Emma March Barash took a mind-tingling polar plunge with three friends at Jacob Riis Park Beach in Queens on New Year’s Day 2022. Later, when they stopped for dim sum in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, she took another daring plunge.
She texted Mitchell Harlan Schwartz.
“So, Mitch, are you going to ask me to get a drink or what?”
Mr. Schwartz was then Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first deputy press secretary coordinating public responses to policy matters at New York City Hall; Ms. Barash worked in the second floor bullpen, one flight up, as a policy adviser to Melanie Hartzog, the deputy mayor for health and human services.
The two had met in October 2021 after Ms. Barash brought a sensitive issue to his attention: expanding access to child care vouchers.
“I told her we’d be OK,” said Mr. Schwartz, who graduated cum laude from Kenyon College with a bachelor’s degree in political science.
“She was very beautiful, very brilliant, very composed and easy to talk to,” Mr. Schwartz said, when she dropped by his desk.
Ms. Barash, who graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in humanities, received a master of public affairs from the University of California, Berkeley.
Later, on her way to Takahachi, a nearby bakery, for an afternoon snack, she ran into Mr. Schwartz on the steps outside City Hall, and asked if she could get him anything.
“A black coffee would be so great,” he said, strategically to see her again, and owe her one.
“I started hustling away,” she said. “I got chills.”
Then it hit her at that very moment.
“I knew I was going to marry him,” she said.
He had no plans to ask her out, not yet anyway, since they worked together.
But, that didn’t stop them from chatting in passing each day sometimes about music — she sang and played guitar in an indie folk-rock duo, Stabwounds, that was active until 2022.
Eventually he vaguely suggested a drink after work, and was happy when she texted him New Year’s Day about “that drink.”
They went to Tiny’s & the Bar Upstairs in TriBeCa after working late the next Wednesday, where she asked him what she asked every guy on a first date: “What’s your favorite book?”
“Trout Fishing in America” by Richard Brautigan, he said, which she ordered online later that evening, and read.
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She also mentioned that she had applied to graduate school at Berkeley, and planned to go if she got in.
“I knew I was serious about him,” she said. “I thought he was handsome, charming and incredibly funny.” And she loved that he was close to his grandparents.
Mr. Schwartz hugged her before they took the subway home — he to Midtown East and she to Brooklyn Heights. Two Fridays later, they had burgers at the Long Island Bar in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and a first kiss.
He knew “she was the one,” he said, around a month later after they saw the film “Licorice Pizza” at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, then danced to a Grateful Dead cover band at Skinny Dennis bar, where they washed down dumplings that he ran out to get with Shiner Bock beer.
Ms. Barash soon wowed him with her creative dishes, especially soba noodles with tofu and gochujang chile paste.
When she left for Berkeley in May 2022, he visited her often, and they made trips to places like California’s Big Sur and Muir Woods National Monument.
Mr. Schwartz, 33, who had left the mayor’s office, was then working for a political consulting firm called Moonshot Strategies. He is now a senior adviser for public affairs focusing on the five-year capital plan at M.T.A. Construction & Development in Manhattan.
In August 2023, after graduation, Ms. Barash moved into Mr. Schwartz’s studio, and that fall they got a bigger place in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Until December 2024, Ms. Barash, 35, was the chief of staff to the chief operating officer at New York City Housing Authority, and is to begin working on Feb. 10 as a senior director of strategy and program management at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit organization in Manhattan.
In March, Mr. Schwartz got down on one knee at Shabbat dinner after recreating a chicken scarpariello dish, which they had at La Palina in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on Valentine’s Day (a major feat for someone who’s usually on dishwashing duty).
On Jan. 17, Rabbi Matt Green, the associate rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, officiated at a brief legal ceremony in the Governor’s Room at City Hall.
“It felt great to go back to the place we first met, and fell in love,” she said.
Two days later, on a blustery snowy day, Rabbi Green led another ceremony, before 200 guests, at 99 Scott, an events space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, under a huppah, woven by the groom’s college friend, Lauren Williams, a weaver, in the colors of a winter sunset.
As the couple walked down the aisle, friends, including the musicians R.O. Shapiro and the bride’s bandmate, performed Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Let Me Roll It,” featured in “Licorice Pizza.”
Guests later danced to two versions of the hora — Chubby Checker’s Hava Nagila and one with a surf rock vibe by Meshugga Beach Party.
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