Eric Adams was once considered a rising star of the Democratic Party — but he’ll leave office in the New Year as more of a punchline.
Less than four years on from being sworn in as New York City Mayor, Adams has crashed out and announced he is abandoning his bid for a second term with just five weeks to go until Election Day.
“Although this is the end of my reelection campaign, it is not the end of my public service,” vowed Adams, who opted out of the Democratic Party primary earlier this year to run as an independent candidate.
“I will continue to fight for this city — as I have for 40 years, since the day I joined the NYPD to make our streets safer and our systems fairer,” he said. “The quest for justice is far from over. Inequality persists. Innocents still suffer. New Yorkers deserve better every single day, and until the last day of my term, I will fight for just that.”
It has been a tumultuous few years for the retired NYPD captain after being sworn in on Jan. 1 2022.
Adams has been dogged by scandal and accusations of corruption throughout his only term in office, and at the end of last year, he became the first sitting Big Apple mayor to be hit with federal criminal charges, later dropped by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
Criminal allegations aside, which Adams denies, he has also provided some truly head-scratching and meme-worthy moments both as mayor and in his previous elected position as Brooklyn Borough president.
The Independent looks back at his wild and wacky time in elected office…
The ‘Pied Piper of Brooklyn’
As Brooklyn borough president from 2013 through 2021, Adams believed he had come up with the solution to the problem that has become a signature of his administration — the war on rats.
In 2019, Adams proposed drowning the rodents in alcohol, submerging them in buckets of booze that sparked outcry among animal rights campaigners.
Not content with only a press release for the bonkers plan, Adams held a live demonstration in front of horrified reporters at Brooklyn Borough Hall, where he touted himself as the “pied piper” of Kings County.
It was unclear how the traps — derided as “cruel and barbaric” — would get to the root problem of the city’s rat epidemic.
In his role as mayor, Adams continued to do battle with the rodents and held the first “urban rat summit” in 2024. He appointed a “rat czar,” Kathleen Corradi, to “fight the real enemy” in April 2023.
Corradi stepped down from her role last week after leading an effort in the decline of rat sightings across the city.
Behold, the trash cans on wheels
Adams was roundly mocked by New Yorkers last summer after proudly hailing a “revolution” in waste disposal – a trash can on wheels.
The mayor unveiled the rollable, black plastic trash can at a press conference last year and declared the city was taking “the next step forward in our Trash Revolution.”
“It’s some kind of wheeled bin, American ingenuity knows no bounds,” one user wrote on X in response to a clip which showed Adams wheeling out the bin with Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind blasting in the background.
This was the mayor’s second trash-related gaffe of 2024, following the introduction of side-loading garbage trucks in the city in February. Though touted by officials as a “historic win in the war on trash,” the machines were decried as old news even to much smaller cities in America.
In June this year, Adams took it up a gear by rolling out the “Empire Bins” in front of Star Wars’ The Empire Strikes Back posters. The European-style bins hold 800 gallons of trash and residential properties in Manhattan’s Community District 9 are now required to use them.
Turkish romcom cameo
Years before Adams became embroiled in an investigation over potential bribes from Turkey, which he denied before the case was eventually dropped, the mayor starred in a Turkish romcom.
He had a cameo in a Turkish film shot in New York in 2017 called New York Masah.
In the scene, two Turkish actors asked the then-Brooklyn borough president in Turkish for political favors to open a restaurant and add a floor to their home.
Adams told the men he couldn’t understand what they were saying, but that “Brooklyn loves Turkey.”
9/11 gaffe
Adams has given a series of strange soundbites in media interviews over the years.
When asked to describe New York in one word during an interview in December 2023, he replied “New York” and then went on to give an unorthodox ode to his city.
“This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who is celebrating a new business that’s open,” Adams told local news outlet PIX11.
He also told Vanity Fair in 2021 that his favorite concert had been a performance in Brooklyn by Curtis Mayfield, during which a piece of lighting rig fell on the soul singer and paralyzed him.
Baptism at Rikers
Rikers Island, long plagued by neglect and violence, is slated for closure in August 2027 after a federal judge stripped the city of its control over the facility.
In 2024, in the midst of pressure to close the jail, Adams staged a photo-op where he was rebaptized alongside inmates inside the prison on Good Friday.
“Having been arrested and then elected mayor, I reminded these young men that where you are is not who you are,” Adams said. “For the first time in their lives, their mayor didn’t look down at them — I sat side by side with them to be cleansed and recommit ourselves to getting on the right path.”
There was more controversy this year over Rikers after Adams gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement permission to operate inside the jail, drawing lawsuits from city officials.
They accused him of crafting a “corrupt bargain” with President Donald Trump to expand his anti-immigration agenda in exchange for dropping a criminal corruption case against the mayor.
The move sparked uproar as people protested and called for Adams to resign.
But a Manhattan judge ruled allowing ICE to operate from Rikers was “null and void,” effectively killing the plans earlier this month.
Robocop fail in Times Square station
In 2022, Adams unveiled a new tool in his crime-fighting arsenal– a Robot police officer.
The Knightscope K5 security robot, which weighed about 400 pounds and moved at a maximum speed of three miles per hour, was introduced to reassure New Yorkers on the subway system.
The mayor said, however, that during a two-month trial period patrolling the Times Square subway station, the machine needed to be guarded by a real NYPD officer at all times.
It also couldn’t tackle the stairs.
The bot was quietly taken out of commission in December 2023 after critics rendered it an “obsolete toy.”
The mayor has promoted himself as a fierce proponent of veganism, though with one small problem – he is often spotted eating fish.
Adams embraced veganism around seven years ago after experiencing diabetic symptoms and has regularly promoted the vegan diet as healthier for both humans and the planet. However, he has frequently been seen eating fish, including at the upscale midtown Italian restaurant, Osteria La Baia, where is known to order “fish and salad.”
During his 2021 mayoral campaign, he invited members of the press to his apartment in Brooklyn, where reporters found both salmon and dairy in his fridge. Adams’ campaign later claimed that the items belonged to his son.
In response to accusations that he has been lying about his veganism, Adams has decried his critics as “the food police.”
