Tomorrow morning, New Yorkers across the five boroughs will be nursing their hangovers, mumbling bacon, egg, and cheese orders—and welcoming a new mayor. On New Year’s Eve, Zohran K. Mamdani will be sworn into office in the abandoned subway station beneath City Hall, a Gilded Age wonder with soaring vaulted ceilings, tiled arches, and grand chandeliers that make one cringe in pain at the thought of LEDs.
“When Old City Hall Station first opened in 1904—one of New York’s 28 original subway stations—it was a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives,” Mamdani said in a statement to Streetsblog NYC. “That ambition need not be a memory confined only to our past, nor must it be isolated only to the tunnels beneath City Hall: it will be the purpose of the administration fortunate enough to serve New Yorkers from the building above.” Gorgeous!
According to my TikTok algorithm, millennial optimism is in the air, personified by Mamdani, his mega-watt smile, and his dream of making the city a more affordable place to live. He is, after all, a SEN10R (Bronx Science 2010!), and we who graduated high school in 2010 were big on hope, and also change. Among the many changes coming for the new mayor, one of the more notable is a move from Astoria, Queens, to the historic Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “I don’t care what anyone says,” Mamdani’s predecessor Eric Adams (a terrible mayor but a genius comedian) said in a 2022 interview. “There are ghosts in there, man.”
