An hour before Matthew Cruz and Molly McGhee were supposed to wed at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau last week, the couple realized that they had forgotten their marriage license.
Cue the panic. In 10-degree weather, Cruz, a 30-year-old audio engineer, furiously pedaled an electric CitiBike back to their apartment in Brooklyn. Ms. McGhee, 31, a novelist and creative writing professor, saw it as a small miracle when her fiancé returned with the document, moments before their 10:30 a.m. ceremony.
They made their way inside, only to be greeted by their second surprise of the day: Mayor Zohran Mamdani was there, and he wanted to officiate their wedding.
“Are you kidding me?” Ms. McGhee responded.
Neither one had ever met the mayor before, but they said yes. “It took me a full 45 seconds to get our rings out because I was shaking a little bit,” Cruz added.
Mr. Mamdani made an unexpected trip to the Manhattan Marriage Bureau last Thursday to officiate weddings for six New York City couples who had arrived for their scheduled appointments. The visit was an anniversary celebration of sorts for Mr. Mamdani, who had married the artist Rama Duwaji at the same city clerk’s office almost exactly one year earlier.
His turn as a municipal Cupid came as he navigated the city’s deadly cold snap and prepared to travel to Albany for the mayor’s annual budget pleas to lawmakers. It was kept under wraps until Saturday morning, when Mr. Mamdani’s office released a video on YouTube documenting the occasion to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
“I think it’s the best of New York,” Mr. Mamdani says in the video. “You see all these couples — so many different stories, so many different ages, so many different lives, and they’re all coming to get married.”
Michael McSweeney, who has been city clerk since 2009, said he could not think of another time a sitting mayor had officiated weddings for the public in the city clerk’s office, which is often called City Hall. Nor could he think of another mayor who had held his own marriage ceremony there.
The six couples, all local New Yorkers, were not handpicked, he said; they had simply been on the schedule to get married on Thursday morning. A member of the marriage bureau’s staff approached each pair to give them the option to have their ceremonies officiated by the mayor, he added.
“All of the couples were somewhere between happy and thrilled,” Mr. McSweeney said.
In interviews, the newlyweds said they had been shocked by the mayor’s appearance, but were open to letting him be a surprise guest star in their love stories.
Ms. McGhee, who cheered on Mr. Mamdani’s run for mayor, said she had been touched that the mayor correctly gendered her spouse, Cruz, who uses they and them pronouns. The pair have been together for 12 years, since meeting at a poetry reading as students at Champlain College in Vermont.
The mayor did not make the moment about himself, she added. After the roughly five-minute ceremony, the couple rode the subway to Bryant Park with their families, took pictures at the New York Public Library and treated themselves to a seafood tower at a nearby restaurant.
“I love that the mayor was there, but I’ll be honest, my focus was not on him,” Ms. McGhee said.
Emily Grimmius, 30, a lawyer in Manhattan, also found her ceremony to be more exciting than she had anticipated. “I expected the day to be, like, government paperwork,” she said. “And then you walk in, and it’s your wedding, and you’re a little star-struck by the mayor.”
She and her husband, Muhammad Saleem, 28, a start-up founder, have often remarked that only New York could have brought them together. She came to the East Coast from Washington and California; he grew up in Pakistan before moving to Chicago. They met in 2024 through friends from Columbia University, where Mr. Saleem was a student, and bonded over their shared love of food.
“It’s the epitome of New York: You don’t know who you are going to meet,” Mr. Saleem said. “There is nothing predictable, and that’s the beauty of the city, right?”
Michael and Minji Tzeng, who met on the dating app Hinge in 2019, arrived for their 11:15 a.m. appointment at the marriage bureau expecting an intimate ceremony before a few family members. Ms. Tzeng, 29, a data engineer at a nonprofit, said she had chosen the Manhattan location because it was the most photogenic of the city clerk’s offices.
Soon, Mr. Tzeng, 30, a medical resident, was shaking hands with a grinning Mr. Mamdani. The mayor complimented his black-and-gray striped tie and told him he had the same one. (It was from Suitsupply, Mr. Tzeng said.)
After the ceremony, the couple made ramen in their apartment on the Upper East Side and excitedly texted their friends pictures of their wedding crasher.
“They were like, Wait, is this real?” Ms. Tzeng said. “Are you sure it’s not A.I.?”
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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