Who the Hell Is Curtis Sliwa?

New York City is full of larger-than-life characters—the kind of dynamic, magnetic, self-mythologizing eccentrics you can't imagine being anywhere other than the center of attention. Mayor Eric Adams, for all his flaws, is that type of New Yorker: one of a kind, preternaturally charismatic, someone who could put on a show just folding some laundry (or making, and I'm sorry to keep harping on this, an absolutely freakish smoothie). Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa is also one of those only-in-New-York types, a fast-talking idiosyncratic media mainstay so committed to performing his own persona that he's been wearing the same hat in public for 46 years. 

It's the second time Sliwa, a 71-year-old native Brooklynite, has clinched the Republican mayoral nomination with a pretty amorphous policy platform whose primary pillars are public safety and animal rights. Last time, Eric Adams handily beat out Sliwa for the keys to Gracie Mansion; but four years and one socialist Democratic mayoral nominee later, the general election is looking very, very different. As Andrew Cuomo and Adams bicker and John Catsmatidis and David Paterson stage reactionary press conferences, calls have amplified for Sliwa to drop out and throw his weight behind someone who can beat 33-year-old Queens assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. Sliwa's response? Fuck no, not even if Donald Trump personally calls him. "I'm not getting out of this race unless they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under," Sliwa told Politico in June with his signature panache. "If the president were to call, I, very respectfully, would say, 'President Trump. I'm interested in only one job: being mayor of the city of New York.'" (And in the latest poll of registered voters, Sliwa is tracking two points higher than the incumbent mayor, so…)

Who is Sliwa, and how has he managed to hold the spotlight on himself for almost half a century? Here's our best crack at the man, the myth, the Guardian Angel—and some interesting context from civil rights attorney Ron Kuby, his longtime radio cohost and one-time friend.