This week, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced that he would be holding a private swearing-in ceremony at an abandoned subway station.
It was also announced that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the leader of the House "Squad" and the burgeoning socialist movement in Congress, would be giving opening remarks during the main ceremony at City Hall on Jan. 1.
As it turns out, Mamdani should have researched the subway station a bit more before selecting it, as its history goes against everything that he believes.
Mamdani is holding his first inaugural ceremony at the stroke of midnight tonight while the rest of New York is partying in Times Square.
The ceremony will be held underground, a la the Penguin, at a gilded-age subway station that has since been abandoned. The Beaux-Arts subway facility near City Hall has not been functional since 1945.
Mamdani stated, “It was a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives.”
He continued, “That ambition need not be a memory confined only to our past, nor must it be isolated only to the tunnels beneath city hall: it will be the purpose of the administration fortunate enough to serve New Yorkers from the building above.”
Mamdani has become the poster child for the socialist movement that AOC has been pushing since her first day in office, and she would not miss his ascension to his new role for a second.
She will be speaking at the public ceremony that will take place around 1:00 p.m. outside of City Hall.
In announcing AOC as a speaker, Mamdani stated that “for the many New Yorkers who have long felt betrayed by a broken status quo,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez “embodies a new kind of politics that puts working people at the heart of it.”
If her remarks are anything like those we have heard in the past, she will be jumping up and down and screaming at the top of her lungs about Mamdani's status as the future of the country.
There is some pretty rich irony here that was clearly missed by Mamdani when he chose the station for his private celebration. The station was actually privately owned, and it only went under when the government stepped in to take control, a fact which was noted by the editorial board of the Washington Post.
The board wrote, "Little of the subway system would exist if not for private enterprises that the city later took over. These entrepreneurs were more concerned with building a railroad that people would want to ride than placating public-sector union bosses and environmental activists."
It continued, “Once all that infrastructure was there, government got involved in managing and operating it, with price-controlled fares that starved the system of funding. It was under city control until the state created a bloated Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1965."
So, in his effort to use the station as a sign of what he can do as a socialist, Mamdani actually honored the achievements of the private sector and drew a spotlight to the fact that far too often, the government touch is the kiss of death. I actually think he could not have made a more appropriate choice because if Mamdani follows through with his plans for free bus service, I believe the entire NYC Metro system is destined to repeat the fate of the Beaux-Arts subway station.
