Some years ago, a signup sheet appeared in the elevator of my Upper West Side apartment house, inviting volunteers to the roof to build a sukkah for any resident Jews who intended to celebrate Sukkot. When no one signed up, the accommodating Puerto Rican porter took on the job. Not what God ordained, but whatever. A night or two later, an autumn wind barreled into our 84th Street building, snapping the sukkah’s moorings. The little plywood booth levitated, magic-carpet style, and headed north. A scribbled update appeared on the signup sheet shortly afterward: “Relocated to Broadway northbound at 87th.”
In this city of wonders, autumn is the most wondrous season. Emerging from the summer’s languor, New York buzzes briskly to life. The dizzying cultural calendar commences: new operas, plays, exhibitions, concerts, festivals, religious holidays, parades. Half a million college students return to campus. Diplomats paralyze traffic as they congregate at the United Nations and elsewhere. Fifty thousand marathon runners thunder across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and on through all five boroughs—a breathtaking demonstration of the spirit of the place, the sight of which moves me to tears.
This past autumn, however, was not the same. Unease infiltrated the city like a low-grade fever. The Trump administration’s campaign of deportation, deployment, and retribution hovered on the horizon, surely headed in our direction; and a mayor’s race in which a thirty-four-year-old, Ugandan-born state assemblyman from Queens was on the verge of becoming the first Muslim and first democratic socialist chief executive of the global capital of capitalism was kicking up an alarming mix of exhilarating and ugly.
From his gilded offices, Donald Trump vowed to terminate federal funding for New York City if the “100 percent Communist lunatic,” Zohran Mamdani, were elected, suggesting that the city would have “zero chance” of survival. Rabbis inveighed against him as a threat to Jews. Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor running far behind Mamdani, called him a “terrorist sympathizer.” In one Cuomo-supporting ad, an image of the reliably smiling frontrunner was superimposed on a video clip of the World Trade Center blowing up.
As much as any place, New York embodies what the Trump administration appears to detest: a magnet for immigrants, more than half a million of them unauthorized; a Democratic bastion, a sanctuary city, majority nonwhite; a center of elite higher education, of high culture; the place where Trump was put on trial, convicted of fraud, found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Now he was ordering troops into Los Angeles, Washington, Portland, Chicago, Memphis. You had to wonder, why was he waiting?
Even in the best of times, disquiet is a fact of life in New York. So much is in plain view that it’s not easy to turn a blind eye. Women newly arrived from collapsing countries peddle chocolate on subway trains, infants strapped to their backs. Glistening chauffeur-driven SUVs idle by midtown curbs. A deliverista on an e-bike scuds past a blanketed body, prostrate on the median. New Yorkers are habitually checking the city’s vitals: murders down, subway assaults up, homelessness doubled. Is everyone awake, worrying, at 4:13 a.m.?
Options for skipping town, a conversational leitmotif ever since Trump’s run for re-election, had become an incessant topic for discussion. Grand-children of refugees were applying for citizenship in countries their Bubbes and Zeydes had fled. Undocumented women, welcomed for years into New York households, were quietly “self-deporting.” One naturalized citizen from Jamaica, weighing her options, explained matter-of-factly to friends, “Back there, it’s only the crime and the killings.”
I talked with a woman from the Philippines who’d worked in the city for twenty years, undocumented but paying taxes. She’d been hardworking and happy, sending money home to her mother to raise her children. She was leaving earlier than she’d hoped, but by choice. Others of her acquaintance had no options: they could no longer find work, get medical care, build lives. When she’d gone to church to tell two friends that she’d be flying out soon, they said, “We are, too! On Thanks-giving.”
Citizens were not spared the foreboding. “The dread is so pervasive, it’s the bedrock,” said one actor, hopeful by nature. When a middle-aged American woman confided her anxious state to her acupuncturist, he appeared startled: “Me, too.” After a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents arresting West African men on a stretch of sidewalk known as a spot to score counterfeit handbags, a lifelong New Yorker wondered aloud over dinner if the city was heading toward “an American Tienanmen Square.”
Finally, election day dawned—bright, crisp, and hopeful, just like autumns past. Voter turnout was the highest in more than sixty years. Some 107,000 New Yorkers had registered for the first time. Just nine months after polling at one percent, Mamdani was suddenly set to become the most powerful Muslim elected official in the United States. In neighborhoods across the city, the fog of dread seemed to levitate, like the flying sukkah, and blow out to sea on an updraft of shock, amazement, and, in many quarters, euphoria.
Viral videos swarmed Instagram for days afterward, satirizing the equal-opportunity panic of the previous months (a Radio City Music Hall kickline of burka-ed dancers, Times Square in flames as firefighters sauntered in on a camel). The social-media-savvy mayor-elect seemed ubiquitous—dancing with aunties, talking chicken biryani, fielding random questions on street corners. Asked what his erstwhile opponent might discover about New York if he chose to live here, Mamdani said, “This is a city to be loved, not a city to be feared.”
Janny Scott is the author of The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father as well as a biography of Barack Obama’s mother.