Want to Talk to Zohran Mamdani? Get in Line

Visitor No. 53, Gabriella Gonjon, who was raised by Dominican immigrants in South Jersey (“between Princeton and Six Flags”), said she was terrified of how Donald Trump is targeting immigrants. “Hearing Trump say he doesn’t want people from third-world countries here,” she said, “that really scared me, and it just makes me feel like, even though I’m born here and I’m a hundred per cent a citizen here, I don’t know when that line is going to change.” But that’s not what she wanted to talk to Mamdani about. Gonjon, who is twenty-six, and a trained architect who works for a city agency that oversees school construction, had a complaint about the new OMNY contactless-payment system in the city’s subway stations and buses. “I don’t feel like our identity should be tied to every stop that we go to,” she said. MetroCards had afforded riders some measure of privacy. “Especially with this immigrant thing—like, I don’t want to be targeted in any way.”

Joynal Abedin, a Bangladeshi immigrant in his sixties, from Woodside, came to the museum dressed in a blue suit and a green shirt and tie. He wanted to talk to Mamdani about the plight of the small landlord. “All homeowners are not billionaires like Donald Trump,” he said. Despite Mamdani’s championing of the city’s renters, Abedin was determined to make him see that mom-and-pop landlords such as him deserved empathy, too. But when he got into the room, the Mayor-elect, whom he had met before, disarmed him by reciting the names of his children. “Asked me about the kids by name,” Abedin said. “What can I do?”

As the afternoon wore on, snow accumulated in the museum’s back garden, and Mamdani’s visitors kept coming, shaking ice off their boots. One man recited what he wanted to tell Mamdani over and over again under his breath, his eyes gauzy and lost in the middle distance. Another attendee had written notes in pen on the back of her hand, which read, from top to bottom: “Rent Iftar Glitter com. Red Hook + Gowanus Knitting Small Biz Bus Idling.” In the afternoon, Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is one of the leaders of the transition team, arrived in the staging room to talk with the visitors, along with other top advisers, including Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff, and Dean Fuleihan, a soft-spoken seventy-four-year-old veteran of state and city government, who will be serving as Mamdani’s first deputy mayor. Visitor No. 97, the woman with the moon earrings, emerged from her meeting around 5:3src, saying she sensed Mamdani flagging. “He was exhausted, you could see it on his face,” she said. “But you couldn’t tell by the way he talked.”