With outgoing Mayor Eric Adams continuing to dodge the question of whether he’ll attend Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration this week, the only former mayor confirmed to be in the crowd is Bill de Blasio.
“I’ll be attending,” de Blasio, who left office in late 2021 after two terms as mayor, told the Daily News over the weekend.
De Blasio, a progressive Democrat, was a surrogate for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and has been an informal adviser to him, making his appearance at Thursday’s inauguration expected.
Adams — a conservative Democrat who was harshly critical of Mamdani during the 2025 campaign — has declined for weeks to say whether he’ll attend, raising the specter that he’ll break with the tradition of outgoing mayors attending the inaugurations of their successors.
During an unrelated press conference Monday, Adams once again declined to say if he’ll be at the inaugural ceremony on the steps of City Hall, telling reporters he first wants to speak to Mamdani to make sure he doesn’t “disrupt his day.”
“That’s a very important, historical day, and it’s unfortunate that there’s a body of some of his supporters, some of them, who rather protest everything,” Adams said in a dig at the democratic socialist mayor-elect’s voters.
“If he’s cool, I’m cool,” Adams added.
But Mamdani has already said he’s cool with Adams’ attendance. Asked for a response to Adams’ Monday comments, a Mamdani rep referred to remarks the mayor-elect made last week in which he said his predecessor is “still welcome to my inauguration.”
Reps for Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, the only other living ex-New York City mayors, didn’t return requests for comment on whether they will be at Mamdani’s inauguration.
Giuliani, a Republican who’s close to President Trump, has called Mamdani a “communist — right out of Karl Marx.” Bloomberg donated millions of dollars to anti-Mamdani super PACs that sought to boost the mayor-elect’s chief rival in the Nov. 4 election, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
After dropping his own reelection bid in September amid fallout from his dismissed corruption indictment, Adams also endorsed Cuomo and sought to portray Mamdani as the “king of gentrifiers.”
Since Mamdani’s election win, Adams has been reluctant to share specifics about what’s next for him professionally. At Monday’s press conference, Adams repeated he wants to travel, write a book and go “back to school,” but also said he hopes to work on something related to cryptocurrencies.
“A combination of back to school, doing my book, using technology like cryptocurrency to improve the lives of our children and go after hate in a real way, specifically antisemitism,” he said at City Hall before declining to elaborate.
Meanwhile, planning was underway outside City Hall for Mamdani’s inauguration ceremony, with a stage being erected on the steps.
During Thursday afternoon’s ceremony, Mamdani will be sworn in by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a fellow democratic socialist, before thousands of supporters expected in City Hall Plaza. Thousands more supporters are expected to cram the streets around City Hall for what Mamdani’s transition team has called a “block party” that anyone can show up to for free by submitting an RSVP form on his website.
Also Monday, Mamdani’s transition team announced he will, before his official inauguration, take the oath of office at midnight on New Year’s Eve inside the abandoned subway station beneath City Hall.
The subterranean ceremony will be a more quiet affair, with Mamdani’s team saying it’s only expected to feature the mayor-elect, his family and State Attorney General Letitia James, who will administer the oath.
In a statement, Mamdani said he picked the location because the station, first opened in 1904 and shuttered in 1945, “was a physical monument to a city that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working peoples’ lives.”