As I waited at Thursday’s mayoral inauguration for Zohran Mamdani to step forward and take his oath of office with New York’s stately City Hall as a backdrop, I thought for a moment of the Coney Island Boardwalk. 

Exactly one year earlier, on New Year’s Day 2025, I ran into Mamdani and his Communications Director Andrew Epstein on the boardwalk after joining the annual Polar Bear Plunge into the Atlantic Ocean’s frigid waters. 

I was leaving. Mamdani was arriving. We chatted for a couple of minutes. No one walking by even noticed him. He asked how the plunge felt. I said it was awesome but so jarring you can’t help but scream. He laughed that big Zohran laugh. 

I headed home for a hot shower. He continued to the beach. I thought he was there to shake hands and introduce himself to potential voters. Later that night, I saw people sharing an online video of him vowing “I’m freezing your rent” before plunging into the ocean to emphasize his point. 

He had a popular message, and he was working harder than all the other Democratic primary candidates combined to deliver it. 

***

The Indypendent closely followed the 2024 Democratic primary in Assembly District 56 between incumbent Stefanie Zinerman and DSA challenger Eon Huntley. On election night, I ventured out to a Bed-Stuy bar where Huntley and his young supporters gathered. As the results trickled in and people refreshed their phones, Zinerman’s small but insurmountable lead continued to grow. She would ultimately prevail by about 500 votes, or six percentage points.

When he gave his concession speech, Huntley began by unfurling a giant Palestinian flag that he held between his fully outstretched arms. His supporters roared. They had knocked on thousands of doors in support of a candidate who opposed the U.S-backed genocide in Gaza and the structural violence of landlords exploiting and abusing tenants at home. It had felt like a win was within reach, but in the end they had lost and it stung. Despite its best efforts, Huntley’s campaign hadn’t been able to overcome the one-two combination of the Biden-era malaise that drove younger, progressive voters away from politics as well as the billionaire money from the Walton and Bloomberg family fortunes that flooded the race on behalf of Huntley’s opponent. 

After the crowd trickled away, I found a downcast Cea Weaver nursing a drink at the bar. I had first met her in 2014 when she was a young organizer for the Crown Heights Tenants Union. Tenants groups won major rent law reforms in Albany in 2019 including the end of vacancy decontrol. However, there was still much more to be done and the Democratic-led State Assembly was one of the main obstacles organizers had to overcome. Winning a tough race in AD 56 against a Hakeem Jeffries protege would have sent a strong signal to Assembly Democrats to change their ways. 

Weaver had taken time off from her job in the last two weeks of the race to campaign for Huntley and introduce him to her tenant allies in the district. But, big money had prevailed (again) and it sucked. 

DSA’s eight incumbent state legislators had all handily won their primaries that night, but the socialist organization won only one of three Assembly races they contested in 2024. It was the third straight election cycle in which DSA challengers had lost more races than they won. DSA and the New York Democratic establishment had reached an impasse, I wrote. The socialist organization was unbeatable in its “Commie Corridor” strongholds in Western Queens and parts of Brooklyn, but the party establishment had managed to contain it to those areas. DSA was a thorn in the establishment’s side but not a threat to its power. It was an impasse that with time would favor the establishment over the volunteer-based DSA which relies on the fervent enthusiasm of its members. Something needed to change.

***

That change came through Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory. In his inaugural speech, he vowed to govern “audaciously and expansively.” Hours later he signed his first executive orders in a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn. One order vowed to intervene on behalf of 5,000 rent-stabilized tenants who are battling their corporate landlord, a story featured on the cover of the January Indypendent. He also appointed Cea Weaver executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants which had withered under Eric Adams. 

With Weaver leading a newly revitalized MOPT, tenants will have a smart and tenacious champion in a key position. It will very likely help drive a surge in tenant organizing across the city. Tenants who live in buildings rife with code violations and abusive landlords have every reason now to form tenant unions and urge the city to take action on their behalf. For groups like Crown Heights Tenant Union, all the hard-won organizing victories they have scored up to this point may well just be a prelude to what they can achieve in the coming years. 

**

When Zohran Mamdani rolled up for his first day of work at his new office, he was driven in a yellow cab by Richard Chow, a New York Taxi Workers Alliance member. 

Four years earlier, Mamdani, a first-term state legislator, joined Chow and other indebted taxi drivers who held a 45-day protest encampment on the sidewalk on the west side of City Hall. The city’s financial chicanery had triggered an economic crisis for drivers that caused nine of them to commit suicide. 

Mamdani and the drivers were ignored by the de Blasio administration for the first 30 days of their protest. Powerless and with no other recourse, they went on hunger strike — a polite term for slowly starving yourself —  for 15 days until the mayor finally relented and agreed to support a deal with the drivers and their debt holders that provided $450 million in relief, a life-transforming victory for thousands of drivers. 

Now, Mamdani was walking in the front door as the mayor of New York City. 

A few minutes before yesterday’s official program began, I ran into Brandon West, a DSA member, union organizer and former City Council budget analyst. He was sitting to the left of the stage inside City Hall Plaza. He too was marveling at the surreality of what was unfolding in front of his eyes. And like so many of us, having his Zohran then-and-now flashbacks. 

The last time he has been by City Hall was in the fall of 2021 when the taxi workers were on hunger strike. He recalled Zohran handing him a cup of chai tea. 

 “It is still hitting me that we are now inside,” West said, shaking his head. 

***

After all the poems had been read, songs had been sung, oaths of office had been taken and speeches given, I left City Hall Plaza and made my down Broadway — past the remnants of the “block party” that drew thousands more Zohran supporters, past the diehards who were hanging around  and leaned into the blast of cold air blowing up from the New York Harbor. 

When I arrived at Zuccotti Park, there were a few cops standing around and stacks of metal police barricades, but we were free to come and go. This privately owned public space controlled by Brookfield Properties was its usual self. There were the primly manicured trees, the granite sidewalks, tables and seats for lunchtime office workers. In the far southeast corner of the park, near Broadway, the bright red beams of a modernist sculpture reached for the sky. 

This normally sterile space had erupted with life when Occupy Wall Street took root here in the fall of 2011. With the country still slowly recovering from the 2008 Great Recession, Occupy was a primal scream against an economic and political system rigged in favor of the rich. With its framing of the 99% vs. the 1%, Occupy brought class back into American political discourse for the first time in decades.

Occupy Wall Street was also a vibrant, ramshackle utopia that sought to feed and care for all its participants — to bring forward a new world from the husk of the old as the Wobblies used to say. At a moment when leftwing activism seemed completely dead in the United States, Occupy jolted people into motion and shook the power structure of this country. Similar Occupy encampments were established in public squares in more than 600 cities and towns across the United States. Public opinion polls showed majority support for OWS and its message. 

Then, in one city after another the encampments were raided and shut down by local police working in close coordination with the federal government. After two months of protests, New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD in to crush the Zuccotti Park encampment. Power reasserted itself, and people’s campaign supplies along with the camp’s kitchen, medical aid center and library were tossed into garbage trucks

Two days later, on Nov. 17, 2011, 30,000 people gathered in Foley Square, marched past City Hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge in a mournful procession. It was a crushing moment. Occupy was never again able to regroup at Zuccotti or anywhere else. The police made sure of that. 

For all the excitement that the Occupy movement ignited, it refused to put forward a political program and eschewed almost all forms of organization. It could never carry out a long-term organizing strategy. But, its message about the injustice of living under a rigged system was out in the world. That message would be put on blast during Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns which did what Occupy could not – provide a very clear and popular political agenda that inspired millions of people. 

Bernie’s presidential runs in turn spurred the rise of DSA, the Justice Democrats and the Squad as a socialist tendency took root in American electoral politics for the first time in over a century. Zohran Mamdani’s ascent is its greatest victory to date. 

***

When we carried our anger and our despair over the Brooklyn Bridge, we could not have imagined that 14 years later that the feisty economic populism that Occupy gave rise to, would help propel a 34-year-old Muslim democratic socialist into the mayor’s seat — that we would occupy City Hall. 

In that same vein, Zohran Mamdani didn’t know if he would be New York’s next mayor, but he dove into those frigid Atlantic waters anyway to deliver his rent freeze message. Cea Weaver got over her disappointment and continued organizing. She’s now in an unprecedented position to foster the growth of  tenant power across the city. Eon Huntley is pursuing a rematch in AD 56 which flipped dramatically to the left in 2025 thanks to a surge of young voters. New York City DSA experienced repeated setbacks from 2021 to 2024 but continued learning and building capacity even in defeat. And then it won its biggest victory ever. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance never gave up and now they are shuttling their close friend and ally, the mayor, to his new job. 

Life’s wheel is always in spin. And if fortune favors the bold as the saying goes, the beginning of this new mayoral administration reminds us that fortune also favors those who persevere and push forward even when the outcome is uncertain and success is not guaranteed. 

***

Speaking of persistence, The Indypendent recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. We’ve been able to cover the movements that are changing our city and our world for a quarter century thanks to the support of our readers. We are currently in the middle of our annual winter fund drive and are still less than halfway to reaching our goal of $50,000. Any contribution you can make – whether a one-time donation or becoming a monthly sustainer makes a huge difference and will help us begin 2026 in a strong position. To hear from some of our supporters, click here.