NEW YORK >> In a lace-accented white wedding gown, Chirlane McCray, first lady of New York City, made her way up the church aisle and turned to face the crowd. Arrayed before her were not the familiar faces of friends and family, but dozens of other women in similar bridal attire as they prepared to march across Upper Manhattan in solidarity against domestic violence.

“There’s nothing like putting on the garb,” she said after the event last month.

After nearly one full term, McCray, wife of Mayor Bill de Blasio, has fully wrapped herself in the role of political spouse, a job especially steeped with symbolism for her. As the African-American wife of a white mayor in a moment of renewed racial strife across America, McCray has emerged as most likely the most influential, if not consequential, first lady in the city’s history.

She has a full-time staff of five and her own public schedule. She oversees a portfolio of municipal programs, including her signature $850 million mental health initiative, in which other city officials report to her. She controls an independent nonprofit with a $25 million annual budget and still more staff. And she has the mayor’s ear on decisions big and small, sitting in on top-level job interviews, policy formulation and senior staff meetings.

“Where’s Chirlane?” is a regular refrain heard around City Hall as de Blasio wonders aloud why she is not in a particular meeting, or where she stands on an issue.

In a wide-ranging interview this month at Gracie Mansion, McCray outlined her ambitious agenda, which is topped by re-imagining mental health services as one of city government’s core responsibilities. “I want to be clear,” she said, “that my job is to make systemic change.”

And if that is not the typical first lady’s purview, so be it. “There’s demands, there’s expectations, there’s traditions, and then there’s what I want to do,” she said with a laugh.

While she has no permanent office of her own at City Hall, her influence is such that aides will sometimes seek the first lady’s buy-in and input on an idea before even going to de Blasio. Andrea Hagelgans, a senior adviser to the mayor, approached McCray about putting together a paid parental leave program for city employees before she spoke to the mayor. She signed on, and so did he.

“I wouldn’t say she’s always in every meeting,” Hagelgans said. “But she’s in everyone’s thought process.”

By now, the contours of de Blasio and McCray’s relationship are familiar: they met in City Hall as aides during the administration of David N. Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor; de Blasio set out to woo her and she resisted; she had penned a 1979 essay in Essence magazine declaring “I am a lesbian”; he persisted anyway; they married in 1994 and honeymooned in Cuba. They have two children, and their biracial family’s prominence, particularly their son Dante’s Afro, in the 2013 campaign is widely seen as vaulting de Blasio to the mayoralty.

When she enters a room, McCray and de Blasio invariably kiss on the lips — whether it is on stage at a rally or at more intimate City Hall staff meetings. Some aides look away; others roll their eyes. But most are now adjusted to the public displays of intense affection that broadcast the couple’s interdependence.

“They’re each other’s oxygen,” said Peter Ragone, a former senior adviser to the mayor who has known the couple for two decades. “I hope if I ever get married again I can figure out what they’ve got.”

More than a foot shorter than her nearly 6-foot-6 husband, McCray has an upright posture and a warm smile, when she chooses. She speaks softly, firmly and without fear, but is openly more comfortable with the written word. She has written poetry for most of her life, and she previously signed off her emails with the line, “Your silence will not protect you,” from one of her favorite black lesbian poets, Audre Lorde, whom she quoted in her speech at the brides’ march.

McCray has her detractors, but few have been willing to publicly voice their criticism as the mayor marches toward re-election next month. Some in the mental health industry, for instance, suggested that her initiatives have been more focused on branding and splashy announcements than on outcomes, but they refused to be quoted on the matter because they still hope to compete for lucrative city contracts. It’s one thing to criticize de Blasio, multiple people who work with City Hall said; it’s another to speak ill of his wife.

From the start, de Blasio was insistent on her having a title beyond first lady, according to past and present city officials, and quickly installed her as chairwoman of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a nonprofit that works in tandem with City Hall. There was an internal debate about having the mayor’s wife solicit private industry for money, but de Blasio pushed past those concerns.

The fund raised $45 million in her first two full years at its helm, including six-figure checks from real estate, energy and finance industries, according to federal tax and city records. She said she makes fundraising calls weekly.

Susan Lerner, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause New York, called the nonprofit, which predates the de Blasio administration but was not previously run by the mayor’s wife, a “backdoor way to curry favor.”

“When you donate to it, you expect that the mayor knows you’re supporting his priorities and his program,” Lerner said.

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McCray is also at the table for all of the mayor’s most important meetings. One of the pointed questions that she is known to ask job candidates is whether they send their children to public schools.

“If you ask the right questions, you learn a lot about people,” McCray explained. “Like the why — why public school? Why not public school?”

De Blasio gushes about how much he values her advice; in his first six weeks as mayor, he called her “my guiding light,” “my closest confidante,” “my partner in all I do,” and “my No. 1 adviser.”

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Her first year as first lady was a searing experience. When she spoke publicly about her failings around her daughter’s struggles with depression and addiction, she found herself on the cover of The New York Post with the headline: “I was a bad mom!” She weathered chatter about undo influence, a tabloid-fueled scandal that pushed out her chief of staff and the erroneous storyline that she had worn jeans to a police officer’s funeral.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would think I would wear jeans to a funeral. Like why? Why would they even?” McCray said, still visibly stung.

“That first year was hard,” said Rebecca Katz, who was a top City Hall adviser at the time and is a longtime friend of the family. “There were so many tongues wagging about what her role would be. Was she the ‘co-mayor’? There was sexism, there was racism that she faced and when you actually looked at the work, it was pretty impressive.”

She launched Thrive NYC, an umbrella of 54 mental health initiatives with a four-year budget of $850 million, setting out, among other things, to train 250,000 New Yorkers in Mental Health First Aid over five years, and launching a city-sponsored 24-hour hotline for mental health and substance abuse services.

Together with the Mayor’s Fund, McCray is at the center of nearly $1 billion in spending. But of the 54 initiatives in Thrive NYC, 31 previously existed at agencies scattered across the city; one of the new initiatives was an ad campaign promoting the program and free text and phone hotlines already existed in the private sector, although unconnected to city services.

Asked what her biggest legacy would be, she did not cite specific city programs, saying instead it was about a culture shift around mental health. Richard Buery, deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives who has worked closely with the first lady, echoed her remarks.

“In some ways, I think the biggest achievement is elevating this work to a priority of city government because mental health has never been considered a core of city government,” Buery said.

At City Hall staff meetings, McCray often remains quiet, presumably preferring to wield her opinion in private. But while professional staff often chafe at the sight of influential political spouses, many mayoral aides said McCray is typically welcomed. “There’s no one better at keeping his volatile personality in check than her,” said one of the aides, granted anonymity to candidly discuss internal City Hall dynamics.

Her public image is not haphazard. She has occasionally consulted with Ebs Burnough, a former adviser to Michelle Obama and a brand specialist (he did not respond to requests for comment), and as first lady, she has kept a blog to maintain her voice. In 2016, she wrote a poem about the city placing feminine hygiene products in schools. “Consider the tampon,” she wrote. “So essential, so taboo.”

This is one small step for NYC

And one giant leap for womankind.

When it comes to menstruation

We all deserve peace of mind.

Her schedule can read like a map of multiculturalism in New York: opening a 24-hour center for “LGBTQ youth” in Queens, touring an urban farm in East Harlem, a Hispanic Heritage event at Gracie Mansion one night and a transgender theater performance another, opening a substance use clinic at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis headquarters in Manhattan, attending a reading of writer James Baldwin at a center for black culture — all since late September.

Bertha Lewis, an African-American political activist who once served on the mayor’s transition team but has become a critic of the administration, said McCray should be more outspoken. “It would really be good if she speaks out and tells her husband you’re hurting my people,” Lewis said.

McCray bristled at other critics’ accusation that she, and her husband, have sometimes focused on forgotten corners of the city to the exclusion of everyone else.”The fact that we are doing things for all communities is not reflected in the tabloids at all,” she said, citing the creation of universal prekindergarten, while voicing a disdain for the news media that she shares with de Blasio.

“I have the advantage of many perspectives as someone who has lived in different kinds of communities: as a woman, as someone who previously identified as a lesbian, as someone who is a person of color,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of life, so that informs what I do.”

As the ranks of de Blasio’s veteran advisers has thinned throughout his term, and with even more departures expected after a November election in which the mayor is heavily favored, McCray’s internal influence is only expected to grow in a second term.

“Don’t think it’s just me,” she said. “He has many advisers, and he makes the final decision.” Then she added, “But he does value my opinion.”

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