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

The episode opens with election night 1993, when Staten Island voted 65% in favor of secession from New York City, only to have the New York State Legislature kill the bill the following year. However, the secession movement's real impact came through its effect on the mayoral election: the massive voter turnout for secession on Staten Island—82% voted for Rudy Giuliani—made the critical difference in his victory over incumbent David Dinkins, making him New York City's first Republican mayor in decades.

The narrative establishes Giuliani and Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari as closely aligned figures who shared Italian-American working-class backgrounds and an "outer borough" perspective that felt marginalized by Manhattan-centric city governance. Molinari was instrumental in encouraging Giuliani to run for mayor and introducing him throughout the boroughs.

The episode highlights a pivotal moment in 1992 when 10,000 off-duty police officers protested at City Hall against Mayor Dinkins' plan for civilian police oversight, after riots in Washington Heights and Crown Heights. The protest became violent and racist, with officers calling for Dinkins to leave. When asked to calm the crowd, Giuliani instead inflamed it, telling officers that the reason for low police morale was "one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins," and calling the oversight plan "bullshit." This choice—to feed the fire rather than extinguish it—revealed a strategy of channeling resentment rather than bridging divisions.

The episode then pivots to political scientist Katherine Kramer's research in Wisconsin, where she discovered that rural resentment toward cities centered on three things: money (resources concentrated in cities), power (decisions made in cities), and respect (cities getting more of it). This "simmering emotion" intensified starting in the 1970s and manifested as a politics of resentment—not from the poorest or most marginalized, but from peripheral places and even wealthy people within them who felt forgotten and disrespected.

The episode argues that secession and a vote for Giuliani were two expressions of the same underlying resentment. Giuliani delivered for Staten Island: making ferries free, investing nearly half a billion dollars in waterfront development, building a baseball park, and crucially, closing the Fresh Kills landfill (which had been the world's largest man-made object and received much of the city's garbage).

However, the episode notes that Giuliani's methods were harsh: homeless people were denied shelter or forced to pay, he often refused to meet with Black leaders, cops were sent to "empty the streets," and he reportedly aimed to get poor people to leave the city. Reporter Frank Cipolla describes how Giuliani would dismiss journalists' questions as "stupid" and refuse to engage with criticism.

The episode then draws a line from Giuliani to Donald Trump, who grew up in Queens in a similar outer-borough environment and admired Giuliani as "the greatest mayor in the history of the city." Both men embodied the resentment of the forgotten places. Trump's 2016 election victory followed a remarkably similar pattern to Giuliani's 1993 win—riding a wave of populist resentment from places that felt left behind, using the language of "forgotten men and women" that echoed the "forgotten borough."

The episode connects the 1992 police riot at City Hall to the January 6th Capitol riot, noting that both involved crowds angry about perceived disrespect and injustice, incited by political figures willing to channel rather than calm their rage. A former Dinkins aide notes the parallel: the reaction to the first Black mayor in 1993 mirrors the reaction to the first Black president in 2009-2016.

The episode concludes with a pilgrimage to Fresh Kills, now being transformed into a major park. The landfill, which operated from 1948 to 2001, contains the garbage and material history of everyone who lived in New York City during that period. The transformation is bittersweet—it represents a victory for Staten Island but also obscures history. The episode notes that New Yorkers walk on their garbage history all the time without knowing it, just as politically we've forgotten the origins of current resentments.

The final segment reveals that Woody Guthrie originally wrote "This Land Is Your Land" with the lyric "from California to the Staten Island" but crossed it out and changed it to "New York Island." Staten Islanders later petitioned to restore the original lyric. The episode ends with a newly recorded version using Guthrie's original Staten Island lyric, suggesting a way to remember all places and everyone in the national story.