Mamdani has a place in NYC history. But which place in a centuries-long list of mayors?
NEW YORK (AP) — Zohran Mamdani can claim multiple firsts when he becomes New York’s mayor Jan. 1.
Besides being the first Muslim and first person of South Asian heritage elected to the office, the Democrat also is poised to shape city history by being the 112th mayor — rather than 111th, as he was expecting. That’s due to a longstanding oversight in record-keeping that recently gained new attention.
“I’m excited to be whichever mayor,” Mamdani told reporters Wednesday after learning about the counting contretemps. It shows how tricky history’s arithmetic can be.
Paul Hortenstine, an independent historian exploring early New York mayors’ participation in slavery, recently noticed that the city government’s widely used list of mayors undercounted Matthias Nicolls, a figure from the beginning years of English colonial rule in New York.
Nicolls was listed as the sixth mayor, from 1671 to 1672, but there was no mention of his return to office two years later. In the interim, successor John Lawrence took office, then was ousted by a Dutch invasion that briefly implemented a different form of colonial government. The Netherlands eventually gave up the area in exchange for other concessions, and the new English governor reappointed Nicolls in late 1674.
Other mayors were counted multiple times if they served nonconsecutive terms, so Hortenstine suggested Nicolls get the same treatment. The correction would entail renumbering 350 years of subsequent mayors, from William Dervall (who would become No. 9) to incumbent Eric Adams (who’d be No. 111).
“The numbering of mayors is a fascinating issue that is much more difficult than it appears at first glance,” Hortenstine said by phone.
A Washington, D.C.-area researcher, Hortenstine has his own history with New York mayors: He worked for Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 reelection campaign. (The three-consecutive-term Bloomberg would be 109th if the list is renumbered.)
He hopes the debate will stir interest in early mayors and their personal and political involvement with slavery.
As Hortenstine noted, a former New York State Library official, the late Peter Christoph, pointed out the Nicholls numbering flub in 1989. This time, after local news site Gothamist broached the apparent mayoral miscount, the city Department of Records and Information Services looked into it.
In a Dec. 11 blog post, agency archivist Michael Lorenzini painstakingly traced a trail of complexities and gaps in centuries-old records. When the city began printing lists of past mayors in the mid-1800s, Nicolls’ second term didn’t make it.
“It does appear that on January 1, 2026, Mayor Mamdani should be mayor number 112,” Lorenzini wrote, while noting “the numbering of New York City ‘mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent.”
The list doesn’t enumerate the “burgomasters,” mayor-like officials who served in pairs during some periods of Dutch governance. There’s no accounting for any leaders among the Native Americans who lived in the area for thousands of years before colonization. Some acting mayors are mentioned but not awarded numbers — except in a more obscure version of the list, nestled in a 2015 document in the city archives.
Moreover, even equating “mayors” is, to some extent, Big Apples and oranges. The mayor initially led a New York City that comprised only Manhattan, before the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island were added in the late 1800s.
So how much does the numerical list ultimately count?
“In some ways, it is a sort of academic exercise,” Lorenzini said by phone this week. “But I think what’s interesting to me is that we still have these records, and people can still dive into them and still find something new or something to argue about. History is still alive.”