Mayor Zohran Mamdani tends to stay relentlessly, maddeningly, on script. He wants New Yorkers to know he’s obsessed with the city. He wants them to know he’s not taking breaks. So when Mr. Mamdani took his first vacation as mayor, he didn’t go far, traveling just a little over two hours to the area around Coxsackie, N.Y.
“Missed the city, missed you guys,” Mr. Mamdani said on his return, suited up and facing reporters in a park in Glendale, Queens, on Monday morning.
Mr. Mamdani’s decision to summer near Coxsackie was, to some of the locals there, an unexpected thrill. Patrick Pacheco, a theater journalist who has lived part time in nearby Climax for 25 years, was bowled over to see the mayor and his wife, Rama Duwaji, buying two roast chickens and a hefty amount of vegetables at his local Tops grocery store in West Coxsackie last Sunday. (“The chickens at Tops are not to be described as culinary delights,” Mr. Pacheco said, adding: “The locals call it ‘cook-sake.’ There are tote bags with the correct pronunciation sold around town.”)
He had initially struggled to identify the glamorous-looking young couple in the checkout line. There was something that tipped him off to Ms. Duwaji’s identity: She was wearing all black. “Nobody dresses in black in my neck of the woods,” he said.
Mr. Pacheco said he approached the mayor and his wife, who were accompanied by a single bodyguard. He asked Mr. Mamdani if he was who he thought he was. The mayor smiled and said yes. Mr. Pacheco then asked, warmly, “What the hell are you doing in Coxsackie?” The couple explained they were taking a few days off.
Since assuming office in January, Mr. Mamdani has telegraphed to New Yorkers that he is working around the clock. He has gathered with delivery workers at dawn during Ramadan, and at night watched New York Liberty and Gotham FC games. But everybody needs a vacation.
When City Hall announced that for one week the mayor and his wife would be going “upstate,” they did not specify where. (This kicked off a vigorous debate: Is Westchester upstate?)
Their destination became clearer when residents of Greene County, a region that includes Coxsackie and is roughly 140 miles from City Hall, spotted the mayor out and about during that time.
Last Monday, workers at the trendy restaurant Casa Susanna in Leeds got a heads-up that the mayor was coming to dinner. The couple ordered duck and chochoyotes, or masa dumplings, according to a person who was briefed on their visit and who asked not to be named so as not to upset the business owners. Mr. Mamdani told reporters that he and his wife also went to dinner at an Uzbek restaurant in the area.
The trip was far closer to home than those taken by some of the mayor’s predecessors. Michael R. Bloomberg regularly visited his waterfront vacation home in Bermuda. Eric Adams became known for his jet-setting, ultimately facing a federal indictment on charges involving, among other things, free flights from Turkish Airlines. Mr. Mamdani, though, when asked last year during a campaign debate which country he would travel to first if elected, emphasized that he would stay in New York City.
A recent interview with New York magazine indicated what Mr. Mamdani might have tried to finish reading during his break: “Gods of New York,” a book about the churning social and political ups and downs of New York City in the 1980s. (In a video posted on Monday to social media, in which he announced plans to rehabilitate the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Mr. Mamdani was shown reading Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.” But the mayor’s team did not respond when asked if he had actually read the book.)
Back facing reporters on Monday morning, the mayor again spun his vacation into pithy politics: “It’s also part of what we want for every New Yorker,” he said. “That they also get time to actually step away from the day-to-day.”
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