steer Goldman through the post-Financial Crisis years may be crucial for the city’s future.
Dan Doctoroff

Mayor Bloomberg’s most important deputy, Doctoroff came to prominence with his effort to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York. That effort failed, but Doctoroff took on the myth of manufacturing and laid the groundwork for a more prosperous New York by opening underutilized manufacturing areas to commercial and residential development. His legacy is in limbo after the Financial Crisis but the mayor’s esteem for him is clear: Bloomberg named him to run his company.
Jerry Speyer

One of the city’s leading real estate developers, Speyer built his reputation on successful investments in Rockefeller Center and landmarks like the Chrysler Building. His biggest gamble of all, the purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village from Met Life, turned in to the largest real estate bankruptcy of all time and effectively ended efforts to dismantle the city’s rent regulation system through luxury decontrol.
Jay Cross

Once Doctoroff’s partner in the effort to build a stadium for the Olympics, Cross is now in charge of Related Companies’ plan to develop a Rockefeller Center-like neighborhood on the site where the stadium was to go. If he can succeed, the city will be more prosperous than ever. If not, it will be a sign that the era of New York may be ending.