Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will soon be an Upper East-sider.
He announced plans Monday to move to Gracie Mansion with his wife, Rama Duwaji, after his New Year’s Day inauguration, leaving the apartment they share in Astoria and ending weeks of speculation about whether he would live at the official residence of New York City’s mayor.
“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,” Mamdani wrote in a statement.
Mamdani’s current $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized unit in a six-story apartment building became a target for his opponents during the general election campaign. Andrew Cuomo proposed legislation that would have prevented landlords from issuing new rent-stabilized leases to people on Mamdani’s current Assembly salary of $142,000. But voters — and Mamdani’s own neighbors — largely rebuffed that criticism and rejected Cuomo at the ballot box.
Even before the primary election in June, Mamdani faced increasing security concerns on the campaign trail. His campaign hired his own security after facing death threats. Once he won the Democratic nomination, Mamdani was assigned an NYPD security detail and will continue to have additional security as mayor.
Gracie Mansion is nestled in a remote corner of the Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side in Carl Schurz Park, on East End Avenue and East 88th Street. The mansion has a gated entrance operated by the NYPD, along with additional security.
The five-bedroom, wood-frame structure has been the official residence of New York City’s mayor since 1942, when Fiorello La Guardia reluctantly moved there with his family over their own security concerns.
“He had resisted, but World War II forced his hand. It was safer and easier to escape, were that necessary, from a blitzkrieg,” Paul Gunther, former executive director of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, told Gothamist in 2021.
Mamdani is not the first mayor-elect to express reluctance about leaving their local stomping grounds behind. Former Mayor Ed Koch was also loath to leave his rent-controlled apartment near New York University when he first took office in 1978. But eventually took up residence at the mansion and founded the Gracie Mansion conservancy in 1981.
By the end of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s term, after facing a marital split that drove him out of the mansion, the building had fallen into disrepair. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, opted to remain at his personal home on the Upper East Side rather than live at the official residence. But he did invest his own money to restore the building, Architectural Digest reported at the time.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio moved to the mansion from Park Slope with his wife, Chirlane McCray, and two teenage children when he took office in 2014, losing a family vote over whether they should stay in Brooklyn or go to the Manhattan home. But de Blasio routinely made trips back to his Brooklyn neighborhood. He was infamously driven back to Park Slope many mornings to exercise at the local YMCA..
Mayor Eric Adams sent mixed signals about whether he would live at Gracie Mansion after winning the Democratic nomination. He told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer in 2021 that he might split his time between his home in Brooklyn and Gracie Mansion if he won the general election. Throughout his winning campaign that year, Adams faced questions about whether he actually lived in Brooklyn or in a condo in New Jersey.
But Adams did ultimately move into Gracie Mansion, even claiming it was haunted.
A spokesperson for the mayor has not yet responded to questions about when Adams plans to move out, where he will move to and what the mansion staff will need to do to prepare for their new residents.
In his statement, Mamdani made clear he will miss his current Queens home and explicitly thanked his neighbors in Astoria for showing him, “the best of New York City.”
“Time and again, this community has shown up for one another. We 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,” Mamdani wrote.
“While I may no longer live in Astoria, Astoria will always live inside me and the work I do.,” the statement continued.
