The New York of the nineteen-eighties was, warily, a city in transition. The frightening “Taxi Driver” New York of the previous decade—steaming manholes, blackouts, riots—still hung over the town, but so did the potent downtown renaissance that had begun at the same time, stretching from punk music at CBGB to a still intact SoHo, where a genuine village of art reigned and the world crowded into 420 West Broadway on Saturdays to see what might happen next. Yuppies, as they were called, were a real phenomenon. The idea that young professionals might build their lives in the city rather than flee it was still a novelty, with the “consumption benefits” of urban living now outweighing the “production benefits.” You came because this was where the life was, not because this was where the jobs were.

Ed Koch was mayor, with an expansive Jewish-uncle manner—“How’m I doin’?” was his constant refrain—memorably captured in a Claymation version in an Oscar-winning short. Old-school New York in style, he was quietly rumored, despite his public romance with a Jewish former Miss America, to be a closeted gay man. By 1984, an obscure real-estate striver named Donald Trump had slipped onto the cover of GQ—the last man you’d want to sit next to on a plane, perhaps, but also the last man you’d imagine as the agent of democracy’s undoing. If you were starting out in the arts or the professions, you likely lived in a tiny place on the far West or East Side of Manhattan, or a slightly larger, funkier one on the Lower East Side. Very few people you knew lived in Brooklyn.

The New York City subway, running all day and night, was the perfect emblem of this era. A sometimes breathtaking “wild style” graffiti had flourished in the system, but the same spray paint was also a marker of disorder, romanticized at a cost. Outside, the full-car murals were unforgettable and, in their way, influential in the worlds of painting and design; inside, the signage devolved into tags, mere scrawled names that hinted at the city’s inability to police even its own interiors.

It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there how the subway managed to feel more dangerous than it does now even as violations of the normal order felt less menacing, because they were part of the normal order. The subway not feeling safe meant that you had no illusions that it ought to be. People are good at intuitively computing dangers—the snake-or-stick problem—and we did it then, rapidly sorting the real threats from the feigned ones. Even the most naïve new New Yorker learned the choreography of avoiding trouble, the small dance of changing cars. It was the price one paid to live in New York. For the growing number of immigrants arriving in the city, it was a price worth paying. Anyway, it was the price you had to pay.

In that atmosphere of fear, on an unseasonably warm December day in 1984, on a 2 express train in downtown Manhattan, a troubled young man named Bernhard Goetz—believing, whether reasonably or not, that he was about to be mugged—shot four Black teen-agers. All were badly wounded; one of them, Darrell Cabey, was left permanently paralyzed and cognitively impaired.

For much of the following year, and well beyond, the shooting became the first true eighties tabloid spectacular, the kind that Tom Wolfe tried to render as black comedy in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” All the forces and clownish figures of the moment, from Howard Stern to Al Sharpton, weighed in. For a time, everyone knew Bernie Goetz’s name and face. By the decade’s end, Billy Joel would include Goetz in the long roll call of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” rhyming him, in proper period fashion, with “foreign debts” and “homeless vets.”

Police escort Bernie Goetz out of a New York courthouse.Photograph from Bettmann / Getty

Was the Goetz incident a genuinely significant event, crystallizing something that was passing through the city, and perhaps is still with us today? Or was it merely a tabloid eruption, memorable for its shock value but, in the end, only a bubble on the surface of deeper currents that were shifting on their own? Now, four decades on, two new books return to the shooting, and to the circus that followed, from very different perspectives. “Five Bullets” (Penguin Press), by the CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, is a carefully wrought account that manages some broad sympathy for all sides. Heather Ann Thompson’s “Fear and Fury” (Pantheon) provides an even more detailed reconstruction—very much in the vein of her excellent, indignant history of the Attica prison uprising, from 2016—but is far more polemical. She treats the Goetz episode as the first whitecap on the surge of racial rage that rose with the Reagan era and has carried into our own. It would be overstating things to claim that the authors’ feelings about the event divide neatly along either side of the subway car; both, within the limits of their viewpoints, are doggedly fair-minded narrators. But Thompson ends her story with Cabey and his mother, while Williams closes with an interview with Goetz, who is allowed to emerge, if not exactly sympathetically, then at least as a three-dimensional figure.

The four teen-agers—Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—came from the South Bronx at a time when the borough was still a national byword for immiseration and hopelessness. Suspicious cops and the threat of incarceration were not distant spectres, as they were for most white New Yorkers, but part of the everyday fabric of life. In a sense, the teens never had a real chance. Yet they really were headed downtown to commit a crime, albeit the relatively trivial one of stealing from video-arcade machines while one of them distracted the employees, and they were carrying screwdrivers for that purpose. But they were not the menacing “sharpened screwdrivers” that the newly reactionary New York Post or the still reactionary Daily News insisted they were. Nor were the tools ever displayed, much less brandished, as the tabloids suggested.

Goetz, in turn, was not, as he was often portrayed at the time, a fed-up citizen. He was a recognizable Travis Bickle type, straight from the “Taxi Driver” template: an isolato from a German background, with an engineering degree from N.Y.U. and a brief, failed marriage behind him. By 1984, he was self-employed, living in a one-bedroom apartment on West Fourteenth Street, still a rough part of town. He was a reclusive man whose fear and resentment—punctuated by racist remarks, though how often and how intensely he made them remains contested—had led him to apply for a concealed-carry permit. When he was rightly denied one (you could still be refused a permit then, absent a demonstrable need for self-protection), he simply bought a Smith & Wesson revolver and carried it everywhere, certain, like his “Taxi Driver” analogue, that the city’s disorder was looking directly at him. He had been mugged once already; if he wasn’t actively looking for an armed encounter, he was certainly ready—and perhaps reaching—for one.

Both books, with varying degrees of confidence, agree that Canty approached Goetz and asked for five dollars. Whether this was a genuinely threatening gesture or the sort of panhandling that straphangers (as they were still called) had learned to evade or ignore is disputed. The teens’ later statements make clear that a cultural misalignment in signalling played a part. They understood their approach as hassling, but well within the boundaries of what passed as acceptably obnoxious behavior—no more sinister than walking through the park with a boom box on your shoulder. It was annoying, and it was meant to be annoying, but it wasn’t intended as a prelude to violence, and nothing in that mode of street nuisance would lead one to expect to be shot. The poignancy of their shock still resonates. “Why did he shoot me?” one wounded teen asked, plaintively.

“I’m going to drop Sam off at two, and then pick up Ellie at two-thirty-five, which should leave me just enough time to do absolutely nothing.”

Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson

Certainly, the other riders in the car—including two friends on their way to SoHo and a recently arrived West African computer engineer—did not feel threatened enough to move, and were as stunned by the gunfire as the teens themselves. Several agreed that Goetz pursued the teen-agers after they had retreated, firing again at Cabey, severing his spinal cord, and delivering a once notorious New York line: “You don’t look so bad. Here’s another.”

Goetz fled the scene after speaking briefly and coolly to the train conductor. The wounded teen-agers were taken to Bellevue and to the now closed St. Vincent’s Hospital, and the hunt for the subway shooter became an instant tabloid mania. Goetz slipped north to Vermont and New Hampshire, where he turned himself in, after burying his gun and wandering the snowy roads, in a tableau that could have come out of “The Sopranos”: the violent New Yorker adrift in some beatific rural elsewhere. At first, he had wanted to get in touch with the Guardian Angels, a largely Black and Hispanic self-appointed subway-patrol group that had recently sprung up under the command of a man named Curtis Sliwa. Instead, he went to the Concord police department, and the N.Y.P.D. dispatched several officers and an Assistant District Attorney to take his confession.

He was strikingly forthcoming, speaking in language uncannily close to what a liberal screenwriter of the time might have put in his mouth. Goetz said that his act of revenge, though provoked by the entire “system,” had not proved satisfying. “It’s the worst thing in your life when you’re on the losing side, and when you’re on the winning side it makes you sick,” he said. “If there’s a God, God knows what was in my heart. And it was . . . sadistic and savage.” He seemed appalled by his own actions. Yet those were not the words that echoed. What made the headlines were some other words that he uttered: “I’m sorry for what happened, but it had to be done.”

The shooting took place on December 22nd, at a moment when New York was experiencing, in a herald of the coming era, a boom in holiday tourism. City officials were acutely aware that a subway gunman could spook the newly arrived Christmas crowds, and there was a palpable institutional eagerness to cast the shooting as an act of vigilante “revenge” against muggers, rather than as a recurrence of the random, destabilizing violence associated with the Son of Sam period, which had seared itself into civic memory in the late seventies.

Only weeks earlier, the city had been shaken by the murder of Caroline Isenberg, a recent Harvard graduate and an aspiring actress who was attacked and dragged to the rooftop of her West End Avenue apartment building by Emmanuel Torres, the twenty-two-year-old son of its superintendent. Torres’s brother, Alfredo, was a resident physician—a reminder of how starkly the lives of two people born under the same roof could diverge. This story dominated the tabloids and fed a general sense that violence in the city was not merely rising but becoming random, intimate, impossible to make sense of.

Even now, the cultural touchstone that comes to mind when reading about Goetz is the Charles Bronson film “Death Wish,” which had been released a decade before the shooting took place, and which remained very much part of the era’s cultural circuitry. The Post and the Daily News immediately dubbed Goetz “the Death Wish Shooter,” and Bronson himself was called on for approving comment. Though he later denied that he was endorsing Goetz’s act, it certainly sounded at the time as if he were endorsing Goetz’s act.

“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed and his daughter raped by muggers and responds by embarking on a vigilante shooting spree. It’s a strangely existential movie, one that conjures the city and misrepresents it at the same time: its subway is pristine compared with the real thing, with no graffiti inside or out, and the killings are, implicitly, both celebrated and condemned. Although the film became a template for white revenge fantasies, its street thugs are assembled with almost comic care to avoid racial bias. On the subway, Bronson shoots white men; two Black men whom he kills appear in a station corridor. (Brian Garfield, the author of the novel on which the film was based, was appalled by the way it was received; his book was meant to show how easily people become brutalized, not to celebrate the brutalization.)

That “Death Wish” had already supplied a script for a shooting a decade later suggests that Goetz’s act was hardly a product of the newly Reaganite Zeitgeist. Long before the eighties, this idea—that an ordinary New Yorker, pushed past endurance by street crime, might turn vigilante—lay within the bounds of the civic imagination. Subway vigilantism existed as a vivid possibility long before there was ever a subway vigilante. The fantasy reflected a wider, populist response to the genuine urban upheavals of the sixties and seventies—the steep rise in violent crime that reshaped American cities and, with them, American politics, often pitting the old ethnic Catholic neighborhoods, Irish and Italian above all, against newly arrived Black communities.

The panic about street and subway crime had already changed big-city politics: Philadelphia elected the far-right police commissioner Frank Rizzo as mayor in 1971, presaging Al D’Amato’s own belligerent anti-crime campaigns to secure and retain his seat in the Senate. The TV character Archie Bunker—a compendium of cranky New York working-class attitudes that would one day be identified as Trumpian—was a seventies icon. It would be difficult to argue that, had Jimmy Carter been reëlected and the Reagan era not arrived, the Goetz shooting would not have happened, or would have happened in some fundamentally different key. Presidential epochs tilt an era; they do not determine it. The deeper currents of urban life had been running for decades. That December, the subway was moving along channels that had been bored much earlier.

As the Goetz case unfolded, it took on a Sidney Lumet, “Dog Day Afternoon” style of dark-comic energy. Goetz had been readily identified shortly after the shooting, and the detectives on the case, in a moment of guileless procedure, simply left notes on his apartment door and his mailbox asking him to call, which, as one officer later acknowledged, “wasn’t a great piece of detective work.” Goetz, by then in New England, kept phoning a startled neighbor on Fourteenth Street for help: a woman he had encountered mostly in passing in the lobby, and who had been Janis Joplin’s publicist until the singer’s death. Hoping to keep Goetz from panicking when he returned, she removed the detectives’ notes—an illegal act, if a well-meant one.

Goetz, on his homecoming, was treated by many as a hero. His support was not as neatly racially coded as later memory sometimes assumes. In surveys, almost half of Hispanic New Yorkers backed him, as the popularity of the Latino-dominated Guardian Angels might have predicted, but so did forty-five per cent of African Americans. Professional opinion was divided. Seasoned old-fashioned ethnic liberals like Sydney Schanberg, in the Times—who had seen more than enough real danger in the killing fields of Cambodia—and Jimmy Breslin, in the Daily News, asked the right questions, condemning the shooting as a slide toward anarchy, and, not incidentally, toward open season on Black youths. But William F. Buckley, Jr., now fondly recalled as a kind of benign Tory, likened the event, bizarrely, to the American massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, arguing that the subway shooting, too, had taken place in a kind of fog of war, and was therefore inevitable and excusable. Howard Stern, then a rising shock jock on terrestrial radio, went all in, calling for Goetz to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. On the other side, the Reverend Al Sharpton, a corpulent, demagogic presence, took up the victims’ cause, and was seen by some as a radical, and by almost everyone as an opportunist.

The legal consequences of the shooting were exhausting and convoluted—not because the system was dragging its feet but because a thoroughgoing judiciary insisted on doing its work. The distinguished Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau, a member of one of New York’s most illustrious Jewish families, was determined, against the grain of public sentiment, to get Goetz convicted. When a grand jury refused to indict him for any violent crime—astonishing for the time—Morgenthau convened a second. (Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, an ambitious new federal prosecutor, declined to open a civil-rights investigation, despite Goetz’s having uttered at least one openly racist slur in front of witnesses years earlier.) Much of public opinion stayed with the first grand jury. Senator D’Amato, in a letter to the Times, had written, “The issue is not Bernhard Hugo Goetz. The issue is the four men who tried to harass him. They, not Mr. Goetz, should be on trial.”

Morgenthau pressed on and obtained a new indictment, only to have the judge dismiss most of the charges, arguing that prosecutors had inaccurately described the right to self-defense, which allows individuals to use deadly force if they feel in imminent danger. Morgenthau diligently pursued his appeal until, in July of 1986, Sol Wachtler, the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals and another stalwart of New York’s legal establishment, made clear that self-defense required an objective standard: it was not enough to say that you felt threatened; you had to show that either a threat existed or that it was “reasonable” to believe that it did. The right of self-defense did not extend to opening fire on unarmed teen-agers because you had begun to imagine that they might shortly mug you.

One of the four teen-agers shot by Bernie Goetz receives aid on the 2 express train.Photograph by Carmine Donofrio / Getty

The case finally went to trial in December of 1986. Goetz had on his side Barry Slotnick, a hyperaggressive defense lawyer who represented clients as varied as John Gotti and the Lubavitchers. The prosecution was led by the equally dogged Gregory Waples. Both worked hard. Waples tried to portray Goetz as “a deeply suspicious, paranoid individual . . . seething inside with suppressed, self-righteous anger.” Slotnick, in turn, had the lawyerly chutzpah to use Waples’s own portrayal of Goetz as a reason for the jury to disregard Goetz’s incriminating statements: even the prosecutor, he argued, thought that Goetz was too nuts to be a reliable narrator.

The defense’s most potent witness turned out to be James Ramseur, one of the four teen-agers. Five months after the shooting, he had taken part in the brutal stairway rape of a pregnant woman, an attack so violent that she required surgery. He had been convicted and sentenced to a long prison term and was forced, angrily, to acknowledge this on the stand. The trial ended—shockingly—with Goetz acquitted of everything but a weapons charge.

In “Fear and Fury,” Thompson, understandably outraged by the verdict, tends to play down the significance of Ramseur’s crime; she’s sympathetic to his claims of having been set up, even while conceding that he had, at a minimum, been present and passive during an assault on a helpless woman. But, though Ramseur’s testimony in the Goetz case was eventually ruled inadmissible, it shaped the verdict. That there was no evidence to show that Goetz could reasonably have believed he was about to be assaulted was a legal point lost on the jury, which evidently concluded that someone who could take part in one horrible crime in May might have been intending to take part in another the previous December. It was bad legal reasoning, but it was an unsurprising emotional conclusion.

In a curious way, the verdict was determined in the same spirit as the O. J. Simpson verdict, a decade later. Both juries absorbed the totality of the circumstances and reached for a lever of indignation rather than the strict logic of the law. The Simpson jurors, despite overwhelming evidence, refused to reward a police department that they believed had treated Black defendants with contempt. The Goetz jurors, despite an absence of any reasonable threat on the subway that afternoon, refused to reward young men whom they regarded as predators. It was not so much reasonable doubt as a kind of unreasoning pout: No, sorry, we won’t convict this guy on this basis. The Goldman and Brown families, in the Simpson case, were outraged by what they saw as a perversion of justice; the Cabey family understandably felt the same. But juries are seismographs of public feeling as much as they are slot machines of law.

As in the Simpson case, the families, having lost in criminal court, turned to civil court. The Cabeys won a forty-three-million-dollar judgment against Goetz—an amount that was, given Goetz’s scant resources, essentially comical. He declared bankruptcy, and although the judgment stood, and still stands, it remains a symbolic victory for a family left with a paralyzed, brain-damaged son and no form of recompense.

All these years later, everything has changed. SoHo is now a bedroom community for Wall Street. CBGB has long been closed; a replica of its bathroom was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Donald Trump is no longer a surprising apparition on the cover of magazines. And, if you are trying to ascend in the arts or the professions, everyone you know lives in Brooklyn.

The literary memorial of the Goetz case is usually thought to be Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” with its collision between affluent white insularity and sudden violence. But Wolfe, in truth, redirected his story away from a subway setting after the Goetz shooting, and, more important still, he made his protagonist a Master of the Universe. Wolfe’s subject was a clash of classes; the Goetz shooting was a racial confrontation among ordinary New Yorkers. The fantasy of a courtroom showdown between predatory wealth and the vengeful many has its appeal, but it’s not what happened.

In narrow New York terms, the subway shooting marked the end of one period as much as the start of another. The money that had begun flowing into the city after its near-bankruptcy in the seventies kept flowing, and crime started to fall, sharply and steadily. Within seven years, even the cinematic image of street violence had shifted. In Mike Nichols’s “Regarding Henry,” from 1991, a yuppie lawyer played by Harrison Ford is shot in the head by a would-be mugger, and, on the whole, the injury improves his character.

There is, inevitably, a literature arguing that Wachtler didn’t go far enough, that self-defense claims should be barred the moment they rely, even implicitly, on discriminatory inference. But that stance, whatever its moral appeal, brushes against the obvious: a person crowded by four teen-age boys—Black or white—is likely to feel more apprehension than someone crowded by four elderly women. The deeper point is that no one before had ever behaved as Goetz did, and no one has since. Other New Yorkers, when confronted with trouble, did the ordinary, sensible thing: moved away, changed cars, or just got off the train. Subway crime was real; the armed, preëmptive vigilante fantasy that Goetz embodied was not. It happened exactly once.

What really made the tragedy possible was that Goetz had an illegal revolver in his pocket. As Gregory Waples, the prosecutor, put it during the trial, Goetz was “the perfect example of a person who should not be carrying a gun in New York City.” Every civilized country grasps the point that eludes ours: arm enough citizens and you guarantee that a commonplace confrontation will, sooner or later, turn fatal. Without the gun, Goetz would have changed cars. With it, five lives were shattered. Catastrophically, the Supreme Court has recently dismantled a century of precedent—and urban common sense—by insisting that the individual right to own a gun for something as amorphous as “self-defense” is close to absolute. Under that regime, Goetz could carry his Smith & Wesson on the subway today without fear even of a weapons charge.

Meanwhile, the West African immigrant in the car that afternoon was, in retrospect, a more telling portent than the violence he witnessed. West African immigration, meagre until then, soon rose; so did immigration from South Asia. Largely invisible at the time, especially compared with the vast Italian and Jewish migrations a century earlier, these influxes were ultimately just as transformative. They helped make New York more genuinely diverse than the old stage for bruising conflicts between first-wave ethnic whites and Black Americans—a world that had run from Frank Rizzo through Boston busing to Bernie Goetz. And it’s the passing of that world which underwrites the Mamdani moment. Over the past century, the mayors of New York have almost all been children of that first great immigration, overwhelmingly Jewish, Irish, and Italian, with two African Americans from the later Great Migration north. Now that consolidated compact is broken. The old immigrants are likely to remain—in the manner of the occasional Wasp legatee (Wagner, Lindsay) who poked in during the buoyant sixties—more visitors to wars over civic power than victors in them. We live in a new New York.

The rest of the supporting cast of characters, remarkably, are mostly still with us, if in a cheerier register. For all the clichés about contemporary “rage,” the temperament of New York’s ethnic and racial skirmishing has softened over time. Zohran Mamdani’s genial grin would have seemed unsustainably mild in the angry eighties, when Koch’s sarcasm fenced with Giuliani’s snarl, occasionally relieved by Mario Cuomo’s solemnity. Curtis Sliwa has settled into the role of amiable, if chronically unsuccessful, political perennial. Al Sharpton appears on “Morning Joe” as a slim, avuncular presence. Howard Stern has become a genial nostalgia-monger, his eager conversations with Billy Joel all over YouTube—though Stern seems never to have asked Joel why, in his chronicle of unforgettable American events, he felt compelled (was it simply for the rhyme?) to include that name.

Bernie Goetz himself became an advocate for fair treatment of the squirrels in Union Square, and was later arrested for selling marijuana. The final irony is that the Goetzes of the world are the ones who have truly faded from Manhattan. No one can imagine a disgruntled Travis Bickle type living in the expensive neighborhood of West Fourteenth Street now. He would have to find another place to live, probably in Queens, or even, possibly, the Bronx. ♦