It’s Never Quite Curtis Sliwa’s Last Hurrah

It’s 9:30 p.m. on election night on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Curtis Sliwa is telling his crowd of supporters that his campaign spoke for animal lovers and the emotionally disturbed.

Polls in New York’s mayoral race had closed a half hour prior, with Zohran Mamdani quickly declared the victor, and while the Republican candidate and longtime city fixture only offered a passing concession—“so we have a mayor-elect”—he took the broader opportunity to reflect on his idiosyncratic presence on the edges of public life for several decades now. In the closing days of the campaign, Donald Trump had come out in support of Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, in an effort to head off Mamdani’s momentum, and claimed that Sliwa, whose calling cards include his red beret, a much-referenced 1992 shooting in the back of a yellow cab, and the animals he and his wife keep in their studio apartment, “wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion.”

“Some of the most powerful people in the world,” Sliwa said, “made fun of Nancy and what we do to care for animals, to care for people.”

“You’re still our mayor!” a supporter in Gucci sneakers and electric blue color contact lenses shouted.

The audience on hand at Arte Cafe, a neighborhood Italian standby, amounted to a fittingly unpredictable mélange of Sliwa loyalists in streetwear, suits and fedoras, and pops of red in the form of Guardian Angels berets. Former New York governor George Pataki, whom Sliwa described as a key supporter in his speech along with Rudy Giuliani, was mobbed by cameras and microphones as he tried to make his way past the bar. In a quieter back room, was Brad Solomon, a Queens native who identified himself as a poker player and sports bettor by trade. He was vaping in a God Bless America hat as he described how he came to root for Sliwa.

“We don’t want Killer Cuomo,” Solomon says. “We don’t want communists. It’s an obvious choice.” He and Sliwa were once arrested together, he says, after protesting the arrival of migrants at a mental hospital next to a Catholic school in Staten Island.

“Curtis was the only one who stood up against that,” Solomon says.