(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, recently spent a weekday morning blanketing the floor of his $2,300-a-month apartment with towels. The sink was leaking, and the super had been summoned. That wasn't the only frustration.

“My wife and I have just talked about the fact that a one-bedroom is a little too small for us now,” he said recently on“The New Yorker Radio Hour,” after detailing the plumbing troubles.

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Assuming Mamdani decides to move into Gracie Mansion, New York City's official mayoral residence, he is unlikely to be dealing personally with such workaday problems much longer. Nor will his new digs feel quite so snug.

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It is hard to overstate the difference between Mamdani's current home, a modest rent-stabilised apartment in Astoria, Queens, and Gracie Mansion, a 226-year-old, 11,000-square-foot home on the Upper East Side, with gleaming mirrors reflecting the light of chandeliers, faux mahogany doors, a vast lawn with apple and fig trees and a vegetable garden occasionally plagued by rabbits.

Dante de Blasio, who was a teenager when his father, Bill de Blasio, became mayor, remembered feeling like“the luckiest kid in America” when his family moved into the home in 2014.

“Growing up in New York, you do not take space for granted,” he said.“And all of a sudden you had a lawn and a ballroom.”

But he said it could be alienating, too.“You are detached from the day-to-day reality of living in New York City, all the glory and the indignities,” he said.

Though Mamdani has said for months that he plans to move out of his current apartment, he demurred when asked Wednesday morning if he would move to Gracie.

“I don't yet have an answer on where I'm going to be living,” he said during a television interview,“but I can tell you where I'm going to be working, and that's City Hall.”

At a news conference later Wednesday, the mayor-elect joked that he'd received a late-night text from his super.

But Gracie is where almost all mayors end up - owing to its heavy security and ample gathering space - whether they like it or not.

Here are just a few ways that Mamdani's current apartment differs from his likely future home.

Heat and hot water included

When Mamdani's apartment in Queens was last listed in 2018, the listing boasted about an enticing perk, actually required by New York City law: heat and hot water included in the rent.

That was not all.

The kitchen had a window. The single bedroom had two closets. And the super lived in the building.

While there was no washer or dryer in the apartment, there was a communal laundry room in the building.

The nondescript, pale brick, low-rise building, constructed in 1929, has an elevator, which brokers said is a rarity in Astoria.

Though Mamdani's campaign staff declined to discuss it, brokers estimated that the unit is probably about 800 square feet, at most.

Or a full-time chef and on-site ballroom?

Gracie Mansion, on the other hand, was once described by a New York Times reporter as a“pale lemon cake of a house.” It sits at the top of Carl Schurz Park, abutting the FDR Drive, and offers sweeping views of the East River from its summertime veranda.

After a day at the office downtown, mayors are driven through Gracie's security gate and walk through the front door, which is adorned with a mezuza, a scroll of Torah verses in a small case, first installed by Mayor Abraham Beame, who served in the 1970s.

The ground level is very ornate, very Federal, and totally off-limits for the mayor to futz with. There's an entertaining room with a grand fireplace where Mayor John Lindsay's children hung their Christmas stockings in the late 1960s, a sitting room and a dining room wrapped in wallpaper depicting Parisian gardens.

Mayors can take their meals here, prepared by Gracie's full-time chef.

When the ballroom across the hall opened in 1966, the Times remarked that the space was“as formal and as balanced as a Haydn quartet.”

Upstairs are five bedrooms.

A series of mayors have sought to make this part of the very formal mansion feel a bit homier.

De Blasio's family hired a decorator from West Elm to modernise the residence, turning one of the rooms into a home office. Beame's family converted another room to a dinette, where his wife could have the occasional midnight snack.

The daughters of Lindsay, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg each etched their name on a windowpane downstairs. So did Chirlane McCray, then the wife of de Blasio.

The ultimate perk: Room for parties

It is not easy to throw a boisterous bash in a one-bedroom apartment like Mamdani's, with neighbours on all sides. But Gracie Mansion was made for a party.

Mayor Eric Adams hosted receptions honoring Arab, Ecuadorian and Guyanese New Yorkers in the span of a few weeks this year, along with a party to kick off Fleet Week, Women's History Month and Nowruz.

Adams' son, Jordan Coleman, a rapper, once threw a holiday party there too, performing songs from his new album.

Giuliani was banished from the home by his then-wife Donna Hanover after he announced their divorce in a surprise news conference. He remarried on the lawn a few years after he left City Hall, with a tuxedoed Donald Trump in attendance.

Dante de Blasio encouraged Mamdani to take advantage of the house and really use it, rather than treating it like a museum.

“You should throw parties,” Dante advised.“I threw some good birthday parties.”

Astoria versus the Upper East side

Astoria, which Mamdani represents in the Assembly, has been a bastion of affordability for young people and families who have settled on its quiet residential blocks, enjoyed its waterfront park and sent their children to its good public schools. The neighborhood is home to immigrants from Greece, Egypt and Morocco, and has a large Latino population.

It is a pleasant, not especially fancy, part of town.

And then there is the Upper East Side.

It has long been one of New York's wealthiest, most elite neighborhoods. It is home to some of the world's most famous museums and Instagram magnets like Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, where patrons can order $28 martinis and then spend the night for $1,000 a night or much more.

It is quiet, sometimes nearly deserted during summer weekends, when many residents decamp for the Hamptons or Nantucket.

It is easy to find a cheeseburger or a spaghetti pomodoro, but it takes a bit more work to find the kind of food Mamdani has sought out in Astoria, one of the city's great neighbourhoods for eating.

Mamdani recently recommended the raw spicy beef at Pye Boat Noodle, a Thai restaurant in his neighbourhood, and rotates between his favorite neighbourhood seafood spots: Bahari Estiatorio, Elias Corner and Abuqir, where a whole branzino costs $23.99.

On the Upper East Side, at the Mark Hotel's restaurant near Central Park, a piece of grilled black sea bass is listed at $72.

Safety first

Mamdani's current apartment has no door attendant or special security apparatus.

Gracie Mansion's real perk may be its high fence, flanked by cameras, and the team of police officers stationed outside.

It's why the de Blasios eventually moved in, and the former mayor urged Mamdani to do the same:“He absolutely needs to go to Gracie.”

Fiorello LaGuardia, the first mayor to take up residence at Gracie, reluctantly moved across town from his East Harlem apartment at the urging of Robert Moses, the urban planner who rebuilt New York, who was concerned about the mayor's safety during World War II.

LaGuardia sought to rebrand Gracie Mansion as the more down-home Gracie Farm. The name didn't stick, but his wife did do all the housekeeping herself, and dried the family's laundry on the lawn.

Mayor Eric Adams has identified an altogether different threat.

“There are ghosts in there, man,” he told a reporter during his first year in office.

The mayor, who typically spends only a few nights a week at Gracie, according to cellphone data obtained by federal prosecutors, was not home around 4 am on New Year's Day this year, when a man scaled the fence outside and entered the mansion, unarmed, and pocketed a Christmas ornament.

Michael Bloomberg spurned Gracie altogether, preferring his nearby townhouse, which is somehow even nicer.

Ed Koch continued to live in his rent-stabilised apartment in Greenwich Village even after he was elected mayor but was soon barraged with calls from voters, since he did not change his home phone number. He eventually chose pragmatism and moved uptown to Gracie, though he held on to his apartment.

“I said you can get used to posh very quickly,” Koch said after losing his 1989 reelection bid.“And I did.”

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