Socialism’s true believers who cast their ballots for Zohran Mamdani should take note of how the perpetually grinning mayor-to-be thanks them for their votes: with a big, fat kiss-off.
Mamdani coldly blew off lower Manhattanites who overwhelmingly voted for him by taking the wrong side in the long-running dispute over the beloved Elizabeth Street Garden, which City Hall had earmarked for demolition until Mayor Adams came to his senses last spring.
Mamdani wants to replace the green oasis with low-income housing.
But Adams, in one of his finest moments, thwarted him by designating the city-owned parcel as a public park — a brave stroke that left Mamdani fuming.
Beware, New Yorkers! Let it be a wake-up call to woke New Yorkers who sucked up to
Mamdani: He repaid the favor by biting them on their commie-coddling butts.
Residents of the garden’s Nolita neighborhood, and of bordering Soho, Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, swallowed Mamdani’s “democratic socialist” malarkey to give him up to 70% in some election districts, according to Board of Elections records.
They surely weren’t counting on their grinning idol to ruin their modestly sized paradise they spent years fighting to preserve.
The irony would be exquisite if it weren’t so infuriating. The Elizabeth Street garden between Prince and Spring streets has been a beloved neighborhood gathering place since the 1990s when a next-door gallery owner leased it from the city, provided new landscaping and installed a jolly mix of old statues, funky art and seats.
Local organizations that fought to save the garden were an all-star activist lineup whose names alone conveyed their political and cultural postures.
Preservation cause Among them: Downtown Independent Democrats, Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens, the Municipal Art Society of New York, the NoHo Neighborhood Association, the Soho Alliance, Earth Justice, Farms Not Arms, Green
Guerrillas, the New York City Community Garden Coalition and the Trust for Public Land.
Why would Mamdani run roughshod over community wishes to pave over more green space just to create a whopping 123 apartments, which would do zero to alleviate a citywide scarcity of hundreds of thousands of them?
That he trampled on his enthusiasts came as no surprise in light of his graceless post-victory remarks that were less an “acceptance speech” than a revival of Fidel Castro’s anti-western tirades after his communist brigades took over Cuba.
He can’t let a few neighborhood cranks stand in the way of his zeal to “rescue” the poor, irrespective of its ineffectiveness or collateral damage it brings to neighborhoods or to the city as a whole.
So thanks, Eric Adams, for keeping the Elizabeth Street Garden out of his clutches. Too bad he
won’t be around to save other fine neighborhoods from Mamdani’s cruel whims.
