As aides trickled into City Hall in the minutes before Zohran Mamdani was set to be sworn in as New York’s next mayor, they looked around bewildered and took a couple of wrong turns at the two-century-old building’s marble staircase before finally finding their desk in the building’s west wing. For many, it was their first time in the building.

Mamdani himself had been inside just after midnight when he was officially sworn in beneath the building inside a long-disused subway station. Afterward, he went to his new office in order to get started on the work.

Just 12 hours later, Mamdani was back at City Hall to preside over his public inauguration, a ceremony afforded every mayor. He arrived in a yellow cab alongside his wife, Rama Duwaji, took the oath of office, and delivered an inaugural address before thousands of supporters in the plaza in front of City Hall as well as the more than 40,000 who flocked to the streets in lower Manhattan for what the Mamdani team described as an inaugural block party.

In many ways, Mamdani’s inauguration looked like those of his predecessors. There was the blue stage in front of New York’s august City Hall, flags of the........

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