Zohran Mamdani Knows The NYC Mayor Count is Wrong. Will He Fix It?

By Michael Gonik

In case you missed it in the pre-holiday shuffle, Zohran Mamdani is not going to be New York City’s 111th mayor when he takes office on January 1, as the city’s official record would have you believe. Thanks to the restless work of a D.C. historian and a Department of Records researcher, we now know the soon-to-be-former Queens assemblyman will actually be the 112th person to serve the city’s highest office, and that almost every mayor in its history, save for the first six, has been incorrectly numbered on the city’s official record.

And, in an early sign of competence as a leader, Mamdani appears to trust the highly specialized academics and archivists who presented new, in this case barely challenging, information. “Well, I thought I was going to be the 111th. I think the City’s Department of Records tweeted out in fact that I will be the 112th, and I am excited to be whichever mayor it is,” Mamdani told Gothamist. Pushed to indicate which number he’d put on his Inauguration Day banners, the 34-year-old incoming mayor once again deferred to expertise. “I trust the tweet.”

We’ll have to wait and see how the banners read on New Year’s Day. This is a big change to the math, after all, and god knows if the caretakers of the official records could bear the burden of adding one to every mayor’s number, or what that process even looks like in 2025, the year the city only just decided to digitize its thousands of paper land use maps. It has been successfully done, though. In 1937, Charles Lodwick was added to the count as NYC’s 21st mayor, after the presumably then-recent discovery of his 1694-1695 term. According to DOR researcher Michael Lorenzini, the diligent soul who dug up the 17th century document that confirmed the second, non-consecutive term of Mayor Matthias Nicolls (1674-1675) that inspired the count’s latest audit, 1937 was a few years after someone first acknowledged Nicolls probably served a second term. “It’s been pointed out, at least going back to 1935, that Nicolls had the second term and somehow nobody really paid attention,” Lorenzini told Gothamist.

But maybe a 90-ish-year correction gap is avoidable this time around? Who knows, maybe amending the count is something the mayor can do by simple, accurate declaration from the jump? Or does it amount to some holy clerical power the mayor can’t touch? The only thing we really know here is that embracing “112,” even rhetorically, is, if nothing else, an opportunity for the Mamdani administration to deliver on some change from day one, and that if he does, Eric Adams will finally be forced to stop referring to himself as “110.”