Taking a Smoke Break With Eric Adams, Who’s Still Living It Up as Mayor

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There are ghosts in Gracie Mansion.

“Hell yes! You hear them all the time,” New York City mayor Eric Adams replies immediately when I ask if the official mayoral residence, which was built in 1799, harbors any spirits. We’re sitting on the quaint, idyllic back porch of the mansion, located on a secluded waterfront slice of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, puffing Padrón cigars. (They’re about $23 each; when I offered to bring them to the interview, I was reminded that “as a public official, he is not permitted to accept gifts over $50.”) The first week in Gracie Mansion, the mayor continues, “I was like, ‘Listen, man, I’m not sleeping in here.’ You hear conversations. You hear movement. You hear doors close. They’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute, that man is crazy.’ But the reality is reality, you know?”

I don’t encounter any ghosts on the Thursday afternoon that I visit with Adams, although I do catch sight of a few oddities: a cat patrolling the backyard, a cape made of turkey feathers, and a strikingly large painting by the artist Justin Michael Wadlington that depicts Brooke Shields both as an adult and a child (alongside a tube of Colgate toothpaste). Adams has come to the interview directly from a New York City Housing Authority event in Harlem, where he appeared side by side with former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent to succeed Adams as mayor. Adams dropped out of the race in September, finally succumbing to the damage inflicted by a federal corruption case that was, controversially, dismissed shortly after the Department of Justice intervened. He later endorsed Cuomo, whom weeks before he had called a “snake and a liar” and was found to have sexually harassed multiple women in an investigation by the attorney general’s office. In Harlem, Adams offered Cuomo his full-throated support; Cuomo in turn pointed out that he and Adams are Democrats who support Israel and want to bulk up the police force. They also vociferously oppose Zohran Mamdani, who handily defeated Cuomo in the Democratic primary. (At the event, Adams called Mamdani a “communist.”)

In the year or so since Adams’s indictment, as his approval ratings sunk and the Mayoralty slipped out of his grasp, a strange thing happened: A certain strain of very online New York City–centric politics watchers began to celebrate him as a hilarious eccentric. They quoted a 2011 video in which he instructed parents on how to search their children’s room for contraband. They shared another video of him saying he aspires to be like Mahatma Gandhi. And perhaps most of all, they repeated his most inspired one-liner: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.”