An organ played "New York, New York" as pallbearers -- from the New York City Police Department -- carried the simple wooden casket with a Star of David through hundreds of admirers, friends, family members and dignitaries, and out of the Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan on Monday to lay to rest the city's brash and outspoken three-term former mayor, Ed Koch, who died of congestive heart failure on Friday.

He was 88.

"I come today with the love and condolences of 8.4 million New Yorkers who really are grieving with you at this moment," said current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he delivered one of several eulogies for Koch beginning around 11 a.m.

"Although Ed -- on the other hand -- has got to be loving all this attention," Bloomberg joked.

"No mayor, I think, has ever embodied the spirit of New York City like he did. And I don't think anyone ever will. Tough and loud, brash and irreverent, full of humor and chutzpah -- he was our city's quintessential mayor," Bloomberg said. "He knew from the beginning that the key to success lay in throwing political caution to the wind.

"And it's easy to forget just how badly our city needed that kind of leadership -- because the New York that Ed inherited is almost unimaginable today: graffiti-filled subways, miles of abandoned buildings, filthy streets that were unsafe to walk in daylight, much less at night, a municipal government that was broke and had stopped functioning. ... Then came Koch," Bloomberg said.

"It is fair to say that the city we know today would not exist without him. Everything that David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani and I accomplished has been built on the foundation that Ed laid."

Noting that Koch was to be buried at Trinity Cemetery in Upper Manhattan, Bloomberg added, "Just think about it: a Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighborhood. What could be more New York -- or even more Ed Koch?"

Former President Bill Clinton, who cut short a trip to Japan to attend, addressed the mourning crowd next. Holding a handful of letters of advice and opinion Koch had sent him when he was president, Clinton said no one had a better feel for "the impact of what government did on the real lives of people" than Koch.

The former president described how Koch advocated for tougher gun laws and said he would be proud of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for his recent effort to toughen New York state gun laws.