New York City entered 2026 with a mayoral inauguration that broke from convention as Zohran Mamdani, the city’s mayor-elect, assumed office with a private midnight oath beneath City Hall and a large public ceremony and citywide celebration hours later.

At 34 years old, Mamdani became the youngest mayor New York City has seen in a century, as well as its first Muslim mayor and its first mayor of South Asian descent.

Mamdani’s term as mayor officially begins at the first moment of the new year.

As the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2026, he took the oath of office in a private ceremony held inside the decommissioned Old City Hall subway station, located beneath Park Row and City Hall Park.

The station, which first opened to riders in 1904, was among the original 28 subway stations that launched New York City’s underground transit system.

It ceased operations in 1945 and has since remained largely inaccessible to the public, opening only for occasional guided tours.

The decision to hold the first swearing-in there was intentional, linking the start of Mamdani’s administration to a physical remnant of the city’s early 20th-century ambition.

Explaining the choice, Mamdani said in a press release, “When Old City Hall Station first opened in 1904 — one of New York’s 28 original subway stations — it was a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives. That ambition need not be a memory confined only to our past, nor must it be isolated only to the tunnels beneath City Hall: It will be the purpose of the administration fortunate enough to serve New Yorkers from the building above.”

Attendance at the midnight ceremony will be limited to Mamdani’s immediate family and a select group of invited guests.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James administered the oath of office, formally making Mamdani the city’s next mayor.

Details of the underground ceremony were first reported by Streetsblog NYC, but Mamdani’s transition team later confirmed the plan, describing it as a deliberately private and reflective start to his administration.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio took a private oath just after midnight on New Year’s Day in 2014 outside his Park Slope home before holding a public ceremony at City Hall later that morning.

By contrast, Mayor Eric Adams was sworn in publicly in Times Square in 2022, moments after the New Year’s Eve ball drop.

Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York City, added his own tradition to the ceremony. During the swearing-in, he put his hand on the Quran, the first mayor in the city to do so.

Mamdani is expected to use at least three unique Qurans for his public and private swearing-in ceremonies, senior adviser Zara Rahim, told The New York Times earlier. For his private swearing-in ceremony early Thursday (January 1), he used his grandfather’s Quran and one that belonged to Arturo Schomburg, the Black writer and historian. It will be lent to the mayor by the New York Public Library, the report said.

For the public ceremony, he is expected to use the two Qurans used by his grandfather and grandmother.

Attorney General Letitia James has played a significant role in Mamdani’s political ascent. She was among his most high-profile endorsers during the Democratic primary, at a time when many prominent Democrats in New York kept their distance from his campaign.

The primary was conducted using ranked-choice voting, allowing voters to rank up to five candidates. During the contest, James publicly stated that she ranked Mamdani third on her ballot.

In October, she appeared alongside him at a rally shortly after she had been indicted on fraud charges related to a mortgage loan — charges that were later dismissed by a federal judge.

Speaking at that rally, James said, “He is a leader fighting for a better future for this city, and he, like me, knows what it’s like to be attacked, to be called names, to be threatened, to be harassed.”

In a separate press release addressing her role in the swearing-in ceremony, James described administering the oath as “an honour,” adding that Mamdani “ran a campaign that brought together New Yorkers around the universal idea that we should all be able to afford to live in our city.”