After a Wild Ride, Eric Adams Takes the Wheel
Eric Adams, who prevailed against the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, will be the second Black mayor of New York City. Photograph by Frank Franklin II / AP
For Adams, Tuesday included a momentous vote, a P.R. gaffe, and a promise to bring New York together.
by Sarah Larson
Not long after the polls closed on Tuesday, around 9:13 p.m., in the ballroom of the Marriott in Brooklyn, a campaign worker stepped up to the mike and made an announcement to a scattered crowd of Eric Adams supporters awaiting the results of the New York City mayoral election. Adams, a former N.Y.P.D. captain and the current Brooklyn borough president, was yet to be seen. “Good evening,” the announcer said, without fanfare, or the room’s full attention. “We won! We did it! Thank you, Team Adams!” The crowd cheered, with mild abandon. “Not only that, we won in a landslide,” she added. Even this was a foregone conclusion; as at a wedding reception, the party wouldn’t really begin till the honoree showed up. To my right, a woman said, “I need a glass of wine now that we won.” To my left, a woman examined her own glass of wine and said, “I’m gonna give this back.”
Much of the city government would be changing—mayor, comptroller, Manhattan D.A., public advocate, many City Council members. Though plenty of New Yorkers weren’t wild about the mayoral candidates—the results of their first foray into ranked-choice voting—the Marriott faithful were pumped, as intensely positive as Adams himself. Cynthia King, in a blue party top and a sweatshirt that said vegan muscle team tied around her waist, runs a dance studio in Flatbush, has known Adams for many years (“My husband was in the N.Y.P.D.”), and has worked with him on arts programs and healthy school menus. She was talking to Denise Felipe-Adams, special assistant to Adams in his role as borough president. “This man does not sleep,” she told me, as King danced to “Blurred Lines.” The issues that she cares most about, she said, include the economy, immigrants’ rights, and the “real taxpayers,” a lot of whom are “out of jobs now because of the vaccination requirements.”
The outfits were fabulous in all directions, in greatest-city-in-the-world themes. A dance troupe of tween girls in tutus and kente-cloth-pattern leggings, giddy before going onstage, skipped past a pair of Orthodox Jewish men in yarmulkes slapping each other on the back, to Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” Tall Sikh men wore turbans in pastel colors; Chinese-speaking young men wore expensive-looking suits and sneakers; people wore muslims 4 adams sweatshirts, Adidas face masks, porkpie hats, plaid suits and plaid overcoats, sequins, studded suede boots. Snippets of conversation had undertones of after-hours cop. (“Whatever we do, I don’t want to do CompStat no more—I’ll tell you that”; “He got promoted to detective”; “this vaccine shit.”) Community organizers from Flushing caught up with community organizers from Coney Island, patriotic jackets alongside brocade salwar kameez.
The day had begun with a sense of occasion, too. Adams had arrived at his polling place, at P.S. 81 in Bed-Stuy, beaming and carrying a large framed photo of his mother, who died in March; he got teary talking to reporters. His Republican rival of sorts, the Guardian Angels founder and talk-show host Curtis Sliwa, whose campaign included a mask-burning event and a video in which he vowed to help homeless “lost souls,” had arrived at his Upper West Side polling place in his red Curtis Sliwa jacket and matching beret, his arm in a sling after a recent run-in with a taxi, bearing a cat named Gizmo wrapped in a blanket. When asked to temporarily divest himself of his jacket and cat, he took umbrage. “Arrest me!” he said. Later, the Web site Curbed broke more mayoral news of the weird: during a weeklong stakeout of the Bed-Stuy apartment in which Adams claims to live—but might not—a plucky reporter had witnessed him parking illegally overnight and causing a morning logjam, which had in turn caused Adams to drive his car on the sidewalk. (“I caught you!” Adams said to a Curbed reporter, undaunted.) Out with the mayor who drags his security detail to the Park Slope Y; in with the guy who drives his Prius on the sidewalk.
Adams, who will be the second Black mayor of New York City, would be having an after-party at the new members-only club Zero Bond. He has said that he is pro-safety and pro-business; he is also pro-vegetables, pro-cop, anti-racism, anti-illegal guns, pro-him-carrying-a-gun at churches, synagogues, City Hall. He has been a Republican; he is now a Democrat. He wants us to see past all that. He entered to Jadakiss’s “The Champ Is Here,” to euphoric cheering, and spent some time at the edge of the stage, reaching out to fans, Springsteen-style. “You don’t know how much you fuel me,” he told the crowd. “It doesn’t matter if you are in Borough Park in the Hasidic community, if you’re in Flatbush in the Korean community, if you’re in Sunset Park in the Chinese community, if you’re in Rockaway, if you’re out in Queens, in the Dominican community, Washington Heights—all of you have the power to fuel us.” We are divided, he said, and “missing the beauty of our diversity.” Enough! “Today we take off the intramural jersey and we put on one jersey: Team New York.”
Adams’s five siblings were there, and he invoked his mother several times. His rise, his “I am you” message, elicited the most passionate cheers. For “the person cleaning bathrooms” and washing dishes, he said, “My mother cleaned houses. I washed dishes.” To people in Rikers: “I was beaten by police and sat in their precinct holding cell, certain that my future was already decided. And now I will be the person in charge of that precinct, and every other precinct, because I’m going to be the mayor of the City of New York.” He didn’t think he could go to college, “but I overcame a learning disability and was able to obtain my degrees. And now I will be in charge of the entire Department of Education.” He talked about how we’d watched “midtown turn into a ghost town and our parking lots became morgues,” told us to “believe again.” He invoked Percy Sutton, Shirley Chisholm, David Dinkins, Dennis deLeon, Larry Kramer, and “my fellow officers and firefighters.” “And let me be clear on this: I am not creating a division between my firefighters, my police officers, my E.M.T.s, my teachers, and other civil servants,” he said. “We are in this together.”
Nor did he want division between “our C.E.O.s” and “the uplifting of our inner city,” between “blue-collar” and “green jobs,” between fighting crime and “bad behavior from those who are tarnishing the shield.” The crowd stayed with him. He railed against those, including Sliwa, who had attacked him for meeting with “top gang members,” hoping to “collaborate.” (“Yeah! How dare they!” a woman behind me yelled.) “You darn right I am,” Adams said. “You darn right.” Those gang members had dyslexia, mental-health issues, “the problems we ignored.” (The woman behind me concurred.) “But let’s be clear as I talk to my gang members: Jan. 1, the conversation stops. You won’t shoot up my city.” Name-checking Snapple, he said that New Yorkers are made of the best stuff in the world, then introduced the Governor Kathy Hochul, who declared “a new day dawning, a whole new era of coöperation” between the city and the state: “We will fight for you, not fight each other anymore.”
The speeches ended, with a final thanks from Adams (“And to my family that’s here—they will all tell you, it’s hard to be a sibling of Eric Adams. Thank you! Congratulations, New York!”); the dancing, to “New York, New York” and “Celebration,” began. Hearing Sinatra reminded me uneasily of the Trump Inauguration; hearing Kool & the Gang reminded me of other historical moments. “Celebration” was played upon the return of the Iran hostages; before the fall of the Berlin Wall; and on the Space Shuttle. Here it was again, just as we prepared to change out of our intramural jerseys.