Curtis Sliwa And The Last Of the Tri-State Loudmouths

It's probably the end of an era.

The mayoral election takes place in New York City this week, and barring polling data being wrong in a way that would make 2016’s presidential election look like a simple accounting error, Zohran Mamdani is going to win, while Andrew Cuomo will likely retire from politics and end up doing more work for his new pals at Fox News. Of course, nothing is certain, but the chances of the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, packing up his 300 cats and moving to Gracie Mansion are about as slim as Kate Moss on Ozempic. I’m not a betting man, but to quote the founder of the Guardian Angels himself, “It ain’t happenin’.”

And that’s fine. There isn’t much I like about Sliwa or his politics, and I think he’s the most John Slattery on 30 Rock telling Alec Baldwin to “Say ‘Goo-goo, ga-ga’ Jack” candidate the city has had in a minute, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss him when this election is over. In fact, I find his brand of entertaining hilarious and also endearing in a way that’s certainly outdated, but also maybe going extinct right before our eyes. Once the election is over, I don’t know how much of Sliwa’s kind we’ll see getting a bright spotlight. For better or worse? You decide.

Sliwa has been a NYC fixture since he started up the Guardian Angels in the late-1970s. Before that, he was managing a McDonald’s in the Bronx. Today, the legacy of the group feels like more of an aesthetic than an important part of the cityscape during a particularly bleak and transformative time. Guardian Angels will often show up or be seen patrolling the subways in movies or shows set during the era, and they usually look pretty cool. The uniform was striking, with the red beret and the all-seeing eye with angel wings printed all over jackets and sweatshirts they wore. It’s tough to say how effective they were or how much crime they actually stopped, but they stepped up to do something when the city was incredibly dangerous, and they did it without carrying any weapons. They were vigilantes, but unlike Bernie Goetz, the Angels weren’t out shooting people who were (allegedly) committing crimes. It’s not something I’d normally find myself getting behind, but knowing how bad the crime was, the corruption within the NYPD, and hearing some of the horror stories from people who rode the subways back in those days, I get why the Angels seemed like a necessity. Plus, the politicians didn’t like them, so that tends to make me appreciate their work a little more.

Then came Rudy Giuliani. More cops, more guns, and more arrests. His brand of mayoring made Sliwa and the Angels seem benign, and Sliwa and the Angels started feeling like a relic as the mayor supposedly “cleaned up” the city. Sliwa, maybe needing something to do or worrying he’d have to go back to teaching trainees how to assemble Big Macs, turned to the medium that has been a staple of the city’s culture like basketball and bodegas: talk radio. “Curtis & Kuby,” his show with civil rights lawyer, Ron Kuby, wasn’t as big as some of the other drive time shows people listened to while stuck in traffic, but Sliwa was good enough at it that he’s pretty much been on local radio ever since—save for him taking time off during his last two mayoral runs.

And that’s really the thing I’m going to miss. Not so much Sliwa or his shows, but the sort of guy he is on a medium that feels like it’s so far behind the pack now that it’s nearly forgotten. Ask most people under a certain age, and they’ll likely tell you that they listen to podcasts while they’re driving, and not the radio. Podcasts are fine, I listen to plenty of them, but the weirdness of live radio is tough to beat for me. You get those pockets of dead air where the host is composing a thought or letting a statement sit there for a second, prank callers sometimes break through the line, or a guest says something totally unhinged but you can’t rewind it and make sure you heard them correctly. I enjoy that sort of thing, and there’s really nothing better when you’ve got a tri-state area loudmouth at the center of it. Sliwa isn’t as famous or rich as a guy like Howard Stern, and I still listened to Mike Francesa for a few years after he parted ways with Mad Dog, but those guys are a dying breed. I know that it sounds like a crazy comparison, but the closest thing I can think of that still gives me that feeling is when I tune into The Best Show. Tom Scharpling is a Jersey guy whose setup (especially back in the WFMU days) wasn’t that different, and I’m pretty sure he’s done his fair share of listening to Francesa’s various shows. But the comparisons pretty much start and end there.

Whether or not Sliwa’s going back to radio doesn’t matter anymore. He’s likely going to lose, and we’ll hear from him from time to time, he’ll pop up on TV when a crime happens, and there’s a good chance he’ll probably try to run another mayoral campaign in a few years. My guess is that this is the guy’s last hurrah, and there’s something a little sad about that to me because while I don’t agree with almost anything he says or thinks, I find the tri-state loudmouth an endless source of entertainment, and it’s usually on accident. Stern used to be the king, but, unfortunately, we’ve spent the last few years seeing what happens when a tri-state loudmouth goes from entertainment to having actual power with our current president ruining the quaintness of a guy with an outer-borough accent and a lot of really awful opinions. Donald Trump is the tri-state loudmouth on steroids (and Adderall) who is funny in a totally ridiculous, accidental, idiotic way…when he doesn’t have any power. If he wasn’t president, he’d be rich and famous version of Archie Bunker, except his dialogue wouldn’t be as good. If he were harmless, you could just laugh at the idiot who says idiotic things, and thank your lucky stars he can’t actually do anything.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and it’s all the proof you need that a guy like Sliwa definitely doesn’t need even a sliver of institutional power. Tri-state loudmouths are only good when they can’t actually do anything except rant. When they get power, it’s not great. I’m pretty sure Sliwa won’t get what he’s looking for tomorrow, and his campaign might be remembered as a ridiculous footnote alongside my favorite long shot mayoral run by two other famous tri-state loudmouths when Norman Mailer ran for mayor with Jimmy Breslin aiming to become city council president on a campaign to turn NYC into the 51st state. Unlike Mailer and Breslin’s quixotic run that was viewed as more of a stunt—which I actually would probably support if somebody tried to make it a thing again—Sliwa has serious political aspirations. I don’t know if he’s inhaled enough cat poop to think he could actually win, but if he does, and if he could somehow pull off the most massive upset in all of American history, then things would go from funny to yeeesh really quickly.