Hell Gate took on the New York City mayoral election with a livestream and watch parties

Brooklyn — If there was a bar in Brooklyn with a single seat left empty last night, the only possible explanation is that it didn’t have a screen where people could watch the results of the New York City mayoral race roll in. The energy went beyond that of a World Series or Super Bowl; it was as if New York City had fielded its own team in the World Cup and was on the verge of beating Brazil in the finals. I tried three different bars before I found, miraculously, a few empty seats at Threes Brewing in Gowanus.

On the screen, as with the two bars I’d tried before, was live footage of two journalists sitting at a table, laptops in front of them, talking about the election and occasionally cutting to their colleagues at each candidate’s watch party across the city. But this wasn’t a program from one of New York’s broadcast mainstays like NBC or NY1; instead, it was a livestream on YouTube, and the journalists were worker-owners at the local news coop Hell Gate.

Tell your bartender: “Let’s watch the Hell Gate feed” https://t.co/vmtGLggpdV pic.twitter.com/FvSqD2RUx5

— Hell Gate *subscribe today!* (@HellGateNY) November 4, 2025

It quickly became apparent that Hell Gate had figured out how to translate its signature voice — irreverent yet deeply knowledgeable — into video. A scrolling chyron at the bottom of the screen listed all the bars that were showing the livestream across the city, encouraging viewers not to watch the election results alone. An accompanying article (which is what helped me find my way to Threes that night) provided the full list of bars; most of them were in Zohran Mamdani mainstay neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

The anchors, Katie Way and Max Rivlin-Nadler, sat in front of a background decorated with a traffic cone, an old-school monochrome TV topped with a Curtis Sliwa-style red beret, and a framed photo of Andrew Cuomo that gradually kept getting swapped out to zoom in on his rumored nipple ring. Reporter Jessy Edwards, who was stationed at Sliwa’s election night party on the Upper West Side, wore three different berets over the course of the night (at one point wearing two at once). Commercial breaks consisted of personal ads by New Yorkers talking about what they’re looking for in a partner.

They also, of course, couldn’t resist taking a few shots at the outgoing mayor:

Hell gate live stream has some serious early 90s public access TV vibes, right down to the pixelization, and I mean that in only the very best way.

[image or embed]

— Sam (@very-simple.com) November 4, 2025 at 8:48 PM

Shortly after calling the race for Mamdani (causing the bar to erupt in cheers), Hell Gate also had a parting image for Andrew Cuomo:

Still, there were two ways Hell Gate couldn’t keep up with the broadcast mainstays. For one, lapel mics and livestreams fall short of remote TV setups in terms of stability and audio quality. And the stream wrapped up before Mamdani delivered his victory speech, leaving us with a photo of Mamdani as the moon over the city at night.

We all wanted to watch the speech. So we put on NBC.