Just after 10 p.m. on primary day in New York City last week, loud applause erupted spontaneously out of d.b.a., the dog-friendly dive-pub on First Avenue. Young people spilled out into the streets, passersby surreptitiously jumped in for high fives, and a crush of people bellied up to the bar to begin the carousing. Those refreshing the New York Times app on their phones discovered that Andrew Cuomo had conceded the race for the Democratic nomination for mayor to Zohran Mamdani. The East Village exploded.
“We did it!” said a young man, beer in hand, bursting out of the bar, which was hosting a watch party for Mamdani, who for months was widely expected to lose to the former governor. Instead, the 33-year-old’s lead was so enormous, the contest was essentially done and dusted days before expected. When the official counting finished a week later, Mamdani won by 12 percentage points. Four years ago, current mayor Eric Adams eked out a win in the same contest by barely 1%. A bright light burst on the scene—the news camera crews had arrived.
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Flashback to early March, when Mamdani made an appearance at another East Village establishment, at a party thrown in his honor by a bevy of downtown personalities. The host committee consisted of entities more associated with an Artists Space after-party or the front row at an Eckhaus Latta runway show than the orbit of mayoral politics. Those on the invite included Dimes Square boutique Café Forgot, downtown galleries such as Theta Gallery and Derosia, the art dealer Carol Greene, writer and podcaster Noah Kulwin, vinyl purveyors Ergot Records, artists such as Ser Serpas and Martine Syms, the designers Gauntlett Cheng, and more.
“Most of them are people I’ve never met,” Mamdani told me as we stood shaking in the unseasonable freeze snap outside. It was chilly on Avenue A, but he was heading somewhere that was, literally and figuratively, colder: Albany. When I asked if he was looking forward to going back to the city where he currently serves in the New York State Assembly, he rolled his eyes. He wanted to be here.
“Frankly, I got here at about 6:45, and I saw a line around the block…which is something that is not typical,” he said.
Inside the party, the vibe hardly reflected any kind of unfamiliarity; the Oscars were being live-podded by the Chapo Trap House bros downstairs, and Ergot Records founder Adrian Rew was DJing. Generally, there was an optimistic feeling in the air that, hey, maybe this guy could do it. Or, more likely, maybe he could make a little noise. At the time, the wager-on-anything site Polymarket had him at around a 7% chance to win, a virtual impossibility.
In the months that followed, Mamdani went on many, many podcasts, including the slightly niche but beloved menswear podcast Throwing Fits, and of course went on Subway Takes, the deliriously popular subterranean Reels–based talk show. He did TikTok man-on-the-street vids and talked to Knicks fans outside Madison Square Garden. He did the “Polar Bear Plunge” and appeared in a video with Emrata as she wore a “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirt. He walked from Battery Park to Inwood as the Zoomers filmed along. He appealed to the “Nintendo Switch heads” and engaged in some colloquy with Crackhead Barney while walking through the Meatpacking District. By primary day, he had overtaken Cuomo on Polymarket odds.
Then he actually won.
“It’s really beyond all expectations,” said Aria Dean—an artist at the event in March, who back then was hoping for the impossible—in the hours after the race was unofficially called.
But not all in the art world were pleased. One of Mamdani’s signature messages—along with the very popular “freeze the rent” and “fast free buses”— is “billionaires should not exist.” And many of the people who support the New York contemporary art marketplace, the most robust art-selling infrastructure of any city on earth, are, well, billionaires.
Take hedge fund behemoth Dan Loeb. The billionaire started buying art along with his wife in the early 2000s. He tussled with the late Barbara Gladstone over a Matthew Barney that she sold him, then unsold him, prompting some fire-and-brimstone emails to Gladstone Gallery staffers—only for Gladstone and Loeb to become friendly later on. Larry Gagosian invited him to gallery dinners, and Loeb decked out his Third Point offices in Lever House with Richard Prince work. That turned into mornings spent surfing with Montauk neighbors Adam Lindemann and Loïc Gouzer (Loeb’s fund’s name comes from a legendary break in Malibu). He went deep into the Martin Kippenberger market, at one point owning 60 works before offloading many of them to art-mad British ad man Charles Saatchi. He bought Jeff Koons’s Baroque Egg With Bow (Turquoise/Magenta) and then consigned it back to Gagosian in 2008 when the market crashed. The gallery brought it to Moscow in an attempt to find a Russian buyer at an oligarch-ready price of $20 million, but Loeb ended up consigning it to Sotheby’s, where it sold for a much more reasonable price of $5.7 million to…Larry Gagosian, who a few years later brought it to the Art Basel Miami Beach in 2013, priced at $9 million.
Loeb is best known in the industry for his attempted poison pill take-private of Sotheby’s, which was initiated in 2014 and ended with a coup d’état of a CEO and three hard-fought board seats. By the time telecom magnate Patrick Drahi leveraged the funds to take over the house in 2019, Third Point owned 14.3% of the company. Loeb personally netted hundreds of millions in the deal.
Loeb’s kept a low profile since then. He’s consigned some paintings by Gerhard Richter and Jonas Wood here and there, and occasionally shows up at the odd auction-week art world shindig. In the week since the primary, though, he’s been very visible once again. On the day before the election, he tweeted a link to a listing for a $44.6 million home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“Wouldn’t be surprised to see a bidding war on trophy Greenwich, Palm Beach and Miami properties if the communist wins,” he wrote.
After Mamdani shocked the city and snagged the primary within hours of the polls closing, Loeb kept on posting. The morning after the election, he changed his profile picture to that of the character Snake Plissken—a not-so-subtle reference to John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. In another posting, he called Mamdani “Little Fidel.”
And then he made a declaration that was soon picked up by tabloids across the city: “It’s officially hot commie summer.”
In the days that followed, several billionaires publicly decried Mamdani, pledging their support to anyone else who might win. Gristedes supermarket’s owner, John Catsimatidis, promised to decamp to Connecticut. Bill Ackman swore to start a write-in campaign. Mere millionaire 50 Cent promised to give Mamdani “$258,750 and a first-class one-way ticket” to drop out and leave town.
There seemed to be a lingering sentiment among some of the art world regulars as well. At lunches and cocktail parties, some expressed to me their doubts about Zohran, though I would describe their tone as relatively muted.
Not so much with the art adviser Elizabeth Margulies, the daughter of Miami collector Martin Margulies. She posted to her Instagram story a screenshot of a since-deleted X post by the wealth management professional and TV personality Douglas Boneparth in which he said, “New York City downgraded to San Francisco.”
To that, Margulies added her own commentary.
“A terror-apologist lunatic who despises the police is about to run NYC,” she wrote. “Hope everyone’s down with open air psych wards and unanswered 911 calls. Good luck out there.”
But all week, the main question on everyone’s mind was: What does Keith McNally think about all this? The restaurateur with the most talked about memoir of the year—at least in Manhattan, where his book has been perched at the top of the McNally Jackson bestseller list for months—has historically displayed a fairly freewheeling set of personal politics. One could imagine him falling on either side of the mayor debate. The suspense lasted until Monday, when the Balthazar owner went on-grid with a big picture of the Democratic nominee.
“I think Zohran Mamdani is fantastic,” he said. “More so, when my affluent, paranoid friends tell me Mamdani’s dangerous. More so, when those over 50 say Mamdani’s too young and inexperienced to be mayor. More so, when the perceptive among are unable to see what a decent and principled man Mamdani is. I’m sure Mamdani won’t be perfect, but anyone labeled by Trump as a ‘Communist Lunatic’ can’t be all bad.”
The response was, as to be expected, mixed. Real estate developers, who aren’t exactly pleased with the whole “freeze the rent” thing, went especially hard against McNally. Philip Scheinfeld, the luxury real estate adviser at Compass, commented simply, “Your food tastes like dog food!” Matt Bilinsky, the attorney and frequent Fox News guest, said, “You have nothing to offer the world but a solid steak frites and war stories from hitting quaaludes at Blondie shows in the village in 1982.” (The comment appears to have been deleted sometime this week.) Evan Beard, the former head of Bank of America’s Art Services Group who now runs the gallery Level & Co., said, “You’ll love the produce section of his city-run grocery stores.”
But also very much in the comments section were the new generation of content creators who claim the Instagram-famous McNally as one of their own, just another New York–obsessed resident mining the city’s rich cultural offerings for feed fodder ready to go viral. In other words, the comments section is full of the people who got Mamdani elected. Kareem Rahma, the host of Subway Takes, said, “One of the many reasons we love @keithmcnallynyc.” Kaitlin Phillips, the downtown PR maven who was brought in to secure press for the March event (a strategy that seems to have worked), dropped a bunch of heart emojis. And Substacker Emily Sundberg—who titled a March newsletter about the Avenue A event “The hottest party in New York this weekend was a Democratic Socialist fundraiser”—said simply, “Keith for the people.”
Since then, McNally has posted about Mamdani at least three more times. The general election’s just a few months away.
Content never sleeps.
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