While tens of thousands of New Yorkers will be in Times Square for countdown to 2026, the city’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has said he will be sworn into office in an underground midnight private ceremony at an abandoned subway station built during the Gilded Age.
Mamdani, 34, plans to take the oath of office on New Year’s Eve in a disused subway station beneath city hall which acts as turnaround for the local 5 train. The unusual choice of venue for the ceremony, Mamdani said, is symbolically resonant of the “inauguration of a new era”.
“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.
“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.”
He added that he was “humbled by the opportunity to lead millions of New Yorkers into a new era of opportunity, and honored to carry forward our city’s legacy of greatness”.
The abandoned city hall subway station. Photograph: Michael Freeman/Alamy
The station was first opened in 1904 as one of the city’s 28 original stations and was decommissioned in 1945 as the system modernized It was designated a New York City landmark in 1979 and a national register of historic places site in 2004.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has been selected to administer Mamdani’s oath of office, with a follow-up ceremony on the steps of city hall later on Wednesday, where he will be sworn in by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, followed by a block party up Broadway.
The choice of a subway station, James said, was appropriate because the transit system is the “great equalizer” of New Yorkers.
“For all of our strengths and weaknesses as individuals, we ride together on the train, to places far and wide,” James added. “Zohran is our next mayor because he understands how important it is that New Yorkers living side by side all deserve a city that we can thrive in, no matter what subway line you use.”
But only one previous New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, has confirmed their attendance, with former mayors Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani not publicly confirming their attendance. Outgoing centrist Democrat mayor Eric Adams has left his attendance open to question.
At a press conference on Monday, Adams said he wanted to discuss it with Mamdani to make sure he doesn’t “disrupt his day”.
“That’s a very important, historical day, and it’s unfortunate that there’s a body of some of his supporters, some of them, who rather protest everything,” Adams said in an apparent swipe at Mamdani’s supporters. “If he’s cool, I’m cool,” Adams said. Mamdani said his predecessor is “still welcome to my inauguration”.
Ahead of Mamdani’s swearing in, tech billionaire Elon Musk hit out at his choice to lead the city’s fire department.
“Proven experience matters when lives are at stake,” Musk wrote in a post on the social platform X after Mamdani appointed Lillian Bonsignore, 56, an openly gay, veteran emergency medical services (EMS) leader, to lead the FDNY.
Mamdani wrote in a post replying to Musk, “Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of all calls coming into FDNY?”
Last week, Adams appointed Mark Guerra, the first deputy commissioner with 37 years experience on the fire department, to serve as fire chief for the remaining days of his mayoralty. “Lillian’s light is one that can’t be dimmed by anything else that takes place,” Mamdani said, reported Fox 5. “The mayor is free to continue to be the mayor until the end of this year and make decisions as such.”
