The Brooklyn Paramount theatre, just off DeKalb Avenue, was a regular performance haunt for Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington in the New York City of the 1930s, but it took almost a century for its shining political moment to arrive. Not long before half past eleven on Tuesday night, New York’s 111th mayor took the stage and spoke his first words as the next holder to that office.

“The sun may have set over our city this evening but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,’” Zohran Mamdani said.

“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and well connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor; palms calloused from delivery-bike handlebars; knuckles scarred by kitchen burns. These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet over the last 12 months you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.”

It was an opening segment that dipped into the working class imagery of On the Waterfront, referenced a US socialist figurehead in Debs, rattled the ghosts of Tammany Hall and deepened Republican suspicions that New York, the heartbeat of capitalism, had elected an out-and-out Marxist.

“Did the Commie win?” scoffed Sean Hannity, the Fox News show host, at n