Zohran Mamdani sworn in as Mayor of New York City

New York: Zohran Mamdani, the left-leaning populist who deployed a mix of charm, social media savvy and an unyielding focus on affordability to catapult him to political stardom, was officially sworn in as mayor of New York City early Thursday, just after the New Year’s Eve ball dropped in Times Square.

The ceremony, held underground at an abandoned showpiece of a subway station by City Hall, caps Mamdani’s yearlong rise from obscure state lawmaker to international figure carrying the hopes of New Yorkers and Americans across the country who were enthralled by his journey to becoming the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor.

Just after the last seconds of 2025 ticked away, Mamdani (34), was sworn in by Letitia James, the state attorney general, as a smattering of family, friends and reporters looked on.

A public inauguration will take place at 1 pm Thursday on the steps of City Hall, an event that will feature two of Mamdani’s most powerful colleagues on the left: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who will administer a ceremonial oath of office; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will make opening remarks.

The earlier swearing-in will be held in a long-shuttered relic from New York City’s past, from an era when its leaders sought to merge beauty with utilitarian needs: The old City Hall subway station, which, with its tiled arches, chandeliers and vaulted ceilings, opened in 1904 as a showcase destination among New York’s 28 original subway stations.

Mamdani, whose mother is an Oscar-nominated director and who, as a state legislator, brought free buses to parts of the city, is both an unabashed champion of transit and inordinately skilled at the cinematic optics of political messaging.

Much about the event is freighted with symbolism, starting with the choice of James, the New York attorney general and arch-antagonist of President Donald Trump, to administer the oath of office.

The ornate station itself embodied a belief that New York leaders could elevate life for millions of New Yorkers by creating a grand subterranean vascular system — an ambition that Mamdani referred to, saying, “It will be the purpose of the administration fortunate enough to serve New Yorkers from the building above.”

In honoring the subway system with his swearing-in, Mamdani also, at least tacitly, acknowledged the Italian immigrants and African-American laborers who, under the supervision of largely Irish American bosses, built the system under dangerous and nonunionized conditions, said Andrew Sparberg, a former Long Island Rail Road manager and the author of a well-known history of the subway.

If Mamdani’s campaign is any measure, the incoming mayor is expected to embrace a message of hope and possibility for ordinary New Yorkers.

The day after he won the general election, Bhairavi Desai, a labor leader born in the Gujarat state of India, where some of Mamdani’s family traces its roots, found herself crying.

“All I could think was as someone who grew up poor, was raised by parents who died poor, that for the first time in my lifetime I was going to see a mayor that loved poor people — that loves the poor and despises their poverty,” Desai said.

She added that the corruption that surrounded Mayor Eric Adams and his administration, as well as what she called “the blatant racism” of Trump, has caused a lot of cynicism. “I think with Zohran, what you see is what feels like this endless capacity of compassion and a real honestness,” she said.

It remains to be seen how far those qualities will carry him, as the tasks confronting Mamdani are monumental and New Yorkers are famously unforgiving.

He will oversee 3,00,000 employees working in dozens of city agencies — many of those agencies, individually, the largest of their kind in the nation — while attempting to make more affordable a city that 8.5 million people call home and that is subject to economic headwinds beyond his control.

He will grapple with a Police Department he once called racist. He will manage America’s most Jewish city at a time when many Jewish New Yorkers remain skeptical of a politician who came up in the pro-Palestinian movement and still refuses to denounce a phrase, “globalize the intifada,” that they see as a call for violence.

And then there is his actual agenda. A self-described child of privilege, Mamdani ran for office vowing to make New York more affordable by establishing universal day care, freezing rent for rent-stabilized apartments and making city buses fast and free.

The rough annual price tag for those initiatives is $7 billion, and he will need state support for the effort at a time when Kathy Hochul, the moderate Democratic governor of New York, is facing reelection and potentially harrowing federal budget cuts.

But the private and public swearing-in ceremonies were not the place for such challenges to be dwelled upon. Rather, the spotlight will be on the assembly member who skyrocketed to international fame and whose youth and inexperience means he is redolent with possibility.

Mamdani is expected to file his oath of office shortly after midnight with the New York City clerk, pay a $9 filing fee, and sign a leather-bound book so the clerk can attest to the validity of his signature on future city documents, said Michael McSweeney, the city clerk.

Following the ceremony Mamdani was to leave the underground station, roughly 80 years after it shut its doors to passengers, and commence his life as mayor.

Later that day, he will appear on the steps of City Hall, at a celebration that is expected to be jubilant and heavily attended. The transition team anticipates some 40,000 spectators, including his predecessor, Eric Adams, who was not planning to attend Mamdani’s private swearing-in. Adams intended to spend his last minutes of his mayoralty where it began, in Times Square.

Earlier, in lower Manhattan, near where Mamdani made a popular video using halal food trucks to illustrate the rising costs in New York, vendors could not hide their excitement over the incoming mayor.

Saudi Mahmoud, 44, said he voted for Mamdani, and hoped that he would ease the cost of living, citing his plan to make city buses free. He added that for the nearly two decades since he arrived in New York from Pakistan, it had been hard to envision a Muslim mayor here.

“Before? No,” he said. “But now, it’s OK.”