Bill de Blasio claimed his place as the 109th mayor of New York City after 1 p.m. Wednesday, delivering an inaugural address at City Hall in front of luminaries including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as hundreds of New Yorkers.
"We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love," De Blasio said. "And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city's history. It's in our DNA."
De Blasio, 52, was formally sworn in shortly after midnight in a brief ceremony in front of his family's row house in Brooklyn. On the steps of City Hall, he was ceremonially sworn in by Bill Clinton, in whose administration he served as a regional official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
De Blasio was sworn in using a Bible once owned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A Democrat, he begins his term as an emblem of resurgent liberalism, offering hope to progressive activists and officeholders across the country — but also as an untested chief executive whose management of the city will be scrutinized.
He won a landslide victory Nov. 5, seizing on anxiety among voters that the city was increasingly becoming a gilded enclave for the rich, and vowing a sharp turn from the administration of predecessor Michael Bloomberg.
