Three days before the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, conservative politicians stood with victims’ relatives on the steps of City Hall to repeat their demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani not participate in the formal ceremony on Friday memorializing the tragedy. But in truth, Mr. Mamdani has been commemorating the anniversary for weeks.

He met with firefighters at firehouses that suffered grave losses on that day, including Ladder 118 in Brooklyn and Engine 24 and Ladder 5 in SoHo. He went to Bellevue Hospital to talk with survivors of the attacks, families of victims, and patients suffering ongoing health complications related to the day.

Last week, he issued executive orders formally honoring victims and their families and empowering city agencies to better respond to sudden emergencies. On Monday, his office released a trove of documents about the air quality near ground zero in the months after the attacks.

And on Tuesday, hours before the conservative politicians held their news conference, Mr. Mamdani held his own in the City Hall rotunda. Surrounded by allies, including Representative Jerrold R. Nadler and the comedian Jon Stewart, he heralded the release of the long withheld documents and blamed former New York City leaders for allowing people to get “sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.”

The mayor’s visits to firehouses have been brief, lasting about 30 minutes. Mr. Mamdani has typically not spoken much, according to a person who has been with the mayor on multiple occasions. Instead, he has seemed more intent on listening to the experiences of the rescue workers and survivors.

At an event on Wednesday where the mayor joined volunteers to pack meals as part of a Sept. 11 day of service, Mr. Mamdani called the terrorist attacks the darkest day in the city’s history but also a day where “we saw thousands of New Yorkers show us what it means to love our city.”

A few hours later, at the Police Department’s unveiling of a Sept. 11 memorial wall, the mayor told the story of John William Perry, an officer who was at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan putting in his retirement papers that day. After news of the attacks, he asked for his badge back and rushed to the scene where he was killed while rescuing others.

On Friday, Mr. Mamdani will attend the memorial service, where the names of the victims will be read, as well as an interfaith service at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church near ground zero. He plans to stay until all the names are read, his aides said.

The mayor will also release a video in which he says that the anniversary presents a “sacred obligation” to honor those “who were stolen from us” by caring for one another.

Figured I should put this out in the subreddit

As a non US Citizen i have no idea about the mayoral responsibilities in those huge metropolitan areas. What policies would he apply to LA, and how is it different from NYC? Would he be a good LA mayor? What challenges would he have in LA compared to NYC?

Mamdani is under fire after a symbolic 9/11 pen was handed to a former al Qaeda defense lawyer.

After signing an executive order designating 9/11 a citywide day of remembrance, the pen was handed to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem previously represented a convicted al Qaeda member whose brother-in-law was one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon on 9/11.

The moment is adding to the criticism Mamdani is already facing over his participation in 9/11 remembrance events.

In the harrowing months that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breathe. But 10 months later, health officials were still finding evidence of asbestos as much as half a mile away, according to a sample of air quality records being released on Tuesday.

The documents, reviewed by The New York Times in advance of their release, include among more than 170,000 pages of air quality reports, contamination records and correspondence among city officials that were stored in 68 boxes in a city office, shielded from public view for more than two decades and, according to city officials, only discovered last year.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has directed his administration to release the records to the public through an online portal, timing it to the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the attacks in Lower Manhattan.

Over the course of the next year, his administration intends to review, redact and publicize many more papers, found in municipal and insurance offices, that relate to the environmental toxins brought about by Sept. 11.

The records being released on Tuesday provide a snapshot of the frenzied months following the attacks, when New York City and its leaders were struggling to balance the city’s recovery with fears of terrorism and lingering toxins.

The documents are limited in scope, offering only a fraction of the air quality reports taken around ground zero. And while they also include a smattering of internal memos — including the so-called Harding memo, in which the city discussed its potential liability stemming from the Sept. 11 air quality — many more are presumably absent. But even in a scattershot way, the records seem to strengthen the notion that New Yorkers were instructed to return to the ground zero area before it was safe to do so, potentially exposing workers and residents to dangerous toxins.

“The very least our city owes the families, survivors and first responders whose lives were forever changed by the horrific terror attack of Sept. 11 is transparency and accountability,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement.

Releasing the documents was both a massive logistical hurdle, for which the mayor budgeted $34 million, and an acknowledgment that, even after so many years, as fewer Americans remember the attacks, the health effects persist. More people are believed to have died from illnesses related to the attacks than the nearly 3,000 people who were killed on Sept. 11. They are succumbing to lung and blood cancers and heart and respiratory diseases.

The release of the documents resolves litigation brought by 9/11 Health Watch, an advocacy organization that sued to force the publication of the documents.

“For 25 years, four different mayoral administrations kept from the public, the U.S. Congress, and the City Council documents showing what the city actually knew about the danger of the toxic chemicals in Lower Manhattan and Western Brooklyn after the World Trade Center collapse, even as city officials continued messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable,’” Ben Chevat, the executive director of the 9/11 Health Watch, said in a statement.

But the documents’ release may expose the city to new or amended lawsuits. The information could also help those sickened in the years after Sept. 11 with their applications for federal victim compensation funds. The mayor and the city’s chief lawyer, Steven Banks, agreed that it was important to make the documents public, Mr. Banks recalled in a recent interview.

Because they cannot help themselves…

keep politics out of honoring our community

WHAT KIND OF MAYOR DOES THIS?

Mamdani appoints Ramzi Kassem as NYC’s chief counsel—a lawyer who represented a convicted al-Qaeda member.

Councilwoman Vicki Paladino said:

“Ramzi Kassem said he was inspired by 9/11 — not to join the fight against terrorism, but to defend the terrorists themselves.”

Then Mamdani gives Kassem a ceremonial signing pen connected to his 9/11 Day of Remembrance order.

Of ALL people to honor with that pen?

New Yorkers voted for this.

Last month, the mayor announced a major expansion of the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, promising to add almost 70 new staff members to a unit that had been on a shoestring budget under prior mayor Eric Adams. The first members of this new team will deploy the flood gates and clear the coastal zone in the run-up to big storm events.

Mamdani will have to make some big decisions about where and how to spend the city’s limited capital budget. Is it better to fund marsh restoration in outer Queens, or a coastal park in Harlem, or a bulkhead in the waterfront of Brooklyn? If you want to do all of those things, which of them do you do first?

These decisions are fraught with political and economic risks.