Zohran Mamdani’s election didn’t just make headlines—it reshaped the political landscape of New York City. At only 34, he broke three barriers at once: the city’s first Muslim mayor, its first mayor of South Asian heritage, and the first ever born on the African continent. His win signaled a turning point for a city that thrives on diversity yet rarely sees that diversity reflected at the highest level of leadership.
But as the city celebrated, a strange twist in its own history surfaced—one rooted not in politics, but in a 350-year-old bookkeeping glitch.
Historian Paul Hortenstine had been combing through colonial records when he spotted something odd. Matthias Nicolls—New York’s sixth mayor—had served two separate terms, one in 1672 and another in 1675. Yet for centuries, both terms had been squeezed into a single line on the city’s official list. In other words, the numbering of every mayor since then had been off by one.
If the correction were applied, Mamdani—celebrated as the 111th mayor—was technically the 112th.
Hortenstine quickly reported the error, pointing out that even historian Peter R. Christoph flagged the same issue back in 1989. The mistake wasn’t malicious—just a relic of old recordkeeping that no one ever questioned. The city had simply passed it down like an inherited typo.
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