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The quotable, luxury-loving, perpetually mysterious mayor took New Yorkers on a wild and unpredictable ride.
Sept. 28, 2025, 4:58 p.m. ET
Eric Adams promised New Yorkers he would be unlike any mayor his city had ever seen.
On that — and often so little else — his word was never in doubt.
It can be said that no other mayor had his eyebrows threaded in public, claimed to take bubble baths with roses, mused openly about carrying a handgun in church; that no other mayor was equally likely to spend his evenings out with old police friends, known felons, bemused celebrities, homeless subway riders; that no other mayor left so much uncertainty about where he slept, what he ate, whether he really just said what he said, whose side he was on.
He was for law and order and reform and inertia and immigrants and crackdowns and swagger and nightlife and mornings and protesters and counterprotesters and possessive adjectives (“my workers,” “my teachers,” “my bond rating”) and official city attire that said “MAYOR” on as many surfaces as possible.
He was for the old ways — the clubhouse, the unions, the people who knew people — and the new ways, with their viral influencers and crypto bros and Big Ideas Guys who always seemed to have a contact in Florida.
He had two maxims that resonate most in hindsight.
“I’m perfectly imperfect,” Mr. Adams said often. True enough.
“I am you,” he often told voters. That one was more complicated.
In many ways, Mr. Adams’s choice to end his flailing re-election campaign was the most conventional thing he had done in some time. He was acceding, for once, to the laws of political gravity as he weighed how best to position himself for a post-mayoral future.
