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.
"We cannot imagine how different your time will be from ours," you write. "To us, the life of fifty years ago seems quaint, its problems simple and its technological achievements almost primitive by comparison with the present."
Your aide is reading over your shoulder, reminding you that this is a time capsule for a wastewater plant expansion, not the fucking Apollo 11 mission.
You wave them aside.
"We hope that you, our descendants, live in a world….where hunger, disease, and illiteracy have been eliminated; a world whose people respect each other's rights; a world in which there is a fair distribution of the blessings of the land and the sea; a world in whose people are productively and satisfyingly employed in tasks which enhance, rather than degrade, the environment," you write.
At some point you realize you are perhaps being a bit harsh on you and the New York City of 1976. "Read our negative self-criticisms as our desire for improvement and our dreams for you," you write, ending on a note of New York City exceptionalism—New York, even in its tacitly fallen state, is still the greatest city in the world.
"We expect our children, grandchildren, and our great grandchildren to live in a New York City which will still be the Number One city in the world in all activities of the human body, mind and soul," you write.
You sign your name, and seal the envelope. It goes, along with photos of the men and women—the New Yorkers—who made this possible, who believe in a future for this city, who also hope this wastewater treatment facility will outlive them.
The next year, you get your ass kicked in the Democratic Primary.
The wastewater treatment facility lives on. On Tuesday, Mayor Mamdani announced it will get a $185 million upgrade.