Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the culture of City Hall under Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team runs on leftist idealism and social media hits. But the team — which includes his bros, as they’re known, twenty- and thirtysomething men and women, some of whom followed him into city government from his campaign — is also imbued with humor and sports fanaticism. The atmosphere among Mamdani’s inner circle is livelier than the hard-working image that Mamdani projects, as my colleague Emma Goldberg noticed as she reported on the culture of City Hall under Mamdani. I asked her to explain. You wrote that Mamdani’s irreverent sense of humor is now part of the fabric of city government. How so? What made me want to do this story was realizing that cheeky humor is fundamental to who Mayor Mamdani is. You see it in the everyday life of City Hall. I noticed at news conferences, when a tricky question came up, he sometimes deflected it with humor. And when you talk to people who have known him at different times in his life, one of the qualities they all bring up is his impishness. Impishness. What does that mean, exactly? They brought up his love of practical jokes and how he loves to give people nicknames. He has nicknames for many of the aides close to him. Nicknames? Ross Barkan, whose campaign the mayor managed when Barkan ran for the State Senate in Brooklyn, told me the mayor called him Broadway Barkan because Barkan got a lot of donations from people in Manhattan. It’s a way of formulating a relationship with someone. The mayor is very good at connecting with people. He makes people outside his orbit feel as if he knows them personally, even when he doesn’t. For people in his orbit, the nicknames foster a sense of closeness. The same goes for sports. The mayor loves sports and delights at making sports, any kind of sports, part of his job. He lucked out in that regard because soon after he was sworn in, the Knicks went on a generational run and then the World Cup came to New York. That was kismet for this mayor. He got to own that moment. How does all this square with how the mayor is perceived? You write that he is at once the class clown, the earnest civics teacher and the apostle of Fiorello La Guardia. But the public doesn’t necessarily see all that. It struck me that while he came into City Hall with his democratic socialist stalwarts and some veterans of city government, he brought a cadre of people in their 20 and early 30s who shared his sensibilities and his cultural references. I think we’ve seen, since the beginning of the administration, that he was really intent on convincing everyone that he is a very serious person. He wears a suit everywhere. He even wore a suit when he was jumping into a swimming pool. He clearly telegraphs that he’s a workaholic — he wants people to know he’s working late into the night and early in the morning. But it’s becoming more and more clear that his humor and lightheartedness are just as essential. He realizes that his wisecracks and his creative and quirky touches in videos broaden his reach and boost his popularity, even though sometimes the attempts at humor might go too far, as with the widely criticized Ken Griffin video, when he announced the city’s new pied-à-terre tax in front of the building where a hedge fund billionaire has a condo. Griffin promptly threatened to move some of his business out of New York. It didn’t help that there were other missteps in the rollout of the pied-à-terre tax that angered people in the business community. There’s an informal bro culture around Mamdani, but there are also people at City Hall who don’t dress casually. How do they all get along? Yes, some of the first announcements about whom he was bringing into his administration were experienced City Hall types like Dean Fuleihan, the first deputy mayor. But it seems as if there’s a lot of camaraderie at City Hall. The bro culture around Mamdani includes women, and the mayor calls people “brother” whether it’s a man or a woman that he’s speaking to. That avoids the problems that Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign faced in 2016 when women working on the campaign felt they had been brushed aside. Are Mamdani’s aides more sensitive? The sense I got was that everyone is very conscious of the history on the left of women feeling dismissed. The memory of the Bernie bros looms large on the left, and I think for the most part that’s led to more sensitivity, although I will say I’m open and eager to hear from anyone who’d want to shed light on areas where they now feel excluded or dismissed. Here’s a more general question. What’s it like to work for Mamdani? What I have heard is that he is demanding and expects the absolute most out of everyone. People talked about hearing from him at all hours. I think he texts people late at night. What happens if they don’t respond? Everyone, for the most part, is trying to avoid that. WEATHER Today will be cloudy with a high near 85. Rain is possible tonight as temperatures fall near 72. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Sept. 7 (Labor Day). QUOTE OF THE DAY “We were a small group of people who never lost sight of what we really wanted. And that was to preserve the garden.” — Renee Green, the chair of the nonprofit that runs the Elizabeth Street Garden in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan, celebrating the mayor’s move to drop plans for affordable housing there. The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. METROPOLITAN DIARY New England Thruway
Dear Diary: “I’ll go, but I’m not to be called a Fresh Air kid.” That’s what I insisted when they said I was to go upstate, where my 7-year-old sister’s Fresh Air Fund host family lived. “She was lonely,” Mrs. Granger had told my mother on the phone. “Maybe send her big sister with her this summer?” At 12, I was too old for the program, which served underprivileged children from the city. I was mortified. Outside our basement apartment, my father talked with Mr. Granger, who had come to drive us. I snapped off “Dancing in the Street” and packed “Oliver Twist” into my shopping-bag luggage. Mr. Granger, tall in a white shirt and tie, looked down at my father, who leaned on the broom he used to swipe cobwebs off the pipes. “All ready for your holidays in the country, love?” Dad asked me. Carrying loaves of soda bread in tinfoil, we followed the men out past the rotten-smelling garbage cans and up the steps onto Daly Avenue, where we found a convertible as big as an airplane. Passers-by gawked. Raymond DeJesus tripped, screamed and hit his brother. “Jump in, girls,” Mr. Granger said. We thought he meant it, so we stepped back to run before he folded back the huge front seat. I placed the soda bread on his gleaming briefcase and sank into luscious leather. My sister sat in front. He draped his arm along the seat, and soon we were soaring, unable to talk because the wind blew our words away. My sister looked back. We couldn’t stop laughing. “Memories Are Made of This” streamed from the radio. We raced beneath a sign: New England Thruway. The roads blurred with trees as I murmured, “Thruway … thruway.” Thruway, an escape road out — to somewhere else. — Mary Casey Diana Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. |
