Reporters jammed onto the subterranean basement basketball court of the McBurney YMCA on West 14th Street on Monday afternoon to watch Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul celebrate one year of congestion pricing.
In the ordinary course of things, a ceremonial victory lap press conference breaking no real news would likely not have filled the basketball court with media, but the event was also the first joint press conference by Mayor Mamdani, who swept to office on promises of making New York City more affordable by taxing the rich, and Governor Hochul, who so far has largely poured cold water on Mamdani's hopes of getting Albany to raise those taxes.
When then-mayoral candidate Mamdani and Hochul spoke on the same stage at Forest Hills in October, Hochul was all but drowned out by New Yorkers demanding she tax the rich. It happened to her again in Puerto Rico in November. And again at Mamdani's inauguration.
That tension—between a governor who has governed from the center-right of the Democratic Party and an upstart mayor who rewrote the political map of New York City to reveal a popular preference for more radical and redistributive solutions, ran just under the surface of the press conference, even as its tightly stage-managed sequence of celebratory self-congratulation put them on the same side.
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