It's 1976. You're Abe Beame, the mayor of New York City. The city is, quite literally, collapsing around you. A fiscal crisis you helped create as comptroller is subsuming your mayorality, and punishing the New Yorkers you were elected to help. The elites and the wealthy are determined to shame and abandon you, sensing an opportunity to enforce ruthless cuts to social welfare programs. The federal government has told you that no help is coming. You are now very likely to be remembered, for all time, as the mayor who presided over the fall of New York City.
Still, there is hope: You have completed an expansion of the Port Richmond Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility on Staten Island.
In this tiny triumphant moment, you pen a letter to your future counterpart—the mayor of New York City in 2026—and drop it in a time capsule.
On Wednesday, that mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, opened it up.