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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.” Meanwhile, Adams himself seemed to feel a new liberation, leaning into the role of jesting city booster. Not that his calculating—some might say vindictive—political instincts necessarily deserted him. The day after we meet, the New York Post reports that he may be planning a move to block Mamdami’s ability to institute a citywide rent freeze, a key campaign promise. Adams isn’t the first politician to be adopted as a kind of mascot by the same irony-afflicted, hard-tweeting people who denounce their politics—the disgraced former congressman George Santos is treated as a diva, and even young progressives are sharing Trump memes and doing impressions of him for laughs. I was curious to meet the man behind the mayoral sash. Was the real Eric Adams as charming as some of us have made him out to be? Adams certainly sees himself that way. It’s obvious that he likes to be liked, and he clearly relishes the opportunity to kick back with a cigar and answer even my most frivolous questions. For example—Dimes Square. Has the Mayor heard of it? Eric Adams: No, no, no, no. Tell me about that. GQ: It is kind of a hip, young person, little enclave of Lower Manhattan. Eric Adams: Dime Square? GQ: Dimes Square. Clandestino, Le Dive. These are the bars that are kind of the face of— Eric Adams: Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. GQ: You've never been? Eric Adams: No. So I'll do that tonight in memory of the interview. He’s also more than happy, in between blowing experienced plumes of cigar smoke, to give the origin story of his legendary “All my haters” bar. I was in a restaurant. It was a place called One Fish Two Fish on Madison Avenue and 90-something Street. It was low budget. If you wanted to bring your shorty somewhere in Manhattan, you could do that. There was a waiter that I asked to send back a dish because it was cold, and every time he came back to the table, he would step on my foot. He did it the first time, I said it was an accident. Then like three times he did it. I said, “You know what, this guy's a hater.” Let your hater be your waiter. No matter how angry he was, I'm sitting down at the table of success. Adams rather impressively fills out his navy blue suit, which he’s wearing without a tie. He is, unquestionably, in the top percentile in terms of fitness among 65-year-old men. He begins every day at six in the morning. His restaurant-style kitchen is full of fruits and healthy foods like chia seeds, wheat germ, and pumpkin seeds, all organized nicely into labeled Tupperware containers. From here he’s headed to an event for “NYC’s disability community and allies” in the mansion’s backyard. His energy is seemingly unflagging, and if the fact that he will soon need to vacate Gracie is weighing on him, he shows no sign of it. There is a lightness in his step and a lilt in his outer-borough accent. Our conversation ranges far and wide. Adams, who was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, tells me about making his own skateboard as a child, and how he once watched his father fight a rat inside their apartment, using a piece of a disassembled bed frame. I ask about the shorty in the Rockaways that he used to jump the subway turnstile for, and he says, “She probably got married and disappointed that she didn't stay around.” He justifies his very active nightlife—he’s famously a fixture at Zero Bond, and names Casa Cipriani, Chez Margaux, and Osteria la Baia as favorites—by saying, “You got to test the product.” He makes somewhat outrageous claims. “When I first became mayor, people were living in trees,” Adams tells me. “They were living on the side of highways. They were living in cardboard boxes and campers. You don't see that anymore.” Adams is not the type to fret over getting everything exactly correct, or what the masses think of him. “I know I'm not perfect,” he says. “Matter of fact, I'm perfectly imperfect. I make so many mistakes, but I don’t take any of this personal.” Half the charm (and, perhaps, part of the worry) of his mayoralty is that Adams can seem like a tourist in his own city. He has a sometimes clumsy but seemingly deeply felt love for New York’s many cultures, eagerly attending parades, trying his hand at dances, and donning soccer jerseys. He once even tweeted that he must be a little bit Dominican. “When you interact in an authentic way, people are like, wow,” he explains. “So if I go to a Dominican restaurant, they're like, wow. When I look at my Chinese community, my Nepalese community, East Indian community, they just enjoy that. Hey, I came in with this belief that this guy is going to be aloof, and all of a sudden he's laughing at himself. He's comfortable, he's relatable. It just allows you to embrace it, and I love different cultures! I love different food!” Adams carries the idea into a conversation we have about the Knicks’ chances for this season. “Their synergy is growing,” he says, promptly launching into a monologue about how being at Madison Square Garden always reminds him of The Karate Kid: “I always think about the moment when he was washing the car and then he didn't realize he was learning karate. That's how I feel about sports. You’re looking across the stadium, and you realize, Hey man. I'm hanging out with this Chinese guy. I'm hanging out with this African-American and Hispanic guy. We could all root for the same team.” Asked to reflect on his proudest accomplishments in office, the Mayor names public safety, his claim that “we put $30 billion back in the pockets of working class people” by creating affordable housing and restructuring or forgiving debt (he puts a lyrical spin on that: “I cannot bring down the price of bread, but I could put bread in your pocket”), and creating opportunities in city government for people from different ethnic backgrounds. “If you spoke in your native tongue, or broken English, they interpret that as a level of intelligence,” Adams says, running through a list of Filipino, Dominican, and East Asian public servants that he appointed to high-profile roles. “I just shattered those myths, and that was crucial to me.” I also ask Adams for his thoughts on Cuomo, Mamdani, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, and what he would like to see each of them do if elected. Cuomo: “I think that Andrew has a lot of managerial talent and he has to use that talent to go after the feeders of systemic poverty. Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu stated, ‘We spend a lifetime pulling people out of the river. No one goes upstream and prevents them from falling in in the first place.’ Cities are failing their residents in general, but specifically Black, brown, and working class people.” Mamdani: “I'd like to see him be honest with New York because he had a good message of affordability. But elected officials used to promise my mom and my family stuff and then don't deliver it. It's hard on them. I think that he could utilize his skills to bring people together. He's a social media influencer. Now he has to take that social media influencer ability and communicate with young people about the realities of life. Because life is rewarding, but it's hard. If all you're going to tell the young people is, ‘Listen, I'm just going to give you everything for free,’ that's just not life.” Sliwa: “I'd like to see him get rid of that red beret. Let's start with that. Come on. He's been wearing that for about 50 years now. I would like for him to understand that being mayor is not a comedy act and you can't just give nice skits. This is real work. I would like for him to change his persona to believe that a smart answer or a quick-witted answer is not how you govern a city of this complexity. I would like to see him surround himself with people who think differently from him, who are willing to give him good advice and build on it.” Afternoon has turned to evening, and Adams needs to review his opening remarks for the event. He’s in good spirits, maybe riding a slight Nicaraguan cigar buzz. As we say our goodbyes in the Gracie Mansion foyer, I watch as the mayor confers with his security detail, slings his backpack over his shoulder, and disappears into his vast, ghost-filled home, singing himself a jaunty little tune.
