Marking his 100th day as mayor, Zohran Mamdani headed to the Bronx for what could have doubled as a sitcom scene.
Cheerleaders waved pompoms. A mascot named Scrappy was dressed as a compost bin. And there was Mr. Mamdani, trying to connect the dots between his “Municipal Madness” program — a bracket-style competition in which New Yorkers decided which city problem the mayor would directly address — and the broader vision of his administration.
“We have showcased a new kind of approach to governing in our city — pothole politics,” he said. “Delivering public goods coupled with public excellence.”
For most New York mayors, their first few months tend to have little sway over the frenetic rhythms of the city. Mr. Mamdani, however, vowed on Day 1 of his administration to make a visceral difference in the lives of ordinary New Yorkers — their sidewalk meanderings and playground jaunts.
Behind the scenes, that work had already begun before Mr. Mamdani took office in January.
A to-do list had been circulating among his aides, filled with ideas — infrastructure projects, service-focused initiatives — that New York City had at some point started planning but hadn’t seen through to completion, according to a person familiar with the list.
Mr. Mamdani seems to have seized on some of these unfinished ideas as he began his first 100 days in office.
The mayor announced $4 million for new public bathrooms across the city’s five boroughs. He personally shoveled asphalt over a vexing bump at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. His administration started taking down sheds at 40 public housing developments, restarted bus lane projects on 34th Street in Manhattan and Fordham Road in the Bronx and relaunched bike lane initiatives across the city.
He sued a Bronx tow truck operator. He publicized a campaign to fill potholes across the boroughs. And he raised pay for emergency snow shovelers during a massive blizzard.
All of these efforts were examples of something Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, described last year as “sewer socialism” — putting money, time and attention into public services, in an effort to show how the public sector can compete with the private. Or what the mayor’s team is calling “street socialism.”
As Mr. Mamdani ran for mayor last year, he tried to reframe socialist governance as something less ideological and more palatable — especially as rival candidates and critics offered dark prophecies of how socialism could “kill” New York City. Socialist governance, he stressed, could simply mean proving to New Yorkers that investing in city-run goods would make their lives better.
“One of the things that comes to mind for me is the concept of sewer socialism,” he told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer in October 2024, just after he entered the race. “You had socialist mayors who went on to build public health infrastructure, publicly owned power systems, improving workplace conditions.”
Mr. Mamdani has tried to bring that vision to fruition by prioritizing brass tacks projects over ideological ones, even if that means relying on the work of previous administrations.
“Every mayor stands on the shoulders of the mayor that came before,” said Ben Furnas, head of Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy group. “A lot of things a mayor is able to announce are things the government was ready and able to do, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take leadership to proceed.”
The effort to build a rest stop for delivery workers where they can recharge their bikes began under Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams. But it was jump-started and completed this month.
When Mr. Mamdani announced the $4 million for new public bathrooms, he validated a pitch that had withered under the Adams administration because of the high costs involved. The Adams aide who hatched the related idea said she saw Mr. Mamdani’s announcement as a passing of the baton, New York’s government in a relay race of sorts.
The idea of converting part of 34th Street into a busway started in 2025, but was halted several months later. The efforts to take down the ugly sheds at public housing developments had been kick-started under Mr. Adams, too.
Fabien Levy, a former deputy mayor under Mr. Adams, took issue with Mr. Mamdani receiving credit for a child care pilot program, writing on X: “So, basically, it took 5 months for Mayor Mamdani to copy Mayor Adams’s homework.”
“When we did things like expand pre-K, we invited former Mayor de Blasio and gave him credit for things,” Mr. Levy said in an interview. “Not saying everyone has to be invited to everything.”
Sewer socialism has its roots (or, you might say, pipes) far from the bridges and bus lanes of Mr. Mamdani’s New York. In 1910, Milwaukee voters, many of them German immigrants, sent a series of socialists to City Hall. Mayors Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan and Frank Zeidler built parks, sprawling public housing developments and a nationally envied sewer system.
In a 1936 cover story called “Marxist Mayor,” Time magazine celebrated the city’s achievements: 67 parks, 68 playgrounds, 21 social centers, free beaches, dance halls and an outdoor opera.
Milwaukee had become famous for its functionality, even if the magazine piece was quick to clarify that this didn’t mean socialist leadership was a good thing: “Socialism as an economic doctrine has nothing to do with it,” the story read.
It’s a common critique of sewer socialism — a term coined by leftists who were critical of the Milwaukee political camp, which practiced what they viewed as a watered-down type of socialist governance. Sheri Berman, a historian of the left, noted that some progressives felt that sewer socialists, much like Europe’s social democrats, could make the status quo comfortable enough that people didn’t agitate for broader change.
“The classic debate is that social democrats were just making capitalism more palatable,” Ms. Berman said. “What they ended up doing was putting lipstick on a pig, creating a system that was kinder and gentler enough to stop people from thinking about what a fundamentally better future would be.”
But for thousands of leftist activists around New York City, who helped catapult Mr. Mamdani into office, there’s an angsty, yearning, even desperate desire for the young mayor to succeed. So the specific brand of socialism he has brought to office — whether it involves fixing sewers or redistributing wealth — isn’t something they seem interested in attacking, at least not yet.
“For a long time we’ve had mayoralties that haven’t really done enough to challenge what became common sense under Reagan, that the market is the best way to organize public life,” said Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “What this administration is trying to do is to demonstrate that the government can work for you, for ordinary people.”
Mr. Mamdani recently cited Milwaukee with pride while announcing an investment of $108 million to replace and modernize New York’s catch basins. He suggested in jest that a popular 2015 rap song, “Milly Rocking,” might be inspired by the city and its history as the birthplace of sewer socialism.
“Today, we may too be Milly rocking,” Mr. Mamdani said. “We are delivering the very kinds of public goods and public excellence that, too often for New Yorkers, have been missing in their day-to-day lives.”
Part of what has allowed Mr. Mamdani to make this case to his constituents so powerfully is his broad reach on social media and his creative approaches to getting his message out.
When he filled potholes, his handiwork was plastered across Instagram, X and YouTube, infusing his administration with an audacious sense of municipal exceptionalism.
Whenever the administration announced an initiative — a new plan for outdoor dining or a 15-miles-per-hour limit in school zones — the mayor’s communication team would prod influencers to post the effort on social media. Cascades of meme-driven praise followed: “Get in loser, we’re doing sewer socialism.” “Can someone please study the workings of this socialist magic trick.”
For his latest act, Mr. Mamdani put on gloves and picked up trash at the Municipal Madness send-off in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Around him was the litter characteristic of a New York City street: bags of Chex Mix and bottles of orange Gatorade, cigarettes and boxes of Chicken McNuggets.
The event was more reinvention than invention, an imaginative approach to completing some of the everyday, unsexy tasks of a big-city mayor. The Department of Transportation, for example, closed 3,946 potholes in March — the most filled in a month since 2020.
“There’s a La Guardia quote that says there’s no Democratic or Republican way of collecting garbage,” said Paul Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank. “If you’re doing basic municipal services, is that socialism? No, but it’s what municipal government is about.”
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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