Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch — who just a few days ago was still going, if a bit weakly — has died. The NYT has a very readable obituary, which notes,
Besides his sister, a former dean at New York University whom he saw regularly in later years, Mr. Koch is survived by New York itself, as an old friend put it a few years ago.
Koch’s generally successful tenure was buoyed by his outsized and quotable personality but stained by what could most charitably be called insensitivity to New York’s racial problems; to a distant observer that insensitivity sometimes looked more calculated. It’s odd to read again about the many scandals involving Koch’s associates that brought him down; that isn’t what sticks in memory nearly as much as Koch dooming his run for Governor by knocking upstate as too rural and Albany as devoid of a decent Chinese restaurant.
