In her first interview since accepting the post, Ms. Palitz suggested that her stint as the Nightlife Mayor would be slightly more sober and focus less on carousing than on conflict mediation. In today’s New York, gentrification has pitted partygoers against the settled residents of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. In her first official act, Ms. Palitz promised to hold a series of listening tours and entertain the gripes of those who are bothered by the vomit on their streets or the noise at 3 a.m.

“Both sides feel unheard,” she said. “Both sides feel that things are unfair. I think the grievances are almost the same but there haven’t been any practical real-world solutions to address them.”

As a fifth-generation New Yorker, Ms. Palitz, 47, claims to be of a broad enough mind to discern those solutions and to ably serve as advocate for the after-hours set while remaining responsive to community concerns. Though she was raised on 86th Street on the Upper East Side, she moved to the East Village in 1996 and has lived there ever since — on three of the four different corners at First Street and First Avenue. In her early 20s, she took her first night life job, managing the guest list at the old Club Mars. Soon she was producing the “Soulution Spontaneous Groove Open Jam” — a night of hip-hop, spoken word, gospel, rock and drag — at clubs like Nation, SOB’s and the Tunnel.

In the early 2000s, a friend from grade school asked Ms. Palitz to invest in a bar near her apartment called The Flat. (It was briefly famous as a rendezvous that the actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher used for their romance.) But in 2004, The Flat went under and Ms. Palitz took it over. She turned it into Sutra, which for the next 10 years, until it closed, was known for Toca Tuesdays, an old-school hip-hop party overseen by the D.J. Tony Touch.

It was during that period that Ms. Palitz joined Community Board 3, a fractious body that includes the East Village, Chinatown and the Lower East Side. There, she was introduced to the brass-knuckle politics of night life — chiefly through her dealings with what she has called the “no-more bar contingency.”