In September 1983, an artist named Michael Stewart was beaten into a coma by six officers of the now-defunct New York City Transit Police Department. Stewart was 25 years old, a painter and graffiti artist who still DJed at his college radio station, and who had recently been fired from the Pyramid Club in the East Village for not being a forceful enough bouncer. His death inspired a wave of protests among his friends and associates in the art scene.
The writer Elon Green's new book on Stewart, "The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York," begins with that East Village art scene of the 1980s. Despite the concern elicited among artists, even stars like Keith Haring and Rene Ricard, Stewart's killing by Transit Police officers in an overgrown Union Square went unpunished, one trial dismissed and the other ending in an acquittal of all the officers by an all-white jury.
In an early chapter of "The Man Nobody Killed," Green traces a remarkable and brief summary of New York's economic history to the moment Stewart died, separated by only a few hours from his friends in the creative scene. Against the backdrop of two big machines—a bankrupt City Hall led by two conservative Democrat mayors, and a country led by a pitiless Reagan administration—the city was desiccated. In the civic desert, you could say the artists thrived. But so did vicious cops, so did a public resentment that gave those cops impunity, and all of that made Stewart's killing, as Green told Hell Gate in an interview, "inevitable."
In 2025, Green's book punctures the increasingly fashionable sense (at least, among a certain set) that art should defy a terrestrial notion like race. Race always divided those downtown artists (Michael would insist "it's alright" when a bothered friend noticed the cops would hover near Stewart on the subway) and on the night Stewart was brutalized, there was only real racism, real money, real power, and a 25-year-old who had been paying his rent with paintings strangled into brain death by a nightstick in front of an audience of mildly concerned Pratt students watching from their building windows.
Green's book is a vivid history of a singular moment in New York City, and everything that produced it. No one is spared in "The Man Nobody Killed": not the vapid, villainous Andy Warhol, whose primary impression of Keith Haring was "his ability to promote his work"; not a press that initially called Stewart "a graffiti artist" who went "berserk" (and also called his romantic rival Jean-Michel Basquiat "a tough street-voodoo artist and a painter of astonishing precosity [sic]"); and least of all the New York City of 1983, which was the precedent for the one we live in now, a city whose residents demand a psychological safety soothed by graffiti-free subways with cops on every car, and the Museum of Ice Cream.
It was Transit cops who killed Stewart in 1983, and today, as, Green pointed out in our conversation, New York City is overseen by a mayor who joined the Transit Police Department a year after Stewart's death. "Adams's pathologies make a lot more sense if you think about what it meant to flourish as a Transit cop in 1983," Green said of Adams.