Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s trademark smile carried him a long way toward victory this month, and last week his affability helped turn his meeting with President Donald Trump into an Oval Office lovefest.
Now he can employ his smiley superpower to make daily life better for New Yorkers: He can call on the city’s 300,000 employees to turn on the charm when they interact with the public.
Walk into any city agency or court building seeking help, and odds are you’ll get barked at and herded like a dumb animal.
Ask an MTA employee why the train isn’t running, and you’re apt to hear “Can’t you read the sign?” followed by a muttered expletive.
At the McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, “the attendants in the ladies’ room are definitely from a prison movie,” a local commented on Reddit.
It’s a bruising everyday experience, a bone-penetrating assault on your personal dignity.
More From Betsy McCaughey
Last week I went to Family Court at 111 Centre Street to be appointed as guardian for an elderly woman bed-bound in a nursing home.
I arrived at 9:30 am, the appointed time, and found a line of about 80 people snaking around the outside of the building, waiting to go through the one available metal scanner.
The line inched ahead — but when I was third from the door, a burly man in a guard’s uniform suddenly burst through it.
He brusquely blocked me with his arm and yelled at us to turn around and proceed to a different entrance. Everyone who had patiently waited for as long as 40 minutes would now be at the back of the line.
“No,” I said calmly — I had waited long enough, I explained, and so had others; we would like to enter.
“Do you think you’re someone special?” he demanded.
“Yes,” I told him. “We are human beings.”
I pushed my way around him and into the building, taking the two women behind me along.
The fact is, everyone in that line deserved dignified treatment — but that’s not what’s being meted out by our employees at 111 Centre Street.
When I got upstairs to wait outside the assigned courtroom, it was no better: Guards screamed at me for asking questions about when my case would be called, and wouldn’t even confirm I was in the right hallway.
That’s what our citizens encounter all too often in city agencies and courtrooms.
Only 27% of New Yorkers rate such city services as good or excellent overall, reports the Citizens’ Budget Commission, even though we give high ratings for fire protection and garbage collection.
In the many months of mayoral campaigning, as candidates battled over Trump and the fate of Gaza, the quality of Gotham’s public services and their delivery were barely mentioned.
To the extent Mamdani discussed quality-of-life issues, he reduced them to one word: “dignity.”
“A life of dignity should not be reserved for the fortunate few,” he asserted.
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But the only dignity he seemed to care about was financial, saying that it’s up to the City Hall to help working people afford food, or a decent place to live, or childcare.
“No New Yorkers should be ever be priced out of anything they need to survive,” he declared. “It is government’s job to deliver that dignity.”
Well, the jury’s out on whether the city’s budget can ever make good on those promises.
But on Day 1, Mamdani can go a long way toward closing the dignity gap in this hardscrabble city by ordering his employees to treat citizens with respect.
Previous mayors have gone out of their way to make a point of such a policy.
Once, the story goes, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia approached a group of city workers incognito and waited while they ignored him.
When one of them finally spoke to him, the irascible LaGuardia knocked the hat off the worker’s head, shouting, “Take off your hat when you speak to a citizen!”
That would never fly today — but in the 1990s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani also called for more civility from public employees.
He instituted the NYPD’s “Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect” motto, which should be the code of conduct citywide.
Target is mandating its in-store workers to smile and make eye contact with shoppers.
That’s good business. Customers have options.
New Yorkers sometimes find themselves with no option but to walk into a city courtroom or seek help from a city agency. When they do, they deserve the same courteous treatment that customers get.
Many New Yorkers feel skeptical about Mamdani. Others dread the impact of his rhetoric and his pricey promises.
Launching a civility campaign, and putting some energy behind it, could help soften some of the fear.
Put that grin to work, Mr. Mayor-to-be.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.