It was as much a spectacle as it was a farewell. A remix of Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A)” blasted through conference speakers with clips of outgoing Mayor Eric L. Adams speaking over the track, highlighting his uncanny ability to politick and grandstand as only he could.
The city’s second Black American mayor in its 400-year history walked down the grand staircase in the City Hall rotunda this week. One of the last times he will be able to do so this year with his title before a new administration takes over Jan.1.
Adams, 65, was leaving office with the exact same fanfare that he arrived with in Times Square at his inauguration in 2022. He maintained that despite his many windfalls and legal challenges over the course of four years, he and his remaining administration had been a success. However, Adams has increasingly expressed a weariness with public life and elected office, as well as a dislike for media pressure and scrutiny that will not be missed in the next stages of his life.
“For 40 years, I’ve been having people tell me about their leaks, their street repairs, their child not in school. For 40 years, I’ve fielded the problems of New Yorkers,” at his ethnic and community media roundtable on Monday, December 15. And finally, I can smoke a cigar, drink a single malt scotch, and won’t have to worry about anyone nagging and bothering me. And I cannot wait until January 1st.”
Adams’s ‘working class rags to mayoral riches’ story, of course, didn’t start four years ago. Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Adams was then raised in South Jamaica, Queens. His mother worked hard to support him and his five siblings while cleaning houses. Adams has said often that his family faced uncertainty, unsure if they would find an eviction notice or food on the table when they came home. And, that much of the childcare unfairly fell on his older sister.
“Mommy was betrayed, she had to work three jobs. My older sister was betrayed. She lost her whole childhood raising us. And I just took notes in my journal of things I wanted to fix. Things I wanted to get right,” said Adams about his childhood.
In 1975, Adams, then 15 years old, was beaten by police in a precinct basement for an alleged connection to gang activity, something that became a real turning point in his young life. Adams later served as an NYPD officer and supervisor, and an advocate who co-founded the organization 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care (100 Blacks). He was first elected to office as a senator for District 20 in Brooklyn from 2006 to 2013. Afterwards, he served as Brooklyn’s first Black American Borough President from 2013.
During the COVID19-crisis, New Yorkers from all backgrounds and income levels struggled to cope with economic insecurity, isolation, and loss. The nation and the elites were ready to write New York City off as dead, ravaged by crime and an insidious virus. Hope wavered.
Using his office as borough president, Adams was on the ground throughout 2020 tending to constituents dealing with the strife of the pandemic. He delivered personal protective equipment (PPE), hand sanitizer produced in Brooklyn’s own facilities, food, and supplies to Black and Brown communities in need; lobbied for vaccines to be delivered to the most vulnerable; delivered toys during the holiday season; and checked on the elderly in NYCHA housing. It was this good will and media coverage that cemented him as a promising candidate for Mayor. He announced his campaign in November 2020.
One lingering question everyone at the time had for Adams was why would a Black man want to be Mayor considering the city was literally and financially in shambles after the pandemic. Determined to live out his childhood dreams of fixing the city, Adams was adamant about his vision and plan for recovery, which included cleaning up the police department, and cracking down on crime.
“We turned this city around. I inherited a city that was dealing with real crime, gun violence, illegal vehicles on our streets, homeless people sleeping in tents and camps,” said Adams. “Many of us normalized the dysfunctionality of the city, and now that it’s functioning, you know, you didn’t realize what it was back then.”
It’s a point of pride for Adams, which he has consistently complained he does not get enough credit for.
Recovery from the pandemic and fighting crime has indeed been his day one message to New Yorkers, and Adams has succeeded by those measures. The city is thriving again as a tourism destination four years later with shootings and crime down overall, with the exception of grand larceny and sex crimes. His administration has shut down over 1,600 illegal cannabis shops, seized over 125,000 illegal vehicles, and controversially implemented an involuntary removal system to address street homelessness and mental illness. This program managed to connect about 8,900 homeless individuals living in the subways to shelters, and 1,200 have been connected to permanent affordable housing, said the city.
Adams’s tenure also included passing landmark zoning (City of Yes for Housing Opportunity), increasing housing production, lowering unemployment, securing $24 billion for Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBEs), overhauling public school reading and math curricula, expanding the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) to a record 100,000 slots, creating a permanent outdoor dining program, launching a “war on rats,” and reforming the city’s trash infrastructure.
However, the biggest disappointments many voters, particularly Black and Brown voters, have with Adams’s administration was his handling of the asylum seeker crisis that saw the arrival of approximately 245,000 migrants to the city, constant budget cuts, and unprecedented indictment and federal charges for bribery and campaign fraud. By 2023, his approval ratings had tanked.
Still, it was his subsequent relationship with President Donlad Trump and seemingly making a move to a more centrist/right political ideology in order to stave off prison time that turned many voters completely off. In fairness, Adams’ politics had always skewed more moderate because of his law enforcement background. But, he did unorthodox things like skip Martin Luther King Jr Day events to attend Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2025. Even more voters who had previously supported him during his indictment, began to waver. Adams said he doesn’t regret attending the inauguration and called these supporters “fair weather friends.”
“If Black folks abandoned me because I went to an event in D.C., not MLK, then they were never with me. They were never with me cause I’m not a part-time friend,” said Adams. “If they weren’t with me based on what I did in 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a leading voice who cared about ending police brutality. If they weren’t with me for dropping unemployment by 27% in the Black community, 24 billion dollars would go to M/WBE. “If they weren’t with me, after doing free high speed broadband in NYCHA with an overwhelming number of tenants are Black and Brown, of moving 24,000 illegal guns off our streets where the victims of those shooters were Black and Brown,” he continued. “If they weren’t with me for what I have done in small businesses and all that other stuff, but they abandoned me because I went to Washington, then they were never with me. And they need to be with whomever they think to do the job best. I did very well.”
Throughout his single term, Adams was inevitably compared to the late Mayor David Dinkins.
Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, was harshly criticized during his one-term over failing to get a handle on visceral racial tension and riots between Black and Jewish communities in the 1990s. He was seldom praised for introducing the concept of safe streets and community policing that led to a reduction in crime New Yorker’s still benefit from today. Regardless of their successes and failures in office, it cannot go without being acknowledged that both Dinkins and Adams faced a level of veiled bias, racism, and scrutiny while in office that other Mayors have never had to contend with.
“I’ve said this over and over again. It doesn’t matter if it’s one term, if it’s two terms, or it’s three terms.What do you do during those terms,” said Adams about not getting a second term in office. “History is going to show that the records we broke and what we did for working class people is just amazing.”
In a hypothetical second term, Adams stated he would have focused on enhancing language services, further reducing crime throughout the city, and improving mental health support. He claims he has at least “four dream jobs” to choose from after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration in 2026. Though he has not yet elaborated on the details of these offers.
“I turn on my GPS every morning, my God positioning satellite. He handles it,” said Adams about the future.
As far as his critiques of Mamdani, Adams deeply dislikes the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and called their policies “destructive” and “problematic.” He ranted Mamdani’s ideas about decriminalizing prostitution, Rikers Island, taxing the rich, addressing homelessness, running billionaires out of the city, and ending mayoral control of the schools. Adams also pushed back against the idea that he’s potentially sabotaging Mamdani when it comes to keeping his campaign promises, like freezing rent for rent-stabilized apartments, by stacking board appointments. “Those that are within my span of control, like the Rent Guidelines Board, I think it’s important that rent should be determined based on what the law says, based on the economics. We’re going to feel that board,” said Adams. “And so for people to say, ‘you should not be doing appointments right now.’ It’s like, what is this double standard? I’m the mayor until December 31st, and I’m going to carry out that function until December 31st.”
Movers have officially started emptying Adams’s office into trucks as the city heads into the holiday season.
“One thing’s true, you’re going to miss me,” said Adams to the press, with a hearty laugh.
To commemorate their momentous, and at times turbulent, time together, Adams and his team buried a time capsule with keepsakes in front of City Hall under a slab of sidewalk that had been removed on December 16, 2025. Adams was in good spirits in the press conference as he put an actual record decorated with his accomplishments on the cover into the capsule.
Then he took his final bow as a familiar beat played him out in the background.
Great story!