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The Big Stakes and Deep Weirdness of the Last Days of New York City's Mayoral Race
The future of the country’s largest city is on the line. This week, campaign reporting focussed on a candidate’s refrigerator.By Eric Lach
June 12, 2021
On Wednesday morning, Eric Adams, the front-runner in New York City’s mayoral race, stood facing reporters outside a row house he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, tears occasionally welling in his eyes. “How foolish would someone have to be to run to be the mayor of the city of New York and live in another municipality?” Adams asked.
He’s not the only one asking. The previous day, a pair of Politico reporters, Sally Goldenberg and Joe Anuta, published an article detailing their attempts to find out where, exactly, Adams rests his head at night. The reporters compared official records to Adams’s public statements and conducted a stakeout of Brooklyn Borough Hall, where Adams works as borough president. Goldenberg and Anuta found a lot of inconsistencies and general weirdness. Adams’s voter-registration file, for instance, lists his address as the first-floor apartment of the Bed-Stuy row house, but other documents list a tenant living on that floor. Last summer, state records show, Adams listed a different apartment in Brooklyn as his address when he made a political donation to a member of the State Assembly. (His campaign said that, years ago, Adams signed over his share in that apartment to a former girlfriend.) There’s also a co-op in an apartment tower in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that Adams co-owns with his current girlfriend. Before the pandemic, Adams would occasionally sleep in Fort Lee, a campaign representative told Politico, but he hadn’t been there in months. The Politico reporters spent several recent nights observing comings and goings from Borough Hall—as did operatives working for rival mayoral campaigns, apparently—and, several times, they spotted Adams entering the building late at night and not leaving until early the following morning.
What was going on here? Adams had garnered friendly headlines in the early spring of 2020, after the pandemic hit, by announcing that he was bedding down in his office in Borough Hall. (He told New York magazine that sleeping in his office helped him stay “in the game-time mind-set,” and that after 9/11, when he was still an N.Y.P.D. officer, he had spent time sleeping in his precinct house.) But the situation was portrayed as a temporary one, brought about by the extraordinary work demands created by the covid crisis. Was it still the case that the potential next mayor of Gotham, despite owning multiple properties, was sleeping in his government office? Or, worse—was he secretly a New Jerseyan?
Adams’s rivals pounced. “WTF?!?!” Maya Wiley’s campaign manager said in a statement. “Why won’t you release your EZPass records?” Andrew Yang’s co-campaign managers asked. (Yang’s response was particularly aggressive; he has been criticized by Adams and others for spending time during the pandemic in his second home, in upstate New York. That criticism often bled into the suggestion that Yang was not a “real” New Yorker, which Yang, reasonably, considered a racist allusion to his Asian heritage.)
June 12, 2021
On Wednesday morning, Eric Adams, the front-runner in New York City’s mayoral race, stood facing reporters outside a row house he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, tears occasionally welling in his eyes. “How foolish would someone have to be to run to be the mayor of the city of New York and live in another municipality?” Adams asked.
He’s not the only one asking. The previous day, a pair of Politico reporters, Sally Goldenberg and Joe Anuta, published an article detailing their attempts to find out where, exactly, Adams rests his head at night. The reporters compared official records to Adams’s public statements and conducted a stakeout of Brooklyn Borough Hall, where Adams works as borough president. Goldenberg and Anuta found a lot of inconsistencies and general weirdness. Adams’s voter-registration file, for instance, lists his address as the first-floor apartment of the Bed-Stuy row house, but other documents list a tenant living on that floor. Last summer, state records show, Adams listed a different apartment in Brooklyn as his address when he made a political donation to a member of the State Assembly. (His campaign said that, years ago, Adams signed over his share in that apartment to a former girlfriend.) There’s also a co-op in an apartment tower in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that Adams co-owns with his current girlfriend. Before the pandemic, Adams would occasionally sleep in Fort Lee, a campaign representative told Politico, but he hadn’t been there in months. The Politico reporters spent several recent nights observing comings and goings from Borough Hall—as did operatives working for rival mayoral campaigns, apparently—and, several times, they spotted Adams entering the building late at night and not leaving until early the following morning.
What was going on here? Adams had garnered friendly headlines in the early spring of 2020, after the pandemic hit, by announcing that he was bedding down in his office in Borough Hall. (He told New York magazine that sleeping in his office helped him stay “in the game-time mind-set,” and that after 9/11, when he was still an N.Y.P.D. officer, he had spent time sleeping in his precinct house.) But the situation was portrayed as a temporary one, brought about by the extraordinary work demands created by the covid crisis. Was it still the case that the potential next mayor of Gotham, despite owning multiple properties, was sleeping in his government office? Or, worse—was he secretly a New Jerseyan?
Adams’s rivals pounced. “WTF?!?!” Maya Wiley’s campaign manager said in a statement. “Why won’t you release your EZPass records?” Andrew Yang’s co-campaign managers asked. (Yang’s response was particularly aggressive; he has been criticized by Adams and others for spending time during the pandemic in his second home, in upstate New York. That criticism often bled into the suggestion that Yang was not a “real” New Yorker, which Yang, reasonably, considered a racist allusion to his Asian heritage.)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-big-stakes-and-deep-weirdness-of-the-last-days-of-new-york-citys-mayoral-race
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