Six months into a highly energetic mayoralty, how has Eric Adams changed the city — if at all? freedlander reports
Photo: Dolly Faibyshev According to the authorities, as a northbound Q train climbed the Manhattan Bridge one Sunday morning this spring, a 25-year-old passenger named Andrew Abdullah began to pace and mutter. He paused in front of Daniel Enriquez, a Goldman Sachs employee who was on his way to meet his brother for brunch. Abdullah, who had served four months in prison for attempted murder, pulled a 9-mm. pistol from his pocket, pointed it at Enriquez’s chest, and fired.
There are good reasons why mayors do not customarily join in taking suspected murderers into custody. One is that it would create a precedent for all attention-hungry killers to insist on an audience with the city’s highest-ranking official. Another is that the mayor has a security detail whose entire function is to keep him far away from people with a history of shooting men in the chest.
As the most prominent citizen of what he likes to call the “City of Swagger,” Adams has been well documented: hanging out at fashion shows with Anna Wintour, dining with Paris Hilton, outlasting Jennifer Lopez at the late-night party for a new film about her, haunting the private club Zero Bond often enough that lobbyists are strategizing about how to become members. Adams is also aggressively fundraising for reelection in 2025 at posh events in places from the Hamptons to Beverly Hills.
At a Wells Fargo party with Cara Delevingne and Floyd Mayweather. Photo: Johnny Nunez/WireImage Six months in, Adams has avoided putting out hard metrics to gauge his success and has been surprisingly passive on critical issues like housing affordability. In June, addressing the Association for a Better New York, Adams repeated a favorite line: New York needs to become a “City of Yes” and a place where things get built.
On June 27, the same day Adams said his response to a citywide lifeguard shortage would be a public-awareness campaign about drowning, the Post published an interview in which he boasted about a new system he had devised for the police to track homeless encampments. It’s a shared Google doc. In his absence, whipping the contest fell to Adams’s chief of staff. Mayors often fill the role with creatures of municipal bureaucracy, but Adams tapped a kind of insider-outsider: Frank Carone, a Brooklyn lawyer who ten years ago began to get involved in Democratic politics using his growing influence with elected officials to build his law practice into one of the most successful in New York.
Once Adrienne Adams locked down the vote, Eric Adams tried to prevent her from placing key allies in positions of importance. He failed there, too. Brannan became the head of the finance committee. Another member of the diner group became the head of the investigations committee, another the deputy Speaker, and a third the majority leader.
At a restaurant opening with Mary J. Blige. Photo: Johnny Nunez/WireImage Adams prefers to talk about crime and a post-COVID city, but for months certain New Yorkers had a question that surpassed all others in urgency: When would the mayor let Kyrie Irving play? He was cornered by his friends at exclusive clubs, asked by the press, heckled on the street.
In early March, Adams ended vaccine requirements for indoor settings and the mask mandate for schools. The employee rule stayed in place. It meant Irving could practice with the Nets and even attend games at Barclays, but he couldn’t lace up. Adams dug in. “Kyrie can play tomorrow: Get vaccinated,” he told a heckler at a press conference on March 13. Later that day, Kevin Durant, the Nets’ other superstar, blasted the mayor.
On March 24, Adams caved. “He just wanted to get it over with,” says a person close to the mayor. “It got to the point where he couldn’t take the public humiliation of it all.” In a subtle dig at Irving, the mayor appeared not at Barclays Center but at Citi Field to announce an “athletes and performers” exemption to the private-sector mandate.
Jumaane Williams, the ultraprogressive public advocate, spent the first half of the year focusing on a failed run for governor, and despite their ideological differences, he is close enough to Adams that the mayor attended his wedding in 2021. Brad Lander, who has Stringer’s old job as comptroller, has seemed hesitant to engage.
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