Nothing makes a person seem so small as the 407-foot-tall mass of brick and glass that hovered behind Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York City. But the luxury apartment complex in the Upper East Side — named “Oriana," Latin for “gold” or “sunrise” — served as a helpful if unwieldy prop for Mamdani, who held a press conference on the sidewalk that cloudy Friday morning to ferret out Andrew Cuomo, its most famous resident and now his chief political rival.
“Ever since he moved back to New York City in October after decades of living in Westchester and the Hamptons or in Albany, New Yorkers have been desperate for answers about his record. What they’ve found instead is evasion time and time again,” Mamdani, a three-term state assembly member, told a cluster of reporters, one curious Oriana tenant and her baby. “We're having this press conference next to his supposed residence to make it easy for him to come downstairs and address any of those questions."
