Mayor Mamdani Is Moving On Up to Gracie Mansion

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, have begun moving their belongings from their Queens apartment to the official mayor’s residence in Manhattan.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, have begun their move from their one-bedroom Queens apartment to Gracie Mansion, the 11,000-square-foot historic home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that has housed most of New York City’s mayors for decades, according to three people with knowledge of the move.

Mr. Mamdani is scheduled to hold a news conference at Gracie Mansion on Monday afternoon.

On Sunday night, East End Avenue across from Gracie was, as it almost always is, very quiet. Doormen in buildings facing Gracie said they had not seen much moving activity over the weekend. People walked their dogs around the perimeter of Gracie’s security fence. There were a few lights on upstairs.

Though Astoria, the couple’s former home base, is separated from Gracie only by a bend of the East River, the move represents a psychic schlep between two politically and culturally divergent neighborhoods.

Astoria is a diverse middle-class area — mainly white, Hispanic and Asian American — that has long been a center of immigrant life in New York City. It is in the so-called Commie Corridor, a stretch of Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods known for their leftist politics. Its many progressive voters put Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the State Assembly and then helped catapult him to City Hall.

Mr. Mamdani has been living in his rent-stabilized apartment since 2019, most recently paying $2,300 a month, and Astoria has become a central part of his political brand. He delights in promoting some of his favorite Bangladeshi, Thai and Afghan restaurants in the neighborhood.

He said last month that he and Ms. Duwaji “will miss it all — the endless Adeni chai, the spirited conversations in Spanish, Arabic and every language in between, the aromas of seafood and shawarma drifting down the block.”

The Upper East Side, the city’s ultimate bastion of old money, could hardly be more different. It is predominantly white, and has one of the city’s lowest poverty rates. Though Mr. Mamdani found support in a few precincts in Yorkville, the area that includes Gracie, the mayor’s new neighborhood largely opposed him in the mayoral election, and some residents expressed outright hostility.

And then there are the new living arrangements.

Gracie Mansion is a whole lot of house.

There are five bedrooms upstairs, which Mr. Mamdani and Ms. Duwaji, an illustrator, are free to redecorate as they please. The bathrooms were renovated during former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s tenure — though Mr. Bloomberg chose to live in his nearby townhouse — but their current state is unknown.

Downstairs, the couple has access to a formal ballroom and dining room, along with an in-house chef. There is a sprawling lawn with views of the East River, and a veranda where former Mayor Edward I. Koch would sip iced tea while taking meetings during the summer.

None of it, of course, does much to boost Mr. Mamdani’s populist image.

But the mayor has insisted that he is not worried about how much his political identity lines up with his new home.

“I don’t think too much of brand, to be honest,” he said on “The New Yorker Radio Hour” in October when asked about his potential move.

And the reason Mr. Mamdani, now one of the most well-known politicians in the country, has ended up there is simple: security. Gracie is surrounded by a fence dotted with cameras. Visitors must empty their pockets and walk through a metal detector when they arrive.

“This decision came down to our family’s safety and the importance of dedicating all of my focus on enacting the affordability agenda New Yorkers voted for,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement last month.

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