Adams, the mayor who never sleeps
On a June night in the Bronx, I was on the balcony at the restaurant Zona De Cuba, peeking at a special menu for the plantbased mayor of New York, Eric Adams, who was soon to arrive.
Under the heading “Mayor Adams’ Corner” could be found “Eat My Veggies” and “Bite My Eggplant.” Not a fish in sight. I pulled out a notebook, getting ready to interview Adams. But Maxwell Young, the mayor’s communications director, announced, “We have to go.” Plans had changed. We ran out to the mayor’s motorcade and headed to the Upper East Side.
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, executionstyle. 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. He was arrested two days later.
It was Adams’ response to that sense of danger, his demand that the city support the police in the fight against crime, that won him election last year. Now the fight is his.
At a news conference on the night of the shooting, the mayor looked grim. “More guns in our city means more lives lost,” he said. “It means more babies crying as those who love them lie dead.”
The mayor had started that Wednesday with 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 they talked about lawsuits that 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 had a news conference with Sen. 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’ 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.
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’ poll numbers have dived, which the optimistic politician took with aplomb.
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.
“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.”
I asked Adams about his night rambles. “Remember, what is our title, the City That Never Sleeps,” he said. “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.’
The serious parts of the job are never far from his mind.
“I got to turn around the economy,” he said. “I have to make the city safe. I have to educate children and there’s no excuses. 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. Highlight where we are successful.” The press and critics, he complained, laughing, “only talk about, ‘Hey, did you eat a piece of fish?’”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”