Thursday night, during a reception celebrating Eastern European culture hosted by Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion, Katherine Brezler went to the bathroom and noticed a hose next to the toilet.
Ms. Brezler, a strategic adviser to the Queens borough president, whipped out her phone.
“Hi, I can confirm that there are bidets in Gracie Mansion,” she filmed herself saying in a video that she later posted online. She then turned the camera to show a hand-held water-sprayer attachment affixed to the side of the toilet tank.
Promises made, promises kept.
OK, so installing bidets in Gracie Mansion wasn’t exactly a campaign promise. But it was something that Mr. Mamdani said he wanted to do, just a day after moving into the mayoral residence in January, calling the addition of the toilet paper alternatives an “aspirational goal.”
Sure enough, bidets were installed shortly afterward, the mayor’s office said on Friday, adding that Mr. Mamdani had paid for the work himself.
Lately bidets have proliferated in American homes. A 2024 industry report stated that more than two in five renovating homeowners were choosing to install toilets with specialty features, including bidet toilet seats. And according to Axios, the U.S. bidet market is projected to grow 30 percent between 2024 and 2029.
The bidets of Gracie Mansion are not the stand-alone porcelain units you might find on the floors of European bathrooms. They are water-spraying attachments that, according to the mayor’s office, cost $24 a piece.
The office did not specify how many of the mansion’s toilets were fitted with bidets — only that every toilet that could accommodate the attachment (in both the public and private areas of the building) received one, and that they were all installed at the same time.
Fiorello H. La Guardia was the first mayor to live at Gracie Mansion — he moved there in 1942 — and since then, each mayor has put his own stamp on it, tweaking everything from the kitchen to the gardens. Mayor Edward I. Koch didn’t like the ferns in the entry courtyard and wanted more color, so perennial flowers were planted.
In the book “Gracie Mansion: A Celebration of New York City’s Mayoral Residence” by Ellen Stern, the designer Jamie Drake recalled the plumbing issues that came to light during renovations for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg:
When plumbers turned off the water before tackling the bathrooms, they discovered the mansion only had one turn-off valve (most houses have one in every bathroom), and its threading was so corroded they couldn’t turn the water back on. “We had to go into the main water supply on East End Avenue, which required permission to shut off all of East End Avenue for four hours,” says Drake.
Ms. Brezler, who posted the video, has a bidet at home. She said that — as a city official whose work often touches on public infrastructure, specifically sewers and flooding — she believed that New Yorkers should embrace bidets, especially if it meant using fewer flushable wipes.
“Wipes are the worst thing for our sewers and for our plumbing and they cause millions of dollars of damage,” she said, “and you could just be spraying a little bit of water on the tushy.”
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