The Tamesis
Tomorrow morning, New Yorkers across the five boroughs will be easing their hangovers, mumbling orders of bacon, eggs and cheese, and welcoming their new mayor. On New Year’s Eve, Zohran K. Mamdani will be sworn in in the abandoned subway station beneath City Hall, a Gilded Age marvel with soaring vaulted ceilings, tiled arches and majestic chandeliers that make the thought of LED lights painful.
“When Old City Hall Station (one of New York’s original 28 subway stations) first opened in 1904, it was a physical monument to a city that dared to pursue beauty and built great things that transformed the lives of working people,” Mamdani said in a statement to Streetsblog NYC. “This ambition need not be limited to memories of our past, nor to the tunnels beneath City Hall: it will be the purpose of a government that has the honor of serving New Yorkers from the buildings above.” Gorgeous!
According to my TikTok algorithm, there’s a sense of millennial optimism in the air, epitomized by Mamdani, with his bright smile and his dream of making the city a more affordable place to live. After all, he is a SEN10R (Bronx Science 2010!), and those of us who graduated from high school in 2010 are full of hope and full of change. Among the many changes the new mayor will face soon, one of the most dramatic is a move from Astoria, Queens, to the historic Gracie Building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I don’t care what anyone says,” Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams (a terrible mayor but a talented comedian), said in a 2022 interview. “There’s a ghost in there, man.”
