The atmosphere around Gracie Mansion on Saturday changed in a blink-and-you-might-miss-it moment.
Did that really just happen?
For two hours, the sleepy streets around Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City’s mayor, became the stage for a heated protest reflecting a country seething with angst and unease.
A MAGA influencer and Jan. 6 participant, Jake Lang, had attracted a small group of his followers to join him in a protest of Islam outside Zohran Mamdani’s home. Counterprotesters came in larger numbers, which swelled to 100. Taunts and shouts were exchanged, and some of the counterprotesters were sprayed with pepper spray by one of Mr. Lang’s fellow protesters.
Then a young man on the counterprotesters’ side of the street lit and threw an incendiary device. There were cries of “Bomb!”, the clang of a drum, the din of footsteps pounding as people ran toward police barricades, jostling and confusion. Police officers tackled someone to the ground.
The chaos grew as word spread in the crowd that an incendiary device, its smoke and flames visible, was sitting in plain sight on a New York street, just in front of Gracie Mansion.
There is something quintessentially New York about the mayor’s living situation: There sleeps the man in charge of running the largest city in the country, the historical mayoral residence just steps from ordinary grocery stores packed with gymgoers, elderly couples and toddlers clutching library books.
Many residents of East 88th Street have become accustomed to the occasional protest or news conference outside Gracie, but the scene Saturday morning had a dose of the surreal: Eggs, water and hot dogs were thrown; Mr. Lang had even brought a goat. But the tenor changed once the fistfights and shouts gave way to a terrorist act.
“We’ve never had anything like this here,” said Brian Thomas, 29, who lives around the corner from Gracie and had been out to visit a Chick-fil-A when he found himself behind police barricades. Mr. Thomas, as it happens, had moved to New York from Washington, D.C., after tiring of the way politics seemed to suffuse his routines there, recalling with particular disquiet checking in on his neighbors during the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I mean it’s upsetting. This is a quiet street, lots of families.”
Counterprotesters who had been inches away from the explosive device tried to process what they had seen, their recollections jumbled, but much of the event caught on video. Like Walter Masterson, a comedian who had grown up blocks from Gracie Mansion, who on Saturday saw his view of his home neighborhood warped.
He had been speaking into a megaphone, saying that he wants everyone to feel welcome in New York, when he felt somebody come up from behind and throw an explosive device over his head.
“You have all these ideas of how you’re going to react in the moment,” said Mr. Masterson, whose sister had been pepper sprayed by Mr. Lang’s fellow protesters. “And then when the moment comes, you’re just staring at things trying to process.”
Coursing through the crowd around Gracie on Saturday were also emotions that had built up over a tumultuous week. Many New Yorkers had been following news of the war in Iran with worry; one Persian woman standing near the protest broke down in tears talking about her family in Iran, declining to share her name because of concerns about their safety.
Being mayor of New York is a job attached to a never-ending heap of stresses, and the emotions of the city often end up on the mayor’s doorstep. In a 1976 incident, under Mayor Abe Beame, thousands of off-duty police officers surrounded the mayor’s home during the fiscal crisis, and neighbors pelted them with tomatoes.
In 2020, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter activists at one point gathered near the mayor’s home for a nighttime vigil, while police officers surrounded the mansion with metal barricades.
Eccentrics have turned up at the mayor’s home over the years, too. On New Year’s Day in 2025, under Eric Adams, a man jumped the fence, entered Gracie and stole a Christmas ornament. In 1993, under David Dinkins, an intruder tried to enter the home, then bit the finger of the detective who had intercepted him. In 1987, two of Mayor Ed Koch’s bodyguards found a man in the kitchen with two knives, two spoons and eight forks. It is, after all, a city of stranger-than-fiction stories. Mayor William O’Dwyer once woke up to find an intruder next to his bed, a moment that made its way into the novel “The Big Crowd” by Kevin Baker.
But rarely has there been anything as rattling as a homemade bomb thrown outside the mayor’s residence. Sean Wilentz, a historian of New York City, called what happened on Saturday unprecedented, noting that there have been attacks on New York mayors, like the shooting of William Jay Gaynor in 1910, but that didn’t occur at Gracie. The site itself took cannon fire during the Revolutionary War, but the mansion hadn’t yet been built.
On Monday, when New York finally got a balmy morning, teasing springtime, Mayor Mamdani walked outside of his home to update New Yorkers on the investigation ongoing into Saturday’s events. He stepped to the lectern, along with his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, looking a little more uncertain than is typical, straightening his tie and furrowing his brow before speaking.
He began by condemning the far right, anti-Islamic protesters who had gathered outside his home, calling them “appalling.” But they had a right to gather all the same, he said. Then he denounced, in stronger terms, what had come in response to that right-wing protest.
“Many of the counterprotesters met this display of bigotry peacefully, with a vision of a city that is welcoming to all,” he said. “A few did not.”
As the mayor and the police commissioner talked, there were shouts in the distance, faint but clearly enraged. Mr. Lang was back, wearing a pin that read “I am still alive” and shouting outside the gates of Gracie Mansion about the mayor, as his supporters whipped out their phones to record the moment.
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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