The front page of the New York Post has been warning of the perils of Zohran Mamdani for weeks but in a happy irony, they discovered that the election of a socialist mayor can be good for business. On Wednesday, they came up with a moment of classic tabloid art, with Mamdani beneath the blazing headline: The Red Apple (On Your Marx, Get Set, Zo), raising aloft a red hammer and sickle. The edition was a sell-out and numerous reports had dedicated Mamdani voters running from street stall to bodega in the hope of securing a memorial edition.
In the days since the heady completion of his unlikely mayoral challenge, the titans of the city have been getting their heads around the likely realities of having a 34-year-old avowed socialist running a city whose lifeblood has been based on extremes: of wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, fun and excess and what Walt Whitman defined as “the all-swallowing of the great money whirlpool”.
If you walk out of the living museum that is Grand Central Station and look up at the sky, you are confronted with the dizzying sight of a building on 270 Park Avenue.
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