New York has always been, in its imagination and the imagination of the country, a city of subjective and often contradictory preferences — the biggest, the brightest, the richest, the toughest, the one that gives us the most tired, the lowest place on the American map, and the one that might also relegate those other cities to the sepia tone of afterthoughts, anyway.
So it can be particularly disconcerting, for a place so confident in its position in the standings, to find New York heading into a moment of dizzying uncertainty about what it is, who it is targeting, and what will happen next.
The answers are coming, whether the city likes it or not.
Tuesday’s volatile municipal elections appear poised to overhaul and reshape the city’s longstanding power structures that often determine the political, cultural and financial course beyond its neighborhoods.
New Yorkers who run much of Washington are harassing each other during an endless federal shutdown, with accelerating consequences for America’s largest city.
A clash between local and national forces – and the escalation of deportation campaigns; Mutual political disdain and disappointment; Economic anxiety across income classes seems poised to distort New York’s sense of itself, forcing it to confront some of the superficial paradoxes that are at the core of its identity.
The capitalist capital of the world is now the center of a rising and impatient socialist-led rebellion over affordability, over who can live a life in the New York that birthed Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street — and now finds adherents and avatars of both camps credibly arguing that the future is theirs.
America’s archetypal immigrant town is a place where many immigrants increasingly feel under siege, on alert for masked federal agents at an immigration court about a mile from the ferries to Liberty and Ellis Islands.
9/11 City and Post-September 9/11, with all its fear, loneliness, and more than just Islamophobia, is on the cusp of electing its first Muslim mayor, a prospect that has delighted, and at times astonished, many of New York’s politically powerful Muslim communities.
The city that has long defined the Jewish experience for Americans — the land of “Seinfeld,” Katz’s delicatessens and Sandy Koufax — may be led by a man openly hostile to Israel’s government, leaving some New Yorkers questioning their place in a city they don’t recognize.
“I think there’s a question about whether this is still the capital of Jewish America,” said Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg.
But he added that this is just one of “a lot of different tests” whose answers the city will reveal itself on Tuesday and in the following months.
The truth is that New York is functionally dozens of cities, with hundreds of boroughs and thousands of sub-neighborhoods. They are urban, suburban, subterranean and coastal, and have a shifting demographic, social and economic composition and an evolving definition of what distinguishes them.
“Eight, three million people,” said outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, while being jeered in public. “Thirty-five million opinions.”
This is the city that created Zahran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayoral front-runner and Assemblyman from Queens, who had formative stints at a private school in Manhattan and an elite public high school in the Bronx. He hopes to tilt the scales of the state toward those he says have been left behind for too long.
And yet.
“This is also the city that created Trump,” Mamdani reminded Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” last week. “We have to account for that.”
Some of the studio audience seemed to gasp a little, much to the host’s amusement.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s right!’” Stewart said. “Are we Dr. Frankenstein?” Nooooo!”
The specter of President Donald Trump, whom his city still widely rejects despite some successes in last year’s presidential election, looms over much of what lies ahead for New York, especially if Mamdani wins.
On paper, at least, the city has rarely been better positioned to claim its sovereignty in Washington. The president’s circle includes other figures with a long history in New York, such as Steve Witkoff, his envoy to the Middle East, and Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce. Trump speaks frequently with friends who still live in the city.
The Democrats who lead the minority coalitions in both houses of Congress, Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, are New Yorkers. Also among the most famous progressives in office: Sen. Bernie Sanders, who once cheered for the Dodgers in his native Brooklyn. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a district that includes parts of Queens and the Bronx.
But despite its nominal power, New York can in many ways feel helpless about its future.
Trump has made clear that he intends to interfere deeply in city affairs — what will be funded (or perhaps not) in the federal accounting; Which government powers may become clearer on the ground; Where and how can deportations proliferate?
Leaders of red states like Florida and Texas appear eager to watch New York falter in its quest for federal dollars and its efforts to confront Trump.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is waging a third-party campaign for mayor after losing decisively in the Democratic primary, has staked much of his bid on warning.
“If Mamdani wins, you will see Trump come here and take over New York City,” he said.
His candidacy has come to represent diverse constituencies that have often helped select previous mayors but are at risk, this time, of finding themselves on the other side: older black voters; moderate and conservative Jews; Entrepreneurs who have long insisted that progressive leadership in New York will produce a mass exodus of talent and money.
“It will be the death of New York City,” Cuomo said last week, predicting a trip “by the carload” if Mamdani wins.
Whether he is right or not, the failure of Cuomo, 67, will clearly reflect how much the city has transformed from his adolescence in the 1970s to his tenure in the 2000s.
He asserted in the closing days of the campaign that he was New York’s rightful ambassador and most honest Democrat, suggesting that the city had not changed nearly as much as Mamdani’s runaway rise suggested.
However, if any major election, and the aftermath, is a test – what does that mean? What didn’t we see coming? What now? -The difference this time is a matter of size.
On Wednesday morning, and long after that, New York will still be the biggest, baddest and brassiest city in the country.
Its exceptionalism requires that it not just be a pioneer, precisely, but that much will still be true: it will be the place that tells America the most about itself, and perhaps soon a little more than usual whether it likes it or not.
