New York City is gearing up for a visit from King Charles III that is expected to feature an encounter between the monarch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Charles arrived in the United States on Monday for a state visit with President Donald Trump at the White House.
The king’s itinerary includes a number of stops across the country, including an event on Wednesday commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
The monarch’s trip marks his first state visit to the U.S. since he took the crown in 2022. He is embarking on a four-day visit alongside Queen Camilla, touted as a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary of independence from Great Britain. The pair is set to attend a state dinner at the White House, while Charles is delivering a rare address to a joint session of Congress.
But later in the week, they are also making a pit stop in New York City, making a symbolic show of solidarity at the 9/11 Memorial.
Charles and Mamdani will participate in a memorial wreath-laying ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum on Wednesday.
The visit comes after dozens of Britons were among at least 2,606 people murdered when terrorists hijacked a pair of airplanes and crashed them into the Twin Towers over two decades ago.
At the time of the attack, then-Queen Elizabeth II ordered the U.S. national anthem to be played at the changing of the guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace, and the country’s highest-ranking clergyman issued a message of comfort.
“I am hopeful for the people of America: hopeful that as ruins are rebuilt, so also a shaken people will be restored,” then-Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey said. “For, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center disappeared amid the smoke and carnage, across a short stretch of water, another, older, American icon was not submerged. The September morning sun continued to shine on the Statue of Liberty, her torch raised like a beacon — a beacon of hope — and to millions around the world, a symbol of all that is best about America.”
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Charles and Mamdani are not expected to meet privately. The socialist mayor has been a harsh critic of Britain’s colonial history, including during a St. Patrick’s Day event earlier this year that he used as an opportunity to attack the country as a perpetrator of “subjugation and discrimination” in Ireland.
“As we know, it was on Irish soil that the British Empire developed its colonial project. So much of the exploitation later imposed elsewhere across the world was first honed in the plantations of Ireland,” the mayor said.
