Adams will run for re-election as an independent instead of as a Democrat.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said on Thursday that he would not run for re-election in the Democratic primary in June, an acknowledgment of the growing backlash against his embrace of President Trump and his record-low approval ratings.

Mr. Adams said he would instead run as an independent in the general election in November — an uphill battle in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one.

His announcement comes a day after the five-count federal corruption indictment that he faced was dismissed by a judge, following the Trump Justice Department’s decision to abandon the prosecution.

Mr. Adams released a six-minute video saying that the case had made it difficult for him to run in the June 24 primary. He said that he was still a Democrat but that he would “appeal directly to all New Yorkers” as an independent in the general election.

In the video, Mr. Adams again denied the corruption allegations, but acknowledged that he had made mistakes.

“I know that the accusations leveled against me may have shaken your confidence in me and that you may rightly have questions about my conduct,” he said. “Let me be clear, although the charges against me were false, I trusted people that I should not have and I regret that.”

The collapse of the mayor’s primary campaign was a stunning setback for a charismatic leader who once called himself the “future of the Democratic Party.” But in recent months, as Mr. Adams publicly avoided criticizing Mr. Trump, he began to distance himself from party orthodoxy.

“People often say, ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat. You seem to have left the party,’” Mr. Adams said in a January interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”

The decision by Mr. Adams to abandon his bid for the Democratic ballot line, which was first reported by Politico, would seem to significantly dampen his hopes for a second term.

Mayor Adams’ involuntary removal policy

Straphangers say they commute in rush hour alongside sleeping homeless.
Photo by Dean Moses

Mental health: City Council says they found serious flaws in Mayor Adams’ involuntary removal policy in new report
By Ethan Stark-MillerPosted on March 24, 2025
A City Council analysis of data that Mayor Eric Adams’ office released on its policy to involuntarily hospitalize those in apparent severe mental health crisis found that the practice is not working as intended and disproportionately impacts Black New Yorkers.


The council’s findings, unveiled ahead of its Health Committee’s preliminary budget hearing on Monday, reviewed data the Adams administration released earlier this year. The report found that the NYPD initiated 7,060 involuntary removals last year, and clinicians initiated another 660 transports.

Adams has touted the policy as a success since he introduced it in late 2022. It is one of his administration’s central means of addressing severe mental illness and homelessness on the city’s streets and subways.

While involuntary removals have drawn backlash from many lawmakers and advocates, the mayor is pushing for the state to give the city expanded authority over the practice this legislative session.

However, the council analysis found that involuntary removals were five times more likely to occur in private than in public spaces; 40% of those removed were not admitted for inpatient care, and Black New Yorkers accounted for more than half of the transports.

“The Administration has continuously relied on involuntary removals as a catch-all solution without providing funding for the necessary treatment measures for people in need of long-term services,” said Council Member Linda Lee (D-Queens), who chairs the council’s Committee on Mental Health, in a statement.

Missing information“The Administration has continuously relied on involuntary removals as a catch-all solution without providing funding for the necessary treatment measures for people in need of long-term services,” said Council Member Linda Lee (D-Queens), who chairs the council’s Committee on Mental Health, in a statement.Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit

The council also concluded that the city’s data was incomplete. In particular, they said it does not include the full number of involuntary removals initiated by the NYPD through 911 radio calls last year, transfers by city Health Department clinicians, or data on most hospital admissions outcomes.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said the city’s data further “fails to report” on the outcomes of involuntary commitments.

Instead of continuing to push involuntary removals, the council urged the mayor to dedicate more funding to other mental health care programs they say have a proven track record of addressing the crisis in this year’s budget. They include programs like Intensive Mobile Treatment teams, which provide medication, housing and other support services to the severely mentally ill; those that help people maintain stability while their conditions improve, and the clubhouse model, which similarly offers free programs and services.

Williams said the city should focus on the “continuum of care” rather than the removals.

“It is not about involuntary hospitalizations; it’s about the continuum of care that’s necessary after the hospitals,” Williams said.
‘Idealism collides with realism’“Idealism collides with realism,” Mayor Eric Adams said regarding a City Council report on his administration’s involuntary hospitalization policy for the severely mentally ill. “This is real stuff that we have to address. And we have been bold enough to say, ‘You know what, we’re going to take the criticism.'”Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

In response, Mayor Adams fiercely defended his administration’s use of involuntary hospitalizations during his weekly off-topic press conference on Monday.

“Many who are critiquing what we’re doing don’t have the answers of, how do you deal with a person who clearly is dealing with severe mental health illness and refuses care,” Adams said. “Idealism collides with realism. This is real stuff that we have to address. And we have been bold enough to say, ‘You know what, we’re going to take the criticism.'”

Specifically, he pushed back on the council’s findings that Black New Yorkers make up a majority of involuntary commitments, arguing that people of color make up a majority of those who have severe mental health issues and are homeless.

“We are not going to say, ‘Hey, this person needs to be voluntarily removed, but hold on, they’re Black, so we’re not going to do,'” Adams said. “We’re going to go where the issue is. We’re not going to play race politics.”

Additionally, he contended that the council’s finding that the administration’s data was incomplete is partially due to the hospital’s HIPAA requirements, which prevent them from sharing patient information.

“We cannot compel hospitals to turn over information,” Adams said. “We’re trying to give them the best information possible. We are making sure we be as transparent as possible.”

New York in the time of Eric Adams has become surreal

Food delivery workers and their e-bikes have become ubiquitous across the city.


New York in the time of Eric Adams has become surreal and dislocating even by the city’s lofty historical standards. Its overlapping crises — mental health, housing, immigration, identity — have collided with enough force to knock the city itself off its bearings, overpowering the head-down-keep-it-moving impulse that has long been our default setting. There is no staring at phones, no overinspecting subway ads, pretending not to see.

Thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets and in the subway system as commuters and pedestrians pass by.



Fare beaters hurdle turnstiles every day as a matter of course.






Drugstores keep sundries locked away from shoplifters — and everyone else.





Migrant mothers trudge through moving train cars with sleeping newborns strapped to their backs, selling marked-up candy. Men warm their bare legs over steaming curbside grates outside $10 million apartments, tattered sweatpants around their shins, as packs of deliveristas e-rocket past them ferrying $100 app orders from ghost kitchens. Drugstores protect toothpaste and deodorant as if they were launch codes, to be accessed only by uniformed authorities with keys. Undocumented middle schoolers in Brooklyn tuck little red cards into their pockets outlining their rights, as the new secretary of homeland security, fresh from South Dakota, hits the Bronx in a bulletproof vest and camera-ready makeup for a predawn raid tied to Venezuelan gang violence.

Migrants waiting outside Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, which city officials have called “the new Ellis Island.”



Men warming themselves over steaming grates outside Gramercy Park, a greensward so exclusive it requires a key.

 

When politics is just preening for the cameras

By Harry Siegel

New York Daily News

•

Sep 24, 2022 at 5:00 pmExpand

Watching. (Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of the Governor)

It kept coming up cameras during the week, giving glimpses of an increasingly out-of-focus New York full of backward plans and meaningless signs.

Start with the 132 motorist and passenger deaths last year, up 50% from before the pandemic, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, with many of those deaths resulting from the insanely dangerous driving many New Yorkers now regularly see and hear.

Those deaths were up even as the number of summonses for moving violations and arrests for DWIs are both down by more than 50% since the pandemic began.

The speed cameras that Albany’s hostage-taking lawmakers are finally letting the city run around the clock are supposed to pick up the slack. But while they generate revenue, it’s not clear how much they do to keep the public safe — not least because many of the most dangerous drivers damage their plates or purchase covers and sprays on Amazon or eBay to render them unreadable.

The result is cameras that do more to stop the schnook briefly getting up to 38 mph in a 25 mph zone (or, reportedly, Mayor Adams’ security detail) than the “champ” hitting 130 mph on the Belt Parkway.

In podunk places like Ferguson, law enforcement really has been a revenue game — one with horrific consequences. That hasn’t been so true in New York City, but the reliance on cameras is a step in that direction.

Speaking of revenue, Amazon finally yielded in August and said it would halt sales of plate blockers to New Yorkers — eight months after the city passed a law banning them. That should help, but it’s also a reminder of why cameras can’t simply replace traffic enforcement.

It’s also a reminder that the only way to get these online commerce giants to address the social disruptions their business models cause — like effectively subsidizing the city’s shoplifting blitzkrieg by creating a vast and scarcely regulated market for middlemen reselling stolen goods they’ve purchased for dimes on the dollar — is to apply political and regulatory pressure until their bottom line is better off doing the right thing.

Much the same applies to politicians, who are only going to deliver as much as voters hold them to account for, which is even more challenging in a state where Democrats are numerically dominant and most elections are functionally decided in low-turnout primaries.

Back to cameras, Gov. Hochul, doing her best to spend and whistle her way to a full term in November without engaging her political opponents, delivered another bizarre announcement Tuesday.

“You think Big Brother’s watching you on the subways? You’re absolutely right. That is our intent,” she said, presumably joking, while announcing a plan to put cameras on every train car by 2025.

She added, presumably seriously, that “We are going to be having surveillance of activities on the subway trains, and that is going to give people great peace of mind.”

If you say so, gov. Clearly, the malfunctioning platform cameras that failed to capture the N train shooter who then transferred to the R train before freely walking around the city for a day, passing lots of other cameras, did not “give people great peace of mind.”

More broadly, there were nearly as many felony crimes in the subway system, which already has cameras all over the platforms, in FY22 as there were before the pandemic even as the “record” ridership last month was still down more than 30% from the pre-pandemic weekday average.

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Hochul’s Big Brother boast came a couple of weeks after she’d ended the state’s mask mandate for the trains, long after many people had simply stopped wearing them and any enforcement had disappeared.

The governor wasn’t making policy so much as belatedly acknowledging reality, which she still managed to screw up by touting new MTA signs mocking their old ones by re-using the same images that had reminded people to wear their masks properly with updated language declaring it’s all fine now so “you do you.”

Increasingly, governance in New York seems to be defined by meaningless signs — Gun Free Zone ones taped to light poles around Times Square, a No Skateboarding one next to the skateboarders by the arch in Washington Square Park — and “plans” that start with the outcome and then try to backfill the pesky details.

The plan to close Rikers is predicated on the inmate population continuing to decline, with no plan at all for what to do now that the population is up. The congestion pricing plan (which also depends on cameras) is a revenue number in search of a policy, with no word yet on what the charge will be or who will have to pay it.

Eventually, the cart ends up in front of the horse while the riders consult a map that no longer relates to the territory.

Until then, the hacks in power are happy to turn things over to the cameras, collect the cash those bring in and hope for the best.

 Mayor Adams slams ‘silly’ concerns about his nightlife habits, but balks at requests for transparency

The nightlife mayor does not want sunlight on his nocturnal activities.

Mayor Adams took aim Monday at a report that raised ethical questions about his frequent club and restaurant outings, rejecting the notion he should produce receipts or other information to quell concern about the matter.

Speaking at a press conference in Brooklyn, Adams ridiculed the report from the New York Times for suggesting he may be flouting city ethics law by frequently dining at Osteria La Baia, an Italian eatery in Midtown run by two of his scandal-scarred friends, twin brothers Zhan and Robert Petrosyants.

“What’s going on with the New York Times? Front page of the New York Times, breaking news: Eric likes going to restaurants — c’mon!” the mayor told reporters.

After referencing COVID-19, monkeypox and crime as some issues he said the media should focus on instead, Adams added: “That was a silly story. You all know it was a silly, silly story.”

The Times observed Adams dining at the Petrosyants brothers’ spot 14 nights in June without ever appearing to pay his tab. The city Conflicts of Interest Board holds that elected officials should not accept any gifts worth more than $50 that are given to them because of their positions, as it could prompt corruption concerns.

At Monday’s press conference, Adams insisted he personally pays “every bill” he racks up for food and drinks. But he refused to commit to releasing receipts that would corroborate the claim.

“What mayor have you ever asked to give receipts for his private dinners? You can’t have a rule for Eric, and a rule for everyone else,” he said. “I owe no one a receipt of a private dinner that I have with people in the city.”

Johnny Petrosyants, left, and his twin brother Robert. (Monica Schipper/FilmMagic)

The Daily News and other outlets reported earlier this year on the longstanding ties between Adams, members of his inner circle and the Petrosyants twins, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to federal criminal charges over their role in a medical insurance scheme. The twins are the subject of several active lawsuits accusing them of shady financial practices, and some businesses they hold stakes in owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, including a Brooklyn pizzeria that was seized by the state this spring, as first reported by The News.

Despite their checkered past, Adams has repeatedly defended the Petrosyants, saying in February that his friendship with them is indicative of his ability to “mentor people.” On Monday, he used his bully pulpit to offer some free advertising for the brothers’ restaurant.

“I have a favorite restaurant called La Baia,” he said.

Eric Adams and Robert Petrosyants (far right) attend the Mayor-elect Eric Adams Celebration Party at Zero Bond on Nov. 2, 2021, in New York City. (Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Haute Living)

La Baia is not the only Big Apple hotspot where Adams’ patronage is drawing scrutiny.

A self-professed nightlife aficionado who proudly operates on little sleep, Adams often hangs out at Zero Bond, an exclusive members-only club in NoHo where celebrities, business tycoons and other power players are known to congregate.

To become a member of Zero Bond, one must cough up a $5,000 initiation fee and a $4,000 annual payment, which does not include food and drinks.

Adams, however, frequents the establishment without being a member — and admitted Monday that he’s able to do so because he goes as a “guest.” He refused to reveal who usually invites him, though, and also would not explain how or if he pays for his Zero Bond outings.

“If I tell you who I go with, there will be full-page stories on them, and no one’s going to want to hang out with me anymore,” he said. “You know, I’m just blown away how people are so attracted to my life. I mean, people just enjoy everything that I do.”

 

More migrants from Texas border arrive in NYC, Mayor Adams slams Gov. Abbott again: ‘It is unimaginable’ what he’s done.

“When you think about this country — a country that has always been open to those who are fleeing persecution and other intolerable conditions — we’ve always welcomed that,” he continued. “This governor is not doing that in Texas, but we are going to send the right message, the right tone, of being here for these families.”

Taxis took the 14 migrants to their next destinations free of charge, CBS New York reported.

Under New York State law, the city must provide housing for any adult who arrives by 10 p.m. with kids at a homeless shelter the day of their arrival.

New York City saw its first bus of migrants sent by Abbott on Friday morning. A charter bus brought about 50 people to the Port Authority Bus Terminal after a roughly two-day journey from the Lone Star State.

Mayor Eric Adams and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (AP)

“The journey by bus, it was tough,” one of the new arrivals, 40-year-old Alfonso Ruiz, told the Daily News on Friday. “Stopping and shouting and stopping almost all day.”

In the spring, Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who’s also Republican, announced plans to send buses of migrants to Washington, D.C. They were protesting President Biden’s move to lift restrictions on seeking asylum that were imposed near the start of the COVID pandemic. The rule remains in effect, under a court order.

Adams has been calling for federal funding to help handle the new migrants. On Sunday, he said Texas should coordinate its plans with New York .

Mayor Adams greets asylum seekers arriving in New York City from Texas. (Diane Bondareff/Mayoral Photo Office)

“In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Abbott stated Friday. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.”

Last week, the mayor turned down an invitation from Abbott to see the state’s southern border first-hand.

“Instead of a photo-op at the border, we hope Gov. Abbott will focus his energy and resources on providing support and resources to asylum seekers in Texas as we have been hard at work doing in New York City,” Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said at the time.

Washington, D.C. has received more than 6,100 migrants from Texas, according to Abbott’s office.

But the Pentagon on Friday rejected a request from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for the National Guard to provide assistance for what she called a “growing humanitarian crisis.”

Eric Adams, the Mayor Who Never Sleeps

By Maureen Dowd


Suddenly, we were staring down at a sidewalk full of blood. A young woman had been shot in the head an hour earlier as she pushed her 3-month-old daughter in a stroller on 95th Street.

Standing next to a school playground, John Miller, the storied deputy police commissioner, briefed the mayor sotto voce about the 40-caliber bullet casing, powder burns and a young man in a black hoodie shooting at point-blank range, execution-style. The woman was 20 and her name was Azsia Johnson. It was probably the baby’s father who was the shooter, he said. She had filed a domestic violence report against him.

In a couple of days, the police would say that this beautiful young woman, a doting mother of two, had been lured to the playground by her abusive ex, who told her he had some things for their baby daughter. He shot her and ran, leaving the baby on the street, and was arrested two days later.

After a steady rise since the start of the pandemic, murders and shootings in the first sixth months of the year were down 10 percent and 12 percent in New York City compared with last year, according to police figures. The Police Department even announced on Thursday that it had made more gun arrests this past quarter than in any since 1995. But other crimes have risen — overall crime is up nearly 38 percent — and shocking crimes like the shooting of the young mom and attacks on the subway have left New Yorkers fearful.


Adams has worked to increase patrols on subways and has restarted a special anti-gun unit to combat gun crimes, specifically going after people who are most frequently the perpetrators of violence.

“It’s ‘High Noon’ in America,” Adams warned in testimony before Congress in favor of stronger gun laws. “The clock is ticking, every day, every minute towards another hour of death.”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the quarterback for the compromise gun bill that just became law, told me that Mayor Adams had given “energy and new life” to a stalled anti-gun violence movement.

But it is tough going for Adams. He is pinioned from the left by the State Legislature, whose bail reform laws made it harder to keep criminals prone to violence in jail, and by district attorneys like Alvin Bragg of Manhattan, who deprioritized jail time even for certain low-level violent crimes, and by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who are demonizing the police, deepening morale problems. He is pinioned from the right by Clarence Thomas and the other radical justices who issued the opinion overturning a century-old New York statute that limited the number of guns on the streets and by a Republican Party hellbent on arming Americans to the teeth.

The mayor had started that Wednesday with Commissioner Sewell and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. The commissioner noted that they had taken 3,300 guns off the street so far this year (now it’s 3,700), and the trio talked about lawsuits that Ms. James and the city had filed to crack down on ghost guns, untraceable weapons made from a kit that are being illegally sold in New York State.

That afternoon, the mayor and the commissioner had had a news conference with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand about legislation recently passed that would allow the federal government to crack down on gun trafficking across state lines.

By 9:30 p.m., we came full circle: The esoteric discussion went on by day and the bloody reality reared its head at night. The shooting illustrated Adams’s Sisyphean battle.

That Thursday night, he went back to the Upper East Side to a candlelight vigil for Azsia Johnson and hugged her distraught mother, Lisa Desort, saying the death “hit so close to home” because he had worked with Desort when she was an emergency medical technician and he was a police officer.
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The mayor with Lisa Desort, left, at a vigil for her daughter.Credit...Paul Martinka

At the police academy graduation at Madison Square Garden the day after that, on Friday, the mayor spoke of how shockingly high crime was when he started on the beat 38 years ago. “People no longer believed in the city,” he said.

But, the mayor continued, “every entity in the city was on our side,” as the police tried to take the city back. “That’s not the climate you’re policing in,” he told the white-gloved graduates. “You’re policing in a climate where everyone is against us. Every story seems to be negative about our actions and not see what we do every day. Laws are being passed that protect guilty people.”

Promising to be their general, telling them to ignore heckling, name-calling and Twitter insults, he said they are now dealing with a situation where almost anyone can carry a gun and where they can no longer count on criminals they arrest staying in jail. “No, they’re going to come out probably the next day,” he said, “because of a court system that just does not seem to understand the reality on the streets.”

Then Adams, who first drew public attention early in his career as a police officer who criticized police brutality, advised them: “You must be your brother’s keeper. You must ensure that he or she never reaches the point where they tarnish the shield, because one officer could destroy all the work that we are attempting to do.”

His younger brother, Bernard, a former police officer who is the director of mayoral security with a salary of $1 a year, told me that their mom drilled into them that “you have to be your brother’s keeper” and watch out for the little guy who wasn’t getting a fair shake.

Six months into the job, Eric Adams, 61, is at a crucial juncture. The honeymoon, filled with hope for a dynamic new mayor, is over. Adams’s poll numbers have dived, which the optimistic politician took with aplomb. “A C is not an A, but a C is not an F,” he told reporters, adding that he interpreted the numbers from tough New York graders to mean “We’re going to give Eric a shot.”

The New York Post, which endorsed his candidacy, has now given Adams the Homeric epithet “club-hopping.” The Times’s Emma G. Fitzsimmons wrote that his efforts in Albany, where he once served as a state senator from Brooklyn, fell short of achieving long-term mayoral control of public schools and other measures. David Freedlander of New York magazine, asserting that Adams can boast of few accomplishments, wrote recently, “It’s become hard to escape the impression that New York City is being led by a mayor who is, frankly, winging it.”

What Adams has brought to the job is a flair that’s refreshing after eight years of the dyspeptic Bill de Blasio. Over the July 4 weekend, he tweeted a video of himself taking a spin on a jet ski and “looking like a pro” in Mill Basin between Brooklyn events. But the questions echo: Is he all hat and no cattle? Is he skewing too much to swagger at the expense of substance?

“It’s like the second coming of ‘Beau James,’ Jimmy Walker,’’ one top Democratic politico said, referring to the vivacious Roaring Twenties mayor (who left office in a cloud of scandal). “But the most important thing is what you do between 9 and 5, not 5 and 9.”

A top Democratic strategist agreed: “On paper, Eric is kind of a Democratic superhero. But he needs real-world results, not just great swagger.”

In winning City Hall, Adams told a powerful, unique story about becoming a policeman after being beaten by the police as a teenager. He presented himself as someone who could soothe a jangly city and push back on defund-the-police and coddle-the-criminal rhetoric on the far left, restoring a little perspective and sanity as a moderate new face of the Democratic Party. He promised that he could address injustices to Black victims, build a police force that treated people with respect and deliver safe streets.

As the daughter of a police detective, I want to believe in that message. I want to believe we can hold bad police accountable and root out the Derek Chauvins, without straitjacketing officers to the point that forces suffer chronic blue flu and quit in droves.

I also want to believe that moderate Democrats are not becoming pariahs in their own party and heading toward extinction. I want to believe that you can work hard and achieve serious goals while showing flair. Politics is so tepid on the Democratic side and anti-democratic on the Republican side. The mayor’s magnetic smile is a promise. His noir expeditions — turns on red carpets, drop-bys at clubs, and theater and fashion events — reflect his belief that New York is back and open for business, tourists, fun and, yes, swagger.


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A ribbon cutting at the Brooklyn Chop House.Credit...Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

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The mayor and Tracey Collins on the red carpet at the Met Gala.Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

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The mayor at the New York City Ballet spring gala.Credit...Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

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Performing at the Inner Circle Show, a charity event hosted by New York City journalists.Credit...Todd Maisel/The Inner Circle Show, via Associated Press

I also want to believe that New York doesn’t have to be, as the former police commissioner Bill Bratton said, “the Wild West.” (Even as I was writing this story, there was a cascade of news bulletins: A member of the mayor’s advance staff was mugged in Brooklyn at knifepoint; a teenager on a scooter in the Bronx was fatally shot; a man sleeping on a bench in Hudson River Park was stabbed to death, and three people were shot, two fatally, by a man outside a Brooklyn deli.)

I had run into the mayor in February at the dinner after the opening of “The Music Man” on Broadway and asked him if I could follow him around for a story, the days and nights of Eric Adams.

“Zero Bond?” the enigmatic mayor murmured with a smile, referring to the private club in NoHo he frequently visits. (I never did get there.)

I began trailing him last month as he bounced around the city, wearing his navy blue “NYC MAYOR” jacket, meeting with religious leaders about retrofitting hotels for the homeless; climbing into a sanitation truck to help recruit workers; announcing plans for major renovations at a park in the Bronx; delivering a robot’s baby, complete with simulated blood, in a virtual reality program at Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx to help with the maternal morbidity crisis among Black mothers. He gave a Juneteenth speech in Central Park at the site of Seneca Village, where he compared gentrification to slavery. On Father’s Day, he went to a Mets game with his son, Jordan Coleman, 26, and threw out the first pitch. (He ran into the former Trump flack Anthony Scaramucci, calling out, “I love this guy!”) Then he stopped by a music festival in Jamaica, Queens, where he grew up, and presented a proclamation to the New York City Football Club at Yankee Stadium. At Gracie Mansion he gave a news conference about improving nutrition at schools, boosting “vegan Fridays.” A reporter told the mayor that she had talked to some kids who found the fare “squishy.”


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The Central Park Conservancy held a Juneteenth event at Seneca Village.Credit...Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York Times

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A ribbon-cutting ceremony at Independence Towers in Brooklyn.Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times


“In his heart, he’s still a police officer — he’s always patrolling,” said Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, noting that the mayor set up a weekly Zoom call on homelessness at 5 p.m. on Sundays. Several staffers told me that when they do 8:30 a.m. Zoom meetings with the mayor, he’s in his suit and tie on his stationary bike.

He was not always so fit. In his book, “Healthy at Last,” Adams writes that after Sept. 11, he relied on comfort food. If he had a hard day, he craved a Quarter Pounder or a bucket of KFC. He told me that when Tracey Collins, his longtime partner who has been a high-ranking official at the city’s department of education for over a decade, told him to eat a little better, he would pick up a handful of cookies and stuff them in his mouth as though to say, “Leave me alone.”

Then came the “horrific experience,” as he called it: One day in 2016, he woke up blind in his left eye and suffering nerve damage in his feet, which could have led to amputation. His diabetes was killing him. He switched to a plant-based diet, lost 35 pounds and reversed the damage from the disease. He also cooked for his mother, who died last year, to help her get healthier, and wrote a book on the experience.
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Adams switched to a plant-based diet after a health scare in 2016.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Every morning, he does transcendental meditation and then has his green smoothie — blueberries, kale and spinach sprinkled with chia, cacao, acai, maca and moringa. His bling: a stone bracelet Collins gave him for energy, a crystal bracelet he was given by an elderly woman on the campaign trail and a stud in his left ear, which was the result of a humorous promise on the campaign trail. To relax, he said, he’s learning to play the guitar, at the moment, the song “Lean on Me.”

The mayor can stop a staffwide Zoom if he thinks people are tired or nervous to lead the group in deep breathing. But he doesn’t want to be a nanny, like Mike Bloomberg.

“People want to have their steak, their cigarettes,” he said. “It’s all right with me.”

Lorraine Grillo, the first deputy mayor who keeps a pack of Marlboros on her desk, said she warned Adams: “I said, ‘Eric, I’m probably going to have a cigarette once in a while, I’m going to eat a steak, I’m never, ever riding a bike.’”

The mayor is a “low-drama person,” as one aide puts it. He stays pragmatic and Zen, listening more than he speaks. He organizes everything on eight Excel spreadsheets and challenges his staff if they are not prepared.

Being mayor has opened up a whole new exciting world to Adams. He told me that he had always wanted to go to the Met Gala and loved attending. “I guess after eight years of not having someone that was fun just really set the tone,’’ he said. “New York is supposed to be fun. We should laugh. We should go to these balls.”

Adams is so ubiquitous that he has earned the title “The Nightlife Mayor,” which is derisive or complimentary, depending on who’s saying it.

“He has a lot of energy and is so determined to make New York a vital cultural center,” Anna Wintour told me. “He seems to need no sleep.”

Coleman, a filmmaker who works at Roc Nation, thinks that criticism of his father’s nocturnal wanderings is unfair.

“People need to cut him some slack,” he said, because “he’s devoted his whole life to fixing this city” and “he gives 110 percent every time he wakes up.”

After an hour and a half at the crime scene that Wednesday night, I assumed the mayor would want to postpone the interview scheduled at Zona De Cuba (which is owned by the former Republican mayoral candidate Fernando Mateo). But we ended up going at 11 p.m. to Osteria La Baia, the site of “fishgate,” the report that he ate fish at the restaurant.

We sat down. The waitress asked, “Would you like your branzino?” The mayor quickly shook his head no. He munched on a Caesar salad, carefully picking out the croutons and anchovies, while he waited for his staff to deliver hummus, eggplant and mushrooms from another restaurant.

We talked about recent stories in the press about the left eating itself alive with infighting and cancel culture. “They are trying to out-perfect themselves,” Adams said. “All the things we fought for, we’re losing because we were fighting each other. We allowed Donald to stack the Supreme Court because Hillary wasn’t pure enough for folks.”

And now Clarence Thomas is on a tear, he said, adding: “He’s still holding on to what happened to him during his whole confirmation process, and he’s been harboring that for a long time. This is the type of guy that sits in the basement every day and plots.”

I wonder if he had watched the testimony of the Jan. 6 hearing suggesting that his predecessor, America’s Mayor, Mr. Law and Order, Rudy Giuliani, cooked up a coup while he was drunk.

“Talk about imploding,” Adams said. (A week later, Adams went to bat for the supermarket worker charged with assaulting Giuliani, asking the Staten Island D.A. to go easy on him.)

I asked about his night rambles.

“Remember, what is our title, the City That Never Sleeps,” he said, ordering a Tito’s vodka and soda. “When I was a cop, I did the midnight shift for 11, 12 years. There’s another city that comes alive during the nights. I want them to know, ‘Listen, I’m the mayor of you, too.’

“My mother used to tell me she would go to work, clean office spaces. She said no one would even talk to her. It’s like she doesn’t even exist. They would just ignore her being there. I said, ‘I’m not going to do that to people.’”
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Adams took the oath of office in Times Square holding a photograph of his mother. His son, Jordan Coleman, held the family Bible.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

I noted that he doesn’t talk much about his father, a butcher. His mother, who raised the six kids with money from cleaning work, is sometimes referred to as a single mother. Their financial situation was so precarious that Adams had to bring a bag of clothes to school in case they were evicted by the time he got out. His pet was a rat named Mickey.

“Dad was in and out, in and out, in and out,” he said. “He’d come. He would stay for three months, disappear for nine, come back. That was her love. I remember her sharing with me one day, ‘You know, I hope I didn’t love your father too much that I was just blind.’”

I told the mayor that people I’ve talked to are still hopeful about him but seem to be getting impatient. One of my colleagues had told me the day before that she was taking the 2 train and saw a man punch his girlfriend in the face during an argument.

“If you place the accent on the wrong letter, you’re going to mispronounce the word,” Adams said. “If you place the accent on the wrong moment in your life, you’re going to mispronounce your life. Place it on how many times you got on the train and nothing happened to you. Nothing eventful. That’s where the accent should go, not ‘Hey, this is my 900th ride and you know what, I saw a homeless person today. Oh my God, things are out of control.’ They’re not.”

I noted that he has received scrutiny for hanging out with some shady customers. Some friends, like Al Sharpton, warned him before he took office that appearances matter. Others were afraid he might be used by opportunists.

His night crawls, which make some City Hall staffers uneasy, include Zero Bond and Osteria La Baia; the restaurant is owned by his close pal Zhan Petrosyants, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to an illegal check-cashing scheme designed to evade anti-money-laundering rules.

When a member of the New York State Senate was convicted of misdemeanor assault for roughing up his girlfriend, Adams was one of the few who voted against expelling him from office. He named Philip Banks deputy mayor of public safety even though he was an unindicted co-conspirator in a corruption scandal involving the Police Department and de Blasio donors in 2018. And he appointed Frank Carone as his chief of staff despite scrutiny of his past business dealings, raising “money for access” questions.

“The worst day of your life should not define your life,” the mayor insisted. “I just believe that because I’ve had some worst days.”

He continued: “Phil is one of the best law enforcement officers in this country. Imagine me saying, ‘I need to deal with crime. You did some dumb things; now I’m going to leave you on the bench when my team is losing.’ No, I’m not doing that.”

I wanted to know about his sparring with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York Post summed it up with a witty headline: “Is this AOC’s or Adams’ Apple?” The mayor, who spent a few years as a Republican, has critiqued the congresswoman’s socialist agenda and the “Tax the Rich” gown she wore to the Met Gala. He chided it as the wrong message, arguing that the wealthiest New Yorkers paid most of the city’s income taxes (although the top 1 percent make as much as the bottom 90 percent). When he found himself on Anna Wintour’s A list for the next gala, he trolled A.O.C. by sporting his own message on the back of his jacket: “End Gun Violence.”

Adams said he had read a book on “the importance of our children disagreeing with us. That is so natural. I’m almost twice her age. Our experiences are different. She may find it hard to believe that there’s going to come a time that, to her children’s generation, they’re going to say she’s out of touch.”

“I believe that it’s all right to disagree,” he said. “It’s not all right to be disagreeable.”

He can get testy, though, when confronted. At a news conference in February, after the media had questioned his failures at legislative changes in Albany, he threatened to stop answering questions and suggested that the City Hall press corps needed more diversity.

“Listen, it hits a sore spot, but we have to be honest,” he told me. He is only the second Black mayor “and I sit in a room sometimes and I look around the room and I say, ‘Where are the black reporters?’” He added: “My white counterparts, they do one-two-three, one-two-three; that’s their dance. I do the boogaloo.”

Being a Black man in New York was challenging from the time he was young. I asked about the night when he was 15 and was brutally beaten by the police after he and his oldest brother got arrested for trying to cash a stolen money order.

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Eric Adams, far right, in a 1974 family photo.Credit...via Office of the New York City Mayor


“The craziest thing about it was that the cops were not angry at us,” he said. “It’s one thing if you chase someone or they fought you back, tempers rage.” But things were calm. “They were doing the paperwork. And the guy said, ‘You just feel like a beatdown?’ The other guy said, ‘Yes.’ We didn’t know what the hell they were talking about and they took us downstairs to the basement of the 103rd Precinct and just started kicking us in our groin. They weren’t angry. It was just some form of sadistic

ecreation.”

This assault inspired him to be a police officer, to fix the force from the inside. It provided no such inspiration for his brother. “I don’t think my brother has ever been right since that incident,” he said, sadly.

Despite his club-hopping, he said, he would stay home in his pajamas, watching “The Twilight Zone,” if he had a day to himself. “I am socially awkward. I’m extremely shy. I can spend the whole day binging on documentaries. When I was a child, I would sit down and I would get excited about going home and watching ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.’ Animal behavior is the unfiltered human behavior. We cover up what we feel. At our heart, we are all vulnerable.”

He continued that when he’s in a room with billionaires and celebrities, he can see the “scared children” in them. “I look across the table from you, I see exactly who you are. You have your own insecurities, you have your own concerns. ‘Does my wife still love me?’ ‘Am I still appealing?’ I may be mayor but I’m still this child that just wants to do right.”

So which animal in the jungle are you?

He laughed. “Clearly, I am a lion. I am meant to rule the jungle.”

Underneath the swagger, beyond the swank parties, the serious parts of the job are never far from his mind.

“Listen, I got to live up to the job,” he said. “I got to turn around the economy. I have to make the city safe. I have to educate children and there’s no excuses. It shouldn’t be, ‘Oh, you are a Black man. We’re going to give you a pass.’ No, I don’t want a pass. I’m responsible for that woman being shot today. My job is to make sure she could walk down a block pushing a carriage without being assassinated. I’m going to live up to my responsibility, but don’t stack the deck. Highlight where we are successful. We got some real W’s.” The press and critics, he complained, laughing, “only talk about, ‘Hey, did you eat a piece of fish?’”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

 

New Yorkers Really Don’t Like Adams, Hochul Because of Crime

By Nia Prater

Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul attend the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum’s annual Memorial Day commemoration ceremony on May 30 in New York. Photo: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock

More than three-quarters of New Yorkers say they personally worry about becoming a victim of violent crime, and they’re taking those fears out on the mayor and the governor, according to a survey of city residents released Tuesday.

Spectrum News NY1 and Siena College reported in their new poll that 76 percent of the city’s residents say they were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about being a victim of violent crime. Fifty-six percent say the city is headed in the wrong direction, and they give poor marks to the man who ran on cleaning it up. Just 29 percent approve of how Eric Adams is doing his job with 64 percent saying they disapprove. Only 16 percent of residents say he’s doing a “good” job handling crime. His approval rating has been cut in half since a similar Siena poll in January pegged him at 63 percent favorability.

Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul stands at 35 percent approval in the city and 54 percent disapproval compared to 45 percent approval among state voters in March, according to a Siena poll. Today, 46 percent of respondents say the state is headed in the wrong direction under her watch, a potentially forbidding figure as she faces a test in the Democratic primary in three weeks against Representative Tom Suozzi, who’s been assailing her over crime from the right, and the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, who has criticized her from the left.

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There has been some criticism of how Siena conducted the poll, which asked respondents to grade the job officials are doing as excellent, good, fair, or poor. “Fair” qualified as disapproval, which Adams’s press secretary pushed back against on Twitter, saying the poll “actually says almost 2/3 of New Yorkers stand with” Adams.

Residents were surveyed at the end of May, which saw a 27.8 percent uptick in crime over the same period last year, according to the NYPD. While police reported shootings were down year over year, May saw another string of high-profile killings that have unnerved city residents, including the death of an 11-year-old girl who was shot by a 15-year-old in the Bronx and the killing of a Goldman Sachs executive on a subway train.

One area of good news for Adams is residents expressed support for several of his proposals to fight crime, with 63 percent saying they favor his idea of installing machines at subway entrances that could detect weapons and 85 percent approving of his proposal to put more police on patrol in the subway system.