The Staten Island Problem - Part 5: Revenge of the Forgotten Borough

Election night 1993 meets election night 2016. The fate of the island and the country converge in the figure of one man: Rudy Giuliani. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 0:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 1:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Pushkin.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Election night, New York City, 1993. Staten Island Caver.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  That is Staten Island Cable's host, Frank Cipolla. Remember Frank? Former Assistant Press Secretary for the Staten Island Borough President. The one who got yelled at in those sham meetings late into the night? He got a new job, which gave him a front row seat to the big vote.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  The end of the campaign had been crazy. Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari drove around the island in something called the Freedom Bus, talking secession. Staten Island politicians worked the rush hour fairies to try and gin up more votes to secede. And on election night, it looked like it had all paid off.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  We go to Monica DeClarico at the Island Chateau with the latest results, Monica.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  There's a new total coming in.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Well, there you have it, Frank. That's 66% is the total now. The atmosphere here is, it's like a party.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  The numbers were huge.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny, 10 years ago, when Senator Markey first introduced the word secession, people thought of it as a joke.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We know very well that this is no joke.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  It was a landslide. People were celebrating all over the island. State Senator John Markey gave a victory speech. He was the chief sponsor on the bill to secede in the first place. You realize as a city that can plan for its own and doesn't have to say, may I, may I do this and may I do that? We will be going to.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  People on the island voted almost two to one in favor of secession.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Forgotten Borough, I don't know. I think we just might get rid of that nickname.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Dan Singletary was there, that artist who I'd found on those old tapes passionately arguing for secession.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Dan, obviously, your efforts have not been in vain. Did you ever expect to see such political fervor as you've seen tonight?

• 4:34Speaker 05

  This is one of the most wonderful nights, I think, for Staten Island, for the New York City and for New York State.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  It was decisive.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Or so they thought.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  As many of you listening already know, Staten Island wasn't going anywhere. It would remain part of New York City. And somewhere in the back of his mind, Singletary knew that too. When did you realize that?

• 5:04Speaker 05

  Oh, I was getting done pretty close to the end.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So towards the end of this process, you're like, this might actually not happen.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  I said, but it had to do something. And I said, you know, if we got something out of this, it was better than what we were.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  The vote was a referendum. It was Staten Island saying, we want to leave. But the New York State government was going to have the final say. And the next year, when the referendum came before the state assembly, the speaker just killed it. It was dead in the water.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  I hoped that it might be possible, but I knew the probability of all that is so difficult.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Someone else had to have known where all this was going too. Guy Molinari. This was supposed to be the biggest night in his borough's history. And yet, he was nowhere to be found on the island. Instead, he was in Manhattan with his good friend, Rudolph Giuliani, who was at that moment being elected mayor of New York City.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  When I started this series, I told you that this story would amount to a big argument about where our country finds itself today. There's an old way of thinking about time that I love, from the Middle Ages. The idea is that time doesn't just go horizontally, where today is closest to tomorrow, but also vertically, that certain days are closer to all their earlier incarnations. Christmas this year is nearer to Christmas last year than it is to December 26th. It's like a wormhole.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  And what I'm proposing is that when voters went to the polls on November 2, 1993, to elect a mayor and decide whether or not to break New York City up and send Staten Island off on its own, that day was very close to Election Day 2016. That the era we are living in now has everything to do with that moment then. That as a historian told me when I began all this, America really does happen first in New York City. And the America happening now is something you could see first in the Staten Island secession movement. And even more critically, in the man that movement gave us, New York City Mayor Rudy

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Giuliani.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I'm Ben Nattif Haafrey. This is the Staten Island Problem. Our final episode, Revenge of the Forgotten Borough.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's rewind. I want to focus in on the time leading up to that 1993 election because I realized that Rudy Giuliani and Staten Island secession were being driven by the same engine. And I wanted to understand what that engine was.

• 8:24Speaker 06

  The practice of politics in this city stinks. I mean, it is, it is an old fashioned way of practicing politics.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  America first met Rudy Giuliani as a crusader who took on the mob. As US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he went after corruption everywhere, on Wall Street, and especially in New York City government.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  Crooked politicians and crooked bosses of political organizations that are running counties that are in dire need of honest, decent people running those counties who are raping those counties for their own advantage.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  And one of the very first people encouraging Giuliani to consider running for a higher office was Staten Island's Borough President Guy Molinari.

• 9:06Speaker 06

  I think that they had a special kind of relationship or friendship. It went beyond friendship. It was, it was like extended family.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Randy Mastro worked with Giuliani in the US Attorney's Office and later as his first deputy mayor. And he witnessed Molinari's relationship with Giuliani firsthand.

• 9:25Speaker 06

  A lot of similarities in backgrounds, Italian Americans, working class, family backgrounds, shared a lot of the same values.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Giuliani was born in Brooklyn. He was a very serious child. He would sit on his front stoop and read while the other kids played stickball. He started the opera club in high school. He wanted to be a priest. His college girlfriend remembered, quote, "He liked to say Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian Catholic president of the United States."

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Molinari was with Giuliani from the very beginning. The day Giuliani announced his first mayoral run in 1989, it was Molinari who went to all five boroughs with him making introductions. Part of what they shared was an outer borough view of the city. Both were familiar with the politics of white people living on the periphery. And while some Staten Islanders were trying to leave the city entirely, Molinari was looking for someone who could remake it in Staten Island's image.

• 10:31Speaker 06

  I think there was definitely a sense in both their parts about being fair to every borough and that Manhattan had probably been favored by many prior mayors.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  David Dinkins beat Giuliani during the mayoral election of 1989 and became the city's first black mayor. But that election had been a warning sign to liberals in New York. Giuliani had lost by the slimmest margin of any mayoral race since 1905. His supporters were angry. They demanded a recount.

• 11:09Speaker 06

  Please relax and just listen.

• 11:12Speaker 06

  He will be.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  Wait, there's plenty of time.

• 11:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  The first political campaign I covered in New York City was Rudy Giuliani's second run for a very successful run. And I went with him on a, to Staten Island.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  What?

• 11:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Malcolm Gladwell, reporter covering New York for The Washington Post back then, who somehow waited until our final episode to reveal to me that he had met Giuliani and gone to Staten Island with him in 1993. He wrote about it in an article called Rudy Giuliani's Whispered Revolt.

• 11:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  I spent the day on a, we started in the morning. We took the, you know, got in the cavalcade. We went over the bridge and I ended up, came back late at night. He did, you know, he did events all throughout the day. And it was very clear that like, these were his people, even though he's a, for me, he's Flatbush. He's not, you know, he's an Italian, but they were, it's the Italian-ness and it's a sense of grievance.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  It's, it's the people who resent Manhattan.

• 12:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  Resent Manhattan and the, the kind of, and also his close affiliation with the police. Such a kind of cop guy. And that is, that Staten Island is cop central.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Giuliani spoke to exactly the kind of person who might want to secede from New York. He promised to do whatever it took to put New York City to order again. He would be Bruce Wayne in New York's Gotham. As US attorney, he seemed to love to publicly shame his victims with these dramatic perp walks. His message was that all the other mayors had been too tolerant. He promised a kind of illiberalism, zero tolerance.

• 12:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  The thing about Rudy is that Rudy's not fun, right? He's not genteel. He's not sophisticated in a way that some of these other characters are. There's something angry and kind of mean and, and kind of coarse about him. And coming into the New York City political scene for the first time, he realizes he has to, he realizes it's not going to, if he's himself at that point, it's not going to fly. It's too much of a departure. So he has to kind of play it down, play down his, his true essential rudiness.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  For a few years now, I've had a question about that true essential rudiness. Is he the same guy now as he was then? People used to think of him as America's mayor, the guy we depended on during 9/11, or the guy who cleaned up New York City. They don't recognize that guy in Rudy today, standing in the parking lot, Four Seasons total landscaping, spreading lies about stolen elections. That's why I'm so interested in understanding the Giuliani of long ago. Because I think that actually, he's always been the same Rudy. And there's a specific moment back in the 90s when you could see it clearly.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  One morning, a year before the 93 election, Rudy Giuliani and Guy Molinari met up for a very fateful day. The police union had organized a protest. They were angry about a series of riots where they felt Mayor Dinkins had betrayed them, Washington Heights and Crown Heights. They were angry that he had a big plan to put more civilian oversight on the police. So they gathered outside a place where they knew they'd get some attention.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  It was a show of force on the steps of New York City Hall. 10,000 off-duty cops banded together in protest, fed up and angry with a city they claim doesn't back them up.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  There were 10,000 off-duty cops. Many were drunk and things started getting out of hand. They began to climb on cars chanting "Dinkins Must Go."

• 15:05Speaker 02

  They held signs with racist caricatures of Dinkins with huge lips and a gigantic Afro, calling him a washroom attendant. They intimidated a black councilwoman as she tried to cross the street. People hurled racial epithets. Then they charged up the steps of City Hall. A reporter told CBS what he'd seen.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  They climbed the very steps of government and felt comfortable to call the mayor of the city a nigger. It's outrageous. If David Duke had a police department, it would look and sound like this group of people who assaulted our census.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  I was in City Hall at the time. The mayor wasn't.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  First deputy mayor at the time, Norman Steisel. Dinkins was actually uptown at a funeral. And so you were, you're the highest ranking person at City Hall?

• 15:57Speaker 06

  Yes, I was. They decided that, basically, they were thinking about storming City Hall.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Police inside told Steisel they had an evacuation plan through an unused stable in the back.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  At some point in all this, Rudy Giuliani arrived at City Hall. The head of the police union asked him to try to calm things down. He said he led a small group out of the main area and over to a protest outside the plaza, where there was a stage on a truck bed. Guy Molinari had already spoken there. Giuliani got up. He'd seen the out of control rage and hate at Dinkins and had a choice. Calm things down or feed the fire. He chose the latter.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  The reason, the morale of the police department of the city of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!

• 16:55Speaker 02

  He said the move to increase oversight on the cops was just, quote, "to protect David Dinkins's political ass." He said Dinkins's policies were, quote, "bullshit." Steisel, still inside City Hall, heard everything.

• 17:12Speaker 06

  And there's no question in my mind that that's what he talked about when he got up on the stage. You could hear him. It was, you know, right outside our, where we were. So I don't know.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  And so you felt he was inciting?

• 17:25Speaker 06

  Well, there's no question about it. Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  The rioters veered away from City Hall and blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge instead. They threatened drivers. One rioter kicked a New York Times reporter in the stomach. Another group of cops found a car with older black people inside and began to shove it back and forth. Dinkins was outraged.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  For Rudy Giuliani to, to, to urge them on, as it were, demonstrates an irresponsibility on his behalf.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I've started having this weird feeling as I work on this series that I think of as the flicker. Like, when I'm riding the subway, listening to Wu-Tang, the cars have less graffiti, but they're basically the same tin cans. And sometimes something shifts and I feel like I'm looking at the world 30 years ago. The same thing happened when I watched what little tape remains of the riot. Something flickers and suddenly I feel like I'm looking at the 2020s.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  After the break, I want to take you to a rural part of Wisconsin that helped me understand why.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal, along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 19:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet,

• 20:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.

• 21:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Sometime in the year 2007, a political scientist living in Wisconsin decided to leave the city of Madison and start driving around the state.

• 21:40Speaker 07

  I knew that if I wanted to understand how people make sense of politics, the best way to do that is to listen to them.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Katherine Kramer, professor at the University of Wisconsin.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  There's something going on in these rural communities that's very similar all across the state.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  She started hanging out at gas stations, athletic clubs, diners, any place she could find a civic association outside one of the big cities. And she realized that she kept hearing the same conversation in all of them.

• 22:18Speaker 07

  Like a simmering emotion, right? It's, it's different from anger in that it's just kind of this, we might say, like, a chip on your shoulder, a sense of, like, these people piss me off. I'm trying to think of a nicer way of saying it, but like, those people piss me off and they just don't understand me. Those people don't respect me. This sense of, I'm not getting my fair share in like, three important respects.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Those three respects, Kramer says, are money, the feeling that all the jobs and resources are somewhere else, namely, the cities, power, the idea that all the decisions are also made in the cities, and finally, respect, also something cities get more of than rural places. Together, this all adds up to a feeling: resentment.

• 23:13Speaker 07

  It's not that they just don't understand us. They don't care and they don't like us. Like, they think we're not worth listening to because they think we're uneducated and backward and sexist and homophobic and what have you.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  This feeling has always existed, country folk hating city folk, city folk thinking country folk are backwards. But what Kramer found is you could put numbers to it. And it had gotten a whole lot more intense, starting in the 1970s. And it wasn't just rural urban. It was about anything on the periphery of the big cities, which were only getting bigger.

• 23:50Speaker 07

  These sentiments show up in so many places and parts of our population, right? That, that sense of low boiling resentment towards the people in charge? Like, who, who doesn't feel that right now?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Secession was the manifestation of that same feeling. And it expressed itself in two ways: a vote for secession and a vote for Giuliani. On election night after they'd lost, that had been very clear to the Dinkins campaign. What defeated us was the secession issue on the ballot in Staten Island, which stimulated turnout there way out of proportion of its normal turnout.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  So many people had come out to vote for secession on Staten Island, way more than had voted in 1989. And 82% of the people on Staten Island voted for Giuliani. The vote from the forgotten borough is a big part of how we got Mayor Giuliani, the first Republican mayor of New York City in decades, taking the stage at the New York Hilton.

• 25:01Speaker 06

  I'm standing before you as the next mayor of New York City.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  The next day, Dinkins's chief political officer said, quote, "The only surprise, as far as I am concerned, was the size of the Staten Island numbers. You can show what I consider minor increases for Rudy across the board, but not major ones. If you fit Staten Island into the mix, there is the difference."

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Staten Island was part of a movement of people saying, "We don't believe the sum is greater than the parts, and we'd like to go our own way, actually." It was the most outer borough of the outer boroughs saying they wanted to be the center, not the periphery. For some, it was absolutely about race, but it was also about respect, about geography. It was about not wanting to be the dump anymore. And they started a movement that changed their reality by electing a leader who was outer borough himself, who understood what it meant to be on the periphery and both hate and need the center.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Giuliani made the ferry free. He invested almost half a billion dollars in the Staten Island waterfront. He got them that baseball park I used to go to in the summers when I just moved to New York City. But the biggest thing he gave them is that he and Guy Molinari managed to close the dump. On March 22, 2001, the last barge of trash sailed out for fresh kills. Giuliani stood on his porch and saluted as it passed. The dump was, at that point, the largest man-made object on earth.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  The process of Staten Island bearing the burden of the rest of the city's garbage was inequitable, and now it's over for good.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  For the rest of the city, particularly its black and brown residents, the results were more mixed. There was a viciousness to his efforts to clean up the city. Homeless people were denied shelter or forced to pay. Giuliani often refused to meet with black leaders. Cops were sent out to, quote, "empty the streets." Executives at the local public radio station said that at some point, they heard Giuliani say that his goal was to get poor people to leave New York. Today, we call that self-deporting. Frank Cipolla, the cable news guy, remembers, "You couldn't challenge him on any of it."

• 27:29Speaker 02

  I had screaming arguments with him at press conferences because I would ask a question and he would say, "Ah, that's a stupid question." I said, "According to who? I'm asking the question." And I wasn't the only one. He would just look at reporters and say, "You're an idiot. That's a stupid, I'm not going to answer that stupid question."

• 27:46Speaker 02

  And there was another New Yorker I'm guessing you're familiar with, who grew up in the outer boroughs too, and thought, "This is what a great leader looks like."

• 27:57Speaker 06

  Donald Trump announcing tonight the formation tomorrow of a committee to look into the possibility of his running for the presidency of the United States.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  This is a clip from Larry King Live in 1999, one of the first times Trump flirts with running for president. That year, Hillary Clinton was gearing up for her race against Giuliani for New York senator.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  What do you make of the, of the Hillary Giuliani? I know you're a big fan of Giuliani.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  I am, and, and I like her very much. But I think Rudy, and as I said before, he's been the greatest mayor in the history of, of the city of New York. And people, maybe some people don't like him and some people love him totally. I happen to be in love because the guy, not because I love Rudy, because he's done an incredible job. He's the best. I mean, he's just done a great job.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Trump grew up in Queens in an environment a lot like Giuliani, wanting, like Giuliani, to put his mark on Manhattan, to build the biggest towers and put his name on them, to be respected, even though it would always elude him. Giuliani was the model.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  I mean, the polls, generally speaking, National Enquirer did a poll that's unbelievable, that says I win, that you beat everybody.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  They win.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  I'll ride it right into the White House.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  When Rudy Giuliani took the stage at the New York Hilton to celebrate his election, it was the same stage Donald Trump would take 33 years later, celebrating his presidency.

• 29:31Speaker 06

  The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  There's a history to that term, forgotten, the forgotten borough, the forgotten men and women. Around the time in the middle of the 20th century that the civil rights movement had really picked up, there'd been a shift. And white, middle-class, and working-class people started thinking of themselves as forgotten, that they had been left behind in the name of progress. Those are the threads that political scientist Catherine Kramer was teasing apart in Wisconsin. And she wrote it up in a book about all this called "The Politics of Resentment." That book came out in March 2016, eight months before Trump got elected, riding a wave that looked exactly like what she described. An economic geographer

• 30:22Speaker 02

  picking up on some of what Kramer had discovered, wrote what is, to my mind, one of the most satisfying explanations for Trump's election. It's an essay called "The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places That Don't Matter." And it points out that you might expect a populism of resentment to come from the disenfranchised, the very poor, or ethnic and racial minorities, to put it in his terms, among the people that don't matter. But that's not what happened. It was the places that don't matter, even the wealthy people there, who voted for populism. And that same pattern held all around the world. The forgotten places, forgotten no longer.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  The forgotten borough, I don't know. I think we just might get rid of that nickname.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  A vote for Giuliani in 1993 is not the same as a vote for Trump in 2016, but they share that engine. There is some kind of deep cosmic tie between these men, these movements, these places, and these times. Because 29 years after Giuliani riled up a group of drunk, angry cops at City Hall, he did the same thing, but this time as someone in Trump's corner.

• 31:43Speaker 06

  But if we're right, a lot of them will go to jail.

• 31:49Speaker 06

  So, let's have trial by combat.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  To some who'd been in New York in 1992, what unfolded at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, all seemed very familiar.

• 32:06Speaker 07

  Absolutely. There was much chatter among the Dinkins alumni.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Of?

• 32:13Speaker 07

  About the parallel.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  We've seen this before.

• 32:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Marsha Smith, who worked with David Dinkins.

• 32:22Speaker 07

  It's so parallel. You know, you're talking about the first black mayor and the reaction to that, the first black president and the reaction to that. Though, you know, and it's a real reaction, you know, and it's, it is emotional. You know, it literally is psychological, emotional. Who, who gets to be in this position? What's fair and what's not? Who gets to wield power? Who doesn't?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  It's all here in seed form in the 1990s in New York City. It's the story of the past decade, 30 years ago. So how does it end?

• 33:11Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions,

• 33:57Speaker 00

  and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  This whole series has been about where we put our trash, literally and metaphorically. So as we reached the end of it, my producer Lucy Sullivan and I decided we had to make a pilgrimage. So I wish it were a little warmer, but I'm happy that it's gonna be like sunny.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's crisp.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  We were going to Fresh Kills. Once the biggest landfill in the world, now it's on its way to becoming one of the largest parks in the city. We brought its biggest fan with us, the anthropologist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, Robin Nagel. Of the many reasons I love this city, the fact that this position exists has got to be top five. Real treat to go. You all are my, you're like giving me a gift here. Yay. We met with two administrators for the park, Chris Ricker and Mark Murphy. We all drove out to one part of the park called the North Mound. Chris and Mark are native Staten Islanders, and they care a lot about the transformation of this place.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Do you remember what you thought about it when you were growing up? Like, how did you feel about the dump?

• 35:28Speaker 06

  Well, we don't call it the dump. We call it the landfill. But we have our dump jar downstairs. So you put a dollar in it every time somebody says the dump.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  I think that know you.

• 35:36Speaker 06

  Thank you. This was like the dark side of the moon. And your parents, my dad would say to me, look, go, you know, we had garbage out in the garage. Clean the garbage out, take it out to the landfill. And he'd say, take it out to the dump. And you'd throw it in the back of the station wagon. You'd drive out, and it was just this vast place with telephone poles in the ground and ropes on them. And you'd tie it around the stuff in your car, and you would drive away, and it would all fly out. And you'd close the doors, and you wouldn't look back. Because number one, you wanted to get out of that place. But it was like where everything you didn't want went.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  It's clear that this is going to be a beautiful park. It's not fully open to the public yet. Rolling hills are dotted with little pipes pumping methane out of the trash underneath to make it safe for the public. Benches and paths, wide open spaces. Green grass, but not many trees. Turns out, you can't plant things with deep roots on garbage. I turned to my left on top of the mountain of buried trash, and in the clear distance, I saw the buildings of Manhattan gleaming. Someday, people are going to go out of their way to come to this place.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Can you? What are we standing on top of right now?

• 36:51Speaker 07

  So as an anthropologist, we're standing on the story of New York City. If you lived here between 1948 and 2001, you're here somewhere. Maybe not in this exact mound, but some piece of you, even if you just passed through, some piece of you is underneath us. And this is an archaeologist's dream in 500 years, let's say. Like, long in the future. Just the daily lives of normal folks. People who's, they don't become famous. They don't make headlines. But their material record is under our feet.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Ospreys circled overhead. And then Robin said something that I've been thinking about ever since.

• 37:35Speaker 07

  Someday, to my regret, people won't even know that they're standing on mounds of garbage. It's just this extraordinary green space, which I think is its future. Because we don't, we don't remember that Orchard Beach and the 79th Street Boat Basin and all of Lower Manhattan, from Pearl Street to the water, is built on fill. We don't remember that. We walk on our garbage history all the time.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  This whole series, I've been thinking about an unresolved tension at the heart of this country. The idea that every person is equal and deserves an equal vote is at odds with the way our government's actually built. That every state is equal and deserves equal representation, regardless of how many people live there. Are we a country of places or of people? This is a question that New York City resolved in 1989. Remember? Shutting down the Board of Estimate was like killing the Electoral College and the Senate in one fell swoop. New York City became a democracy of people and not of place. But when they did, they missed a crucial fact. Place does actually matter.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  The politics of resentment are a politics of place and remoteness. And if you don't attend to that, people elect a strong man who favors them over others. You get Giuliani. You get Trump. The revenge of the places that don't matter. The reality is, we're stuck together. And if we don't want to keep getting periodically rocked by the forgotten places, we're left with one option. Figure out a new story we can tell that makes this whole place make sense again. That remembers all of it and everyone.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  And so now, in closing, let me share with you just one last excellent Staten Island fact. One day, decades after Woody Guthrie died, his daughter Nora got a call. It was her father's manager.

• 39:48Speaker 07

  And he said, you know, I'm gonna retire soon, so I need someone to come in and kind of learn this stuff of, there's stuff here of your father's, boxes of stuff. So I went in, and then I pulled out a three-hole notebook, and it's filled with lyrics, just like 150, page after page after page, just turning the page. And then there's this land. And I took it out of the book. I said, have you ever seen it? And he said, no. No one had opened these boxes for 40 years.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  "This land is your land" is basically the unofficial national anthem. Nora discovered that her dad had written it soon after he first arrived in New York in 1940.

• 40:36Speaker 07

  He's basically describing his trip from California to the New York Island.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  That is the crucial lyric, the very first couplet. "This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island." But looking at that page of his notebook, Nora realized that's not the line he originally wrote.

• 41:04Speaker 07

  The original lyric had "from California to Staten Island." Why? I have no idea.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  The most crucial part of the first draft of probably the most famous song in American history goes "from California to the Staten Island." And then he crossed it out and wrote another version, the one we all know. Word of this got out in the 1990s, around the time of secession.

• 41:37Speaker 07

  I did have a group of people come many years ago from Staten Island and petitioned me to go back to the original lyric. They wanted Staten Island, you know.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  You serious?

• 41:51Speaker 07

  I'm serious. And they were like, so why did he cross out this Staten Island? I said, I don't know. And do you think we could get it back? I said, I don't think so. But at that point, it had already been published and was widely known.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Staten Islanders, they love a petition and hate being forgotten. And honestly, who doesn't? So since the New York State Legislature decided they weren't going to let Staten Island go its own way, I think it's the least we can do to put them back in the song. I asked my friend Sam Lewis in Nashville to record it for us.

• 42:32Speaker 05

  This land is your land. This land is my land. From California to the Staten Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. This land was made for you and me. As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway.

• 43:12Speaker 05

  I saw below me that golden valley. This land was made for you and me.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  The Staten Island Problem is written and reported by me, Ben Nataf Hafrin. It was produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Rusick. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski. Original music by Stellwagen Symphonette, Luis Guerra, and Jake Gorski. Special thanks to Todd Reynolds for his track "The Solution" from the album Outer Borough. And thanks, of course, to Malcolm Gladwell. So many people shared their time and expertise with me as I made this series. You don't hear all their voices, but it wouldn't have been possible without them. Thanks in particular to Derek Alves, Chris Bauer, Chris Beecham, Ed Burke, Jerry Camerata,

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Gretchen Dykstra, Art Eisenberg, Richard Emery, Ray Fasano, Fernando Ferrer, Ken Gold, Eric Lane, Jill Lepore, Thomas Main, Thomas Matteo, Chris McNichol, Marty Malosi, Susan Mullinari, Patrick Nugent, Carol O'Clarican, Philip Pappas, Jose Ramirez-Garofalo, David Schleicher, Eric Vitaleano, Joseph Viteretti, and Kevin Wade. Several archivists were, as always, the backbone of this story. Huge, huge thanks to James Kaser and Rebecca Lambert at the College of Staten Island Archives, to Danny Sbardella at WNYC, and to the whole staff of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  At Pushkin, thanks to Staten Island's own Morgan Ratner, and to Greta Cohn, Jake Flanagan, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, and Grace Ross. And thanks also to Julia Conrad for teaching me to love this city and its history as much as she does. I'm Ben Nataf Hafrin.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  This land is your land. This land is my land. From California to the Staten Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. This land was made for you and me.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in lifesaving scientific research, until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers only at blockers.fm.