The New York of today is a different city than the New York of 9/11.
Thirteen years ago, I marked the 12th anniversary of 9/11 by getting back-of-the-envelope figures from the Department of City Planning on how many New Yorkers who were here on that dark day were still here. At that point, fully half of the city had turned over in just over a decade.
Today, more than three-quarters of the city has turned over, as people were born, died and moved in and out (and sometimes back in) to New York City. Three mayors have come and gone.
The admonition after the attack — at a time when the question on many minds was if it would ever be safe here again, if anyone would still want to live here — was “never forget,” a mantra in tension with the fact that people will, and need to, forget. It’s part of what it is to be a person, and finite; part of what separates us from the divine and perhaps also the machines.
A hundred million Americans alive now weren’t yet born on 9/11 or were too young to remember it.
Of course there are many people here to whom this was a fatal or formative event, and it’s no disrespect to any of them or the first responders who gave their lives that day or the even greater number who have died from 9/11-related illnesses since then to recognize that other people have moved on, with time, and that the city of today is not the same as the one that those sacrifices were made and suffering endured in.
And New York City’s whole history is wrapped up in not being too wrapped up in its own history, in being a place of and for reinvention. Curt Schilling isn’t right about much, but mystique and aura really are just dancers in a nightclub.
There’s a fragment from Heraclitus that’s often misquoted as something like “No man ever steps into the same river twice, because it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
He never wrote that, but the ancient Greek philosopher was quoted as saying that “On those who step into the same rivers, ever different waters flow — and souls are exhaled from the moist things.” It’s no wonder that Heraclitus was nicknamed “The Dark One” and “The Obscure.”
Something I didn’t think about when I was helping out at Ground Zero, or when I wrote about the attack 13 years ago, but that seems central now to what needs to be remembered, and understood, was how it led directly to the creation in 2003 of the Department of Homeland Security, and a massive new budget line and reordering of the federal government — one that eventually and perhaps predictably brought the surveillance tools developed by the military for the war on terror back home.
There’s a line from all that to the election of the city’s first Muslim mayor last year, in a city that our native-son president once deemed an “anarchist jurisdiction” for trying to maintain its own values and not merely comply with what a federal government hell-bent on mass deportations demanded. (Mamdani, not incidentally, is also the city’s first “real” immigrant mayor since the 19th century, not counting Abe Beame, who came here from London as an infant.)
If a budget is an expression of values, as Mario Cuomo liked to say, that first $30 billion appropriation to DHS in 2004 may have been when the die was cast as President George W. Bush declared that the war on terror had set urgent priorities for the nation both home and abroad.
A city doesn’t just change hands; it changes ages. The New Yorkers who were here that morning are 25 years older now, and the ones who’ve filled in behind them — in the classrooms, apartments and trains — were mostly kids then, if they were born at all, or living somewhere very different. For many of them, 9/11 is something that helps explain the cops with long guns at Penn Station and some of the shape of the city’s politics, but doesn’t organize either. It isn’t the rallying cry it was, or the touchstone, or that one seemingly apolitical stretch of days when most everybody in the five boroughs was grieving the same thing at the same time. That’s what time does to an event, and probably what it’s supposed to do. The anniversary keeps its date; the city keeps moving. To get more of a sense of what moving has actually looked like, I called John Mollenkopf, a distinguished professor of political science and sociology and director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, for a more structured perspective on what’s changed in New York, and specifically in its political demography, over the last quarter century.
Mollenkopf, who’s working on a book about the impact of immigration on New York City’s politics, had a lot to say about the changing state of a city that now has a much diminished Italian American population, offset by growing Arab, South Asian and Central American populations. More than half of the voting-eligible population, he noted, is now made up of naturalized immigrants and their children, though they probably aren’t yet quite half of the actual voters.
There isn’t a simple moral or fable to be drawn, of course, from all the changes happening all of the time in this one river that men and women are always stepping in and out of, but there are some striking observations.
“Italian Americans were the most conservative, most Republican‑leaning of the white ethnic groups,” Mollenkopf said, and they have had by far “the biggest percentage drop of any group” on his chart tracking the population of voting‑age citizens by the race, ethnicity and nativity of household heads — helping to explain why the city’s politics no longer track those of the older, union‑machine and white‑ethnic-coalition-dominated ones that defined the city’s politics in the late 20th century.
Symbolically, you can see the shift in the once Italian American strongholds that often defined the city in popular culture and people’s imaginations that are now almost entirely different. There are still great Italian restaurants on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, but most of them are owned by Albanians now. There are great delicatessens left in Bensonhurst, but Bay Ridge, the setting for “Saturday Night Fever,” now has what Mollenkopf says is “probably the biggest concentration of Arabic‑speaking people on the East Coast.”
“Everybody talks about gentrification in Williamsburg and blah blah blah… but they don’t talk about how basically all the outer‑borough home‑owning neighborhoods that used to be white ethnic are now either West Indian or Chinese, and that’s just as important to the city’s cultural dynamic and political dynamics as anything else.”
Layered on top of all the ethnic turnover is a generational and occupational shift that has less to do with 9/11 directly than with what followed: the tech and knowledge‑industry boom that flourished in the long shadow of the attacks and then the Great Recession.
“The number of young people, say 21 to 35, who work in knowledge‑intensive industries in New York City doubled just in the last 10 years,” Mollenkopf told me. They mostly don’t live in Manhattan. Instead, they’ve settled in what he calls “the corona of neighborhoods around the Manhattan CBD: Western Queens and Williamsburg and down even through Sunset Park with little clusters out on Staten Island and even in the South Bronx,” as people both can’t afford and don’t necessarily want to live in Manhattan.
That cohort, he argues, “has also helped to change the electoral geography of the city as the old ethnic map has been overlaid by a new generational and class map, organized around knowledge work, housing costs and proximity to the Manhattan core.”
At the same time, South Asian communities that often found themselves squarely in the sights of the new Department of Homeland Security and its allied agencies after 9/11 kept growing and began pushing for more political representation.
Bangladeshis, he said, have been the most left‑leaning of those groups while “the median sentiment” among South Asians had remained “culturally quite conservative,” even as many are “very working class,” with “higher than normal” rates of self‑employment and small business ownership.
Mollenkopf recalled watching a mass meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America (he called himself a mostly lapsed member) that helped launch Zohran Mamdani’s ascent, long before City Hall was in view.
Mamdani’s key pitch, as Mollenkopf heard it, was that he could win “all the normal Commie corridor types,” but also “reach out to groups that are culturally conservative… but who’ve been ignored and who could be mobilized” — starting with South Asian Muslims.
“I would say that he was half successful in doing that,” Mollenkopf said, as those neighborhoods gave Mamdani “a much higher Democratic share than they typically do in presidential elections, but it wasn’t a sweep.”
Part of Mamdani’s strategy, Mollenkopf noted, was aesthetic, and meant to tap into the cultural conservatism of the communities’ uncles and aunties, while also offering assurances to other convincible Democrats that the newcomer on the political scene wasn’t nearly as radical as the caricature his opponents tried to make of him:
“It’s interesting that Mamdani has presented himself always in a suit and tie” and as “visibly culturally conservative in a lot of ways,” said Mollenkopf, calling that “obviously a very deliberate” choice by the young politician.
It’s one that paid off, big time, in a race where the demographic shifts that had been registering at the margins of the city’s politics broke through and reshaped its political maps.
By the time Mamdani was knocking doors, he was walking through that entire history: the hollowed‑out Italian base, the ring of knowledge workers around Manhattan, the West Indian and Chinese homeowner belts, and the South Asian communities first organized by federal suspicion and only later by their own ambitions.
It’s from that map, not the one New Yorkers carried in their heads on 9/11 and that some politicians were still holding to 25 years later, that the city’s first Muslim mayor emerged.
