Thousands brave the cold for de Blasio's Gracie Mansion open house

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday opened Gracie Mansion to the public as part of his inauguration, welcoming into the mayoral residence about 7,000 ticket-holders who braved long lines and frigid temperatures.

The open house was billed by de Blasio’s team as an event giving unprecedented access to the public — the first of its kind in recent memory — and the mayor greeted one-by-one the everyday New Yorkers he pledged would have greater representation in City Hall.

“We felt with this whole inauguration that it is crucial to make clear government was open to the people,” he told reporters on Sunday. “This is the people's house. Gracie Mansion is the people’s house. City Hall is the people’s house. We want people to know in everything we do, they are welcome in.”

De Blasio said most New Yorkers have never had a chance to visit Gracie Mansion, a four-bedroom, eight-bathroom Federal-style Upper East Side structure that the previous mayor, Michael Bloomberg, used primarily for diplomatic and ceremonial events.

De Blasio, his wife, Chirlane McCray, and their children Chiara, 19, and Dante, 16, will be the mansion’s first residents since former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his family. Bloomberg chose to live in his Upper East Side town house during his 12 years as mayor.

The de Blasios are set to move from their Park Slope row house into the mansion, but the mayor said Sunday of the relocation, “We have not set a date yet. It might be a little while.”

Petal Hwang, 39, of the Upper West Side, waited an hour and a half outside and an hour inside Gracie to meet de Blasio. She said of the mansion: “It's lovely. It’s really fantastic to see the old and new; we passed a room with these beautiful antique chairs and a modern phone.”

De Blasio, speaking to Hwang’s son, Derek, 11, who sported a bow tie for the event, emphasized that Gracie Mansion belonged to the city’s entire population: “You have a one-out-of-8.4-million share of this place.”

Those who stood in a blocks-long line outside Gracie Mansion were somewhat comforted by warming tents, and hot chocolate and hot cider stands arranged on the property. Inside, they stood in a line snaking through a ballroom before briefly meeting and posing for photos with de Blasio.

McCray, Chiara and Dante were not present at the start of Sunday’s open house.

Asked whether a photo opportunity with de Blasio was worth the wait, Gail Matthews, of Selden, said, “Sure. Definitely. You don’t have an opportunity to meet the mayor every day.”

Matthews said she had trekked in from Suffolk to visit Gracie because she is originally a Brooklynite.

Elliot Lienweber, 11, of Kensington, had another reason for visiting. He said, “I came here to talk about how, with the new mayor and the new schools chancellor, hopefully they'll decide ... to make school not all about testing.”

Elliot added that he thought it was “pretty cool and he’s letting us in,” saying Bloomberg had reserved the opportunity only for his “friends.”

But the wait in the cold and too-brief introduction to the mayor bothered some.

“I wish I could see the whole thing,” Marc Klein, 34, of Kensington, who waited two hours. “I thought the mayor was going to give a tour. It said open house with the mayor.”

Klein said Sunday was his first time and perhaps last time at the mansion, but “I felt like they were rushing it. They weren’t letting people savor the moment.”

Klein said the visit, however, was a “once-in-a-lifetime thing,” adding: “He should have spent more time with me. It was about two seconds.”

De Blasio was sworn in Wednesday as the city’s 109th mayor.