How Progressives Broke the Government
Ed Koch was angry—and perhaps a bit embarrassed. It was the spring of 1986, and his Parks Department had wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. At the height of the crack epidemic, the ice-skating facility’s closure hardly represented the worst of New York’s problems. But the Parks Department’s ineptitude fed a notion that the city was fundamentally ungovernable.