New York!

NYC tops latest list of coolest cities.

So, sure, I pay a lot of tax to live here — but “taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”

WHALES IN THE HUDSON RIVER

But first:

If you don’t think Dems should elect Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House, read newly-elected New York Congressman Brad Lander’s view.

And now: the whales.

Well, no, first the slush.

If you ask me, Mayor Mamdani is an exciting, effective leader.  He has not imposed Sharia law or defunded the police, as some feared; he’s filled 200,000 potholes.

He sends New Yorkers frequent emails, of which I share two.

First, slush:

Andrew,

You’ve probably felt it this week. The mornings have gotten sharp, the radiators are clanking back to life, and for the first time this season, nights in New York are dipping toward freezing.

The heavy coat is coming out of the closet, and soon enough, something else every New Yorker knows and dreads will make its return:

The slush puddle.

It shows up the day after a snowstorm, right where the curb meets the crosswalk. Snow piles up into a wall at the corner, it melts into a gray lake, and there’s no way to tell how deep it is until you’re already in it. All across our city, socks get soaked and days get ruined.

Last winter gave us a lot of slush puddles.

The city got 43.4 inches of snow, nearly twice the normal season. We went nine straight days without getting above freezing. The city’s winter plan usually runs for about 10 days a year. Last year it ran for 50.

Tens of thousands of city workers got us through it, and I’m grateful for all their hard work. But when the snow melted, we didn’t just call it a day. We went back through every one of those 50 days with every agency and asked one question: what would we do differently?

Here’s what we came up with.

> Bus stops and crosswalks are officially part of the plan. Crews worked hard to clear them last winter. Now we’re making it official: bus stops and crosswalks are written directly into DSNY’s snow removal routes.

> Snowblowers, for the first time ever. DSNY now has 120 of them, built to clear the curb cuts, corners, and bus stops that a plow can’t reach. They’re the slush puddle’s worst nightmare.

> More muscle for Staten Island’s toughest streets. The borough’s steepest, narrowest roads are some of the hardest in the city to plow. We’ve added eight new plow routes there and cut the mileage on each route by a quarter, so crews can get to every block faster.

> A better blade. Old metal plow blades ride slightly above the road and leave a layer of snow behind. This winter, 678 plows and spreaders will be fitted with flexible composite blades that hug the road, clear more snow, and chew up less pavement. Which means fewer potholes come spring. That’s our “Pothole Politics” in its most literal form.

> More hands on shovels. 3,000 New Yorkers have already signed up as emergency snow shovelers, earning $30 an hour to clear sidewalks when storms hit. That’s a paycheck for the shovelers and a safer walk for everyone else.

Clearing the streets is only half the job. The other half is making sure more New Yorkers make it inside when the temperature drops.That’s why we’re putting an extra $25 million into Code Blue, the system that kicks in on the city’s most dangerous nights.

That money is paying for 300 more outreach workers and dozens of nurses. They’ll walk the streets, parks, and subway stairs where people sleep, so we can reach more New Yorkers than ever before.

It’s putting up to 55 warm mobile units from NYC Health + Hospitals on the road, each staffed by a nurse. That’s 22 more than last winter’s peak.

And it’s adding more than 600 single and double rooms. That doubles the low-barrier beds we opened last winter. When we asked New Yorkers sleeping outside what would bring them in, they kept giving the same answer: a room of their own, not a cot in a crowded shelter. So that’s what we’re building.

None of this is glamorous. You won’t see a ribbon-cutting for a crosswalk. But a city is measured by whether a senior can get to the bus stop after a storm, whether a parent can push a stroller across the street without wading through slush, and whether someone sleeping outside has somewhere warm to go when the temperature drops.

The slush puddle has had a good run. This winter, we’re coming for it.

So when the snow comes (and it will), we’ll be ready.

Zohran Mamdani
Mayor of New York City

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And now, whales:

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Andrew,

This Thursday, on a gray, rainy day, a humpback whale swam up the Hudson River.

Tour boat captains got on the radio to make sure nobody missed it. Passengers on an architecture cruise spent half an hour watching it glide past Manhattan. Then, around 3 p.m., a guy in an office building near Brookfield Place looked out his window, grabbed his phone and caught it breaching. The whole whale came out of the water right next to the World Trade Center.

I want to tell you how that whale got there, because it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people decided it would.

Let me take you back to 1976.

New York City was broke. Mayor Abe Beame was laying off teachers and cutting services. People across the country were writing this city off.

In the middle of all that, the city expanded a wastewater treatment plant in Port Richmond, Staten Island. Mayor Beame sealed a time capsule inside its cornerstone with a letter addressed to whoever would be mayor in 2026.

Last month, I opened it.

Here’s what he wrote:

“We hope you and your young people will be able to swim, fish and recreate in any part of the Hudson River, the East River, the Harlem River, the Long Island Sound, the Upper Bay and the beaches of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens.”

When he wrote that, only about 85% of the city’s sewage was even treated, and sludge was being barged out and dumped in the ocean. Swimming in the Hudson must have sounded like a fantasy.

But the work had already begun. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. And the city kept going, putting billions into infrastructure year after year, through recessions and budget fights. Today our treatment plants capture 100% of sewage in dry weather.

And slowly, the harbor came back to life.

As the water got cleaner and fishing rules got smarter, the menhaden returned. Those are the small, oily fish New Yorkers call bunker, and humpbacks love them. Last Thursday, a boat captain saw a dark cloud of them in the Hudson. The whale knew exactly where lunch was.

A humpback feeding off New York City. Photo: Chris St. Lawrence

Here’s a fun fact I love: every humpback has its own pattern of black and white on the underside of its tail. It works like a fingerprint. Researchers at Gotham Whale match photos of tails and fins against their catalog to tell whether they’re looking at a newcomer or a regular coming back for another summer.

When they started tracking humpbacks here in 2012, they recorded five. This July they documented the 500th individual humpback in our waters. That’s 500 different whales, each one known by its tail. Dolphins have been spotted in the East River. Seahorses are back in the harbor.

Mayor Beame never saw any of it. He planted a tree he knew he’d never sit under.

That’s what acting on climate looks like. It isn’t one big moment. It’s a commitment that runs from one generation to the next, kept by people who will never get the credit.

That’s why we aren’t slowing down. In October we broke ground on a $185 million upgrade at that same Port Richmond plant, and we cut the red tape so it gets done 40% faster than usual. We’re building bigger sewers and turning street medians into sponges that soak up stormwater before it floods basements and overflows into our rivers.

That last part matters more every year. The storms are getting heavier. The tides are rising. The climate crisis is already here, and it shows up in flooded subway stations and in the basement apartments where working families live. Whether our grandchildren get to see whales in the Hudson depends on what we build now.

I’ll be honest with you. None of this is guaranteed. Every win in that time capsule was something people fought for, and it can be undone if we stop fighting. The opposition is counting on New Yorkers getting tired, so we can’t.

Fifty years ago, a mayor made a bet on a future he’d never see. Will you make one too? Chip in $500 to help our movement keep advocating for a cleaner, greener New York for the people who come after us.

When I finished reading Mayor Beame’s letter, the first thing I thought was: some things we’ve achieved, some things still to do.

Fifty years from now, someone will open a time capsule we leave behind. I want them to read that we kept going: that we cleaned the air, cooled the city, protected the shoreline and kept faith with the people who came after us.

I want them to look out at the Hudson and see whales.

— Zohran

P.S. Did you know you can go whale watching without leaving the city? Tours head out from April to December with the best sightings in the summer months. Or try your luck from the NYC Ferry or the Staten Island Ferry. If you spot one, help support local whale research efforts by sending a photo to https://gothamwhale.org/wanted.

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