Watch: Zohran Mamdani crashes weddings at the NYC Marriage Bureau; shocks couples

Mayor Zohran Mamdani quietly stepped into the Manhattan Marriage Bureau last Thursday and surprised six couples by personally officiating their weddings. According to reports, Mamdani officiated weddings for six couples on Feb. 5. The visit was not publicly announced in advance. His office later released a video on YouTube Saturday morning to mark Valentine’s Day.

In that video, Mamdani reflected on what he witnessed: “I think it’s the best of New York. You see all these couples, so many different stories, so many different ages, so many different lives, and they’re all coming to get married.”

For Matthew Cruz and Molly McGhee, the day had already veered off course before the mayor entered the picture.

About an hour before their 10:30 a.m. ceremony, the couple realized they had forgotten their marriage license. In 10-degree weather, Cruz, a 30-year-old audio engineer, biked back to their Brooklyn apartment on an electric CitiBike while McGhee, 31, waited. He returned just in time.

Inside the clerk’s office, they encountered an unexpected second twist: the mayor offering to officiate.

“Are you kidding me?” Ms. McGhee said. The couple agreed. “It took me a full 45 seconds to get our rings out because I was shaking a little bit,” Cruz added.

McGhee later said the mayor handled the ceremony thoughtfully, including correctly gendering her spouse, who uses they and them pronouns. The pair have been together for 12 years, having met at a poetry reading while students at Champlain College in Vermont.

“I love that the mayor was there, but I’ll be honest, my focus was not on him,” Ms. McGhee said. After the roughly five-minute ceremony, they rode the subway with family to Bryant Park, took photos at the New York Public Library and celebrated with a seafood tower nearby.



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Michael McSweeney, who has served as city clerk since 2009, told The New York Times he could not recall another instance of a sitting mayor officiating public weddings at the clerk’s office, commonly referred to as City Hall. Nor could he think of another mayor who had held his own marriage ceremony there.

Mamdani had married the artist Rama Duwaji at the same office nearly a year earlier. The six couples were not specially selected, McSweeney said. They were already on the schedule for Thursday morning appointments. Staff members simply offered them the option of having the mayor conduct the ceremony.

“All of the couples were somewhere between happy and thrilled,” Mr. McSweeney said. Emily Grimmius, 30, a Manhattan lawyer, and Muhammad Saleem, 28, a start-up founder, were among the couples surprised that morning.

“I expected the day to be, like, government paperwork,” Ms. Grimmius said. “And then you walk in, and it’s your wedding, and you’re a little star-struck by the mayor.”

Saleem described the moment as distinctly New York. “It’s the epitome of New York: You don’t know who you are going to meet,” he said. “There is nothing predictable, and that’s the beauty of the city, right?”

The couple met in 2024 through friends connected to Columbia University, where Saleem was a student. Grimmius had moved east from Washington and California; Saleem grew up in Pakistan before relocating to Chicago.



Another couple, Michael and Minji Tzeng, had arrived for their 11:15 a.m. appointment expecting a small ceremony with family. Ms. Tzeng, a 29-year-old data engineer at a nonprofit, said she chose the Manhattan office because it was the most photogenic of the city clerk’s locations.

Instead, Mr. Tzeng, a 30-year-old medical resident, found himself shaking hands with the mayor, who complimented his black-and-gray striped tie and mentioned owning the same one.

Afterward, the newlyweds returned to their Upper East Side apartment, made ramen and began texting friends photos of what Ms. Tzeng described as their “wedding crasher.”

“They were like, Wait, is this real?” she said. “Are you sure it’s not A.I.?”