NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani can claim multiple firsts when he becomes New York’s mayor Jan. 1.<\/p>\n
Besides being the first Muslim and first person of South Asian heritage elected to the office, the Democrat also is poised to shape city history by being the 112th mayor \u2014 rather than 111th, as he was expecting. That\u2019s due to a longstanding oversight in record-keeping that recently gained new attention.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited to be whichever mayor,\u201d Mamdani told reporters Wednesday after learning about the counting contretemps. It shows how tricky history’s arithmetic can be.<\/p>\n
Paul Hortenstine, an independent historian exploring early New York mayors’ participation in slavery<\/a>, recently noticed that the city government’s widely used list of mayors<\/a> undercounted Matthias Nicolls, a figure from the beginning years of English colonial rule in New York.<\/p>\n Nicolls was listed as the sixth mayor, from 1671 to 1672, but there was no mention of his return to office two years later. In the interim, successor John Lawrence took office, then was ousted by a Dutch invasion that briefly implemented a different form of colonial government. The Netherlands eventually gave up the area in exchange for other concessions, and the new English governor reappointed Nicolls in late 1674.<\/p>\n Other mayors were counted multiple times if they served nonconsecutive terms, so Hortenstine suggested<\/a> Nicolls get the same treatment. The correction would entail renumbering 350 years of subsequent mayors, from William Dervall (who would become No. 9) to incumbent Eric Adams (who’d be No. 111).<\/p>\n \u201cThe numbering of mayors is a fascinating issue that is much more difficult than it appears at first glance,\u201d Hortenstine said by phone.<\/p>\n A Washington, D.C.-area researcher, Hortenstine has his own history with New York mayors: He worked for Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 reelection campaign. (The three-consecutive-term Bloomberg would be 109th if the list is renumbered.)<\/p>\n He hopes the debate will stir interest in early mayors and their personal and political involvement with slavery.<\/p>\n As Hortenstine noted, a former New York State Library official, the late Peter Christoph, pointed out the Nicholls numbering flub<\/a> in 1989. This time, after local news site Gothamist broached<\/a> the apparent mayoral miscount, the city Department of Records and Information Services looked into it.<\/p>\n