Socialist Mayor-elect Mamdani to ditch the hood, move on up to East Side Gracie Mansion

"We will miss much about our home in Astoria," he said. One of those things will be "cooking dinner side by side" in their kitchen. Gracie Mansion, in Carl Schurz Park overlooking the East River around 87th Street, boasts a large chef's kitchen and a chef who cooks for the mayor and his family, in this case artist wife Rama, whose parents are from Syria.

Mamdani claims he will miss riding the elevator with the other residents of his Astoria apartment building and the music and voices that filter through the thin walls. He praised Astoria as he's leaving it for "showing us the best of New York City."

"We have called this neighborhood home as our city weathered a devastating pandemic," he wrote in parting, "cruel attacks on immigrants, and years of an affordability crisis. Time and again, this community has shown up for one another."

He noted that he will miss the smell of ethnic foods and sounds of foreign languages wafting in from the neighborhood as he moves on up to the East Side. "The decision came down to our family's safety and the importance of dedicating all of my focus on enacting the affordability agenda New Yorkers voted for," he said.

The idea, apparently, is that working for the working man requires the luxury of a private, Upper East Side mansion. He claims, however, that his "priority, always, is serving the people who call this city home."

In closing, he said that he will be "a mayor" for all those he is leaving behind, such as "the line cooks on Steinway, for the children swinging at Dutch Kills Playground, for the bus riders waiting for the Q101.

"While I may no longer live in Astoria, Astoria will always live inside me and the work I do," Mamdani assured the little people he's leaving behind.

Mamdani is not foreign to the luxury life. His parents have a five-bedroom, four-bathroom villa in Uganda with views of Lake Victoria on a sprawling two acres. His father, a Columbia anti-colonialism professor, and his Academy Award-nominated filmmaker mother own the compound where their son and Rama Duwaji wed in July.