When Mayor Zohran Mamdani was running for City Hall last year, he said he would support legislation to remove former Mayor Ed Koch’s name from the Queensboro Bridge — but now it is unclear where he stands on the matter.
Mamdani’s office did not return amNewYork’s request for comment on whether he still supports removing the former mayor’s name from the crossing on Monday, following a New York Post report that he had favored doing so on the 2025 campaign trail.
Mamdani, along with City Council Speaker Julie Menin and several other pols who were running for city-level offices last year, had signaled their support to take Koch’s name off the bridge on questionnaires distributed by the LGBTQ+ Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club during last year’s elections.
“Yes, I support renaming,” Mamdani said on the club’s form from April of last year. Following the Post report and more than a year after signing the questionnaire, there is no indication from City Hall as to whether now-Mayor Mamdani has changed his position.
Former Mayor Ed Koch seen in a 2009 photo.The Villager file/Photo by Jefferson Siegel
Menin, whose Upper East Side district includes the bridge, also indicated at the time that she thought the crossing’s name should go back to the 59th Street Bridge. However, she has since changed her mind, according to her spokesperson.
“She does not and wouldn’t support legislation to do so,” the spokesperson said of renaming the bridge. “She was approached last year to add her name as a cosponsor to a bill to do that and declined.”
When asked what had changed in the speaker’s view, the spokesperson referred amNewYork to comments she made Monday morning on Pix11, in which she did not exactly address the change of heart.
“My personal view of this is that is I don’t think we should be naming bridges,” she said. “But I don’t think we should do legislation to rename it.”
Menin added that she would speak to her colleagues about the idea.
The questionnaire was part of Jim Owles’ endorsement process, due to its view that Koch mishandled the city’s deadly 1980s AIDS crisis.
“We are just building support and seeing who shows empathy for those who died and their loved ones for now,” the club’s president Allen Roskoff said in a text message.
Among other pols who said they supported renaming the bridge on their questionnaires were Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Comptroller Mark Levine. Williams indicated that he voted against renaming it while on the City Council in 2011.
Although the bridge was officially renamed the Ed Koch-Queensboro Bridge in 2011, many New Yorkers still call the span the Queensboro Bridge or the 59th Street Bridge. The 3,725-foot span — which connects Manhattan and Queens over the East River and Roosevelt Island — sees an average of nearly 130,000 vehicles, 7,600 cyclists, and 2,800 pedestrians travel over it each day.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council renamed the bridge for Koch, who left office in 1989 after serving 12 years as mayor, two years before he died in 2013.
Koch was famous for his brash, frank style and for asking every day New Yorkers: “How’m I doin’?” Though he was credited for helping turn New York City around following the fiscal turmoil of the 1970s, Koch would take a hit in later years for a slow response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s in which tens of thousands of New Yorkers had become infected with the incurable illness, ravaging the LGBTQ+ community.
Critics charged that Koch did not do nearly enough to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in the city, though his later budgets allocated, amid mounting protests and political pressure, millions toward treatment, testing and counseling programs.