Matthias Nicolls did not create this problem.
A 17th century New York statesman before New York was a state, Mr. Nicolls was a man of many accomplishments. He drafted an early legal code for the colony of New York and served as the speaker of the Assembly.
His great-grandson William Floyd signed the Declaration of Independence, making Mr. Nicolls a founding great-grandfather of our nation. His family owned vast swaths of Long Island. His modern descendants include musical nobility (David Crosby) and political luminaries (former Gov. William Weld of Massachusetts).
On top of that, in 1671, Mr. Nicolls was appointed the sixth mayor of New York.
But it turns out that in 1674, he was also appointed the eighth mayor of New York. And this fact has caused a near-existential crisis for Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect: Will he become New York City’s 111th mayor, or its 112th?
The sources of confusion are numerous, as reported by the news site Gothamist, which brought the whole sordid tale to light. Part of the problem is a numbering convention whereby a mayor who serves two nonconsecutive terms gets counted twice, just as Donald J. Trump is considered both the 45th and 47th president.
Another complicating factor is the misplacement of a historical record called the Minutes of the Mayor’s Court, which somehow persisted for more than three centuries.
Here’s what happened:
From 1653 to 1665, New Amsterdam, as New York was then known under Dutch rule, was run by a pair of officials called burgomasters. Under English rule, starting in 1665 New York had mayors appointed by the colonial governor. Mr. Nicolls, in 1671, was the sixth. John Lawrence, in 1672, was the seventh.
But in 1673, the Dutch retook the colony from the English and reinstalled the burgomasters. In the fall of 1674, the English regained control, and on Nov. 10, Mr. Nicolls was sworn in, again, this time as New York’s eighth mayor.
None of this mattered much until the early 20th century, when the city started publishing a numbered list of mayors in the City of New York Official Directory, better known as the Green Book. The book’s compilers missed Mr. Nicolls’s second term, and listed his successor William Dervall as mayor No. 8. The result is that the number of every mayor from Dervall onward was off by one.
It took until the 1980s for someone to figure this out. In 1982, a historical editor stumbled upon the missing Minutes of the Mayor’s Court for 1674 in the custody of the Manhattan County Clerk, rather than in the office of the City Clerk, where most such records reside.
In 1989, based on the recently unearthed information, another historian, Peter Christoph, wrote in the Record of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society that then-Mayor Ed Koch was actually New York’s 106th, not 105th. “It is a mind-boggling thought: 99 mayors misnumbered — most of them gone to the grave, secure in the knowledge of their place in history, but all of them numerically out of whack,” he wrote.
But no one official paid attention, and the miscount continued through mayor No. 110 (or 111), Eric Adams. This fall, an amateur historian named Paul Hortenstine flagged the mix-up to reporters.
So here we are. Mr. Mamdani, who initially expressed excitement at the prospect of becoming the city’s 111th mayor, now says he will be psyched to become the 112th.
But of course, nothing is that simple.
For one thing, New York has had a handful of acting mayors. Mr. Hortenstine turned up one, William Beekman — a onetime burgomaster, no less — who served for over a year in the 1680s and is not even listed in the Green Book.
Several other early mayors had also served as burgomasters, so why not count them, and acting mayors, too?
“If the Dutch Burgomasters were counted in the same way we count mayors serving nonconsecutive terms, another 15 would be included, so the mayor-elect might be No. 133,” Michael Lorenzini, the operations manager for the City Department of Records and Information Services, wrote in a blog post this month.
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be simpler to just count the number of unique persons who have been mayor?
With the current system, Mr. Lorenzini said in an interview, “You’re not really counting mayors — you’re counting administrations.” Not counting acting mayors or burgomasters, Mr. Mamdani would be the 96th occupant of the mayor’s seat.
Then again, there is a misleading equivalency implied in counting colonial mayors in the same tally as modern mayors. In the old days, the mayor was appointed to run a village of several thousand souls crammed into the bottom few acres of Manhattan. Now the mayor is elected, and governs a metropolis of 8.5 million sprawled across 300 square miles.
For this reason, Kenneth Cobb, the assistant records department commissioner, said on Tuesday, “We would like to put forth the notion that the count should begin in 1898,” when New York City was expanded to include the modern five boroughs.
That would make Mr. Mamdani mayor No. 21. But who’s counting?
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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