New York
Black Leaders on Why They’ve Turned Against Eric Adams
The speech by Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, in the closing week of Black History Month, seemed to be hitting all the right historical notes.
He outlined the lineage tying together Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Rosa Parks and Barack Obama and connected the dots between David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, and himself, the city’s second.
Then Mr. Adams reached for a comparison of biblical contortion.
“When Jesus was on the cross, he said, ‘God, forgive them for they know not what they do,’” Mr. Adams said earlier this week, drawing a murmur of recognition from the invited audience at Gracie Mansion. “All these Negroes who were asking me to step down, God, forgive them. Are, are you stupid?”
Mr. Adams, the only mayor in the city’s modern history to be charged in a federal indictment, has often framed his mayoralty in us-versus-them terms, portraying himself as a working-class Black leader subject to unfair, race-tinged criticism from the political elite in New York.
He has continued to do so in the face of assertions that he agreed to a quid pro quo with the Trump administration: In exchange for the Justice Department’s moving to drop his case, Mr. Adams would help the president enforce his immigration policies.
Yet as the mayor seeks to rally support behind his uphill re-election bid this year, many Black leaders in New York have turned against Mr. Adams, saying that his crises have not only jeopardized his future, but also threaten the political prospects of other Black leaders.
Donovan Richards, the borough president of Queens, warned that Mr. Adams could harm the Black community. “You can set people back,” he said, “if you don’t manage with integrity.”
Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council, called for the mayor to resign, saying the city had “endured enough scandal, selfishness and embarrassment.” Ms. Adams, who is not related to the mayor, has been drafted by other Black leaders and is now considering entering the mayoral race.
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the first Black woman to lead the State Senate, said it was time for the mayor to “move aside” for the sake of the city.
Crystal Hudson, a Black city councilwoman from Brooklyn who is considered a leading candidate to become council speaker next year, said that the actions of one Black person do not reflect on all Black people. But she nonetheless spoke of the “collective embarrassment” among Black elected officials over the mayor’s troubles.
Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of Democrats in the House, has withheld judgment on Mr. Adams but said that it appeared that the Trump administration had the mayor on a “short leash.” (His brother, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a professor at Ohio State University, was far less restrained in a social media post, using colorful terms to criticize the mayor.)
The disappointment among some Black leaders was heightened by the sense of how Mr. Adams might have squandered an opportunity to bolster New York’s growing base of Black political leadership.
Brian Cunningham, a Black assemblyman from Brooklyn who is the son of Jamaican immigrants, said that he and other Black leaders had been rooting for Mr. Adams to succeed even if they didn’t agree with him politically because of “what he symbolized” for the next generation.
“I don’t know if white voters, other voters who don’t identify as Black and even some Black voters, will trust a Black person with this level of power,” Mr. Cunningham said. “This is not what we wanted.”
Mr. Adams has seemed to make things worse through his efforts to have his federal corruption indictment dropped. By appearing to partner with President Trump, Mr. Adams, who denies wrongdoing, has left himself vulnerable to accusations that he has placed himself in a subservient position.
That image was reinforced after he participated in a joint Fox News interview with the federal border czar, Thomas D. Homan. At one point, Mr. Homan said that if Mr. Adams did not “come through” on his promise to cooperate with President Trump’s immigration agenda, “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying where the hell is the agreement we came to.”
One elected official after another condemned the interview as further proof that Mr. Adams had agreed to a quid pro quo, humiliating the city in the process. For some Black leaders, the moment carried a deeper heaviness.
“There is a particular sensitivity Black New Yorkers have watching Eric Adams be embarrassed on national television by Trump’s border czar,” said Zellnor Myrie, an Afro Latino state senator who is running for mayor and who represents Mr. Adams’s former district.
Mr. Myrie, the son of Costa Rican immigrants, had no trouble listing his range of emotions. “Shame that the second Black mayor in our city’s history can so obviously be played for a fool for the country to see, disappointment in his lack of integrity in this moment and pain knowing how far back this sets Black leadership.”
Mr. Richards likened the interview to a “reminder of the way white segregationists would talk to Black leaders” in the past. “As an African American, I felt disrespected,” he said. “I felt so belittled watching that man talk to him that way.”
Mr. Adams has even lost some support from among his most faithful supporters, members of the Black clergy. The Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the mayor’s most important allies, said that Mr. Adams and the city were being held “hostage” by President Trump.
A group of four pastors representing congregations in Brooklyn, Harlem and Southeast Queens, crucial parts of the mayor’s winning electoral coalition, said that Mr. Adams could “no longer be trusted to speak up, speak out, and fight for the Black and Brown communities across this city who need him most.”
Amaris Cockfield, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams, said that Black leaders are often held to unfair double standards that create false narratives and hinder the advancement of Black leadership.
“Many Black leaders in New York today stand on his shoulders,” Ms. Cockfield said. She then cited Mr. Adams’s work to improve education and policing, create one of the most diverse administrations in city history, award minority contracts and reduce Black unemployment.
“No mayor has done more for people of color in New York City history than Mayor Adams,” Ms. Cockfield said.
Not every Black elected leader has abandoned the mayor. Several Black state legislators, including Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, chairwoman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, wrote to Gov. Kathy Hochul to urge her not to exercise her constitutional power to remove Mr. Adams from office. The legislators cited “double standards” and said “our communities would never forget it” if Mr. Adams was forced out.
Ms. Bichotte Hermelyn, one of Mr. Adams’s strongest allies, said that the mayor’s willingness to find common ground with Mr. Trump should not be mistaken for fealty. “Eric having a conversation with the president doesn’t mean he believes in those things,” she said.
In a potential sign that Mr. Adams was not beholden to Mr. Trump, the administration recently announced that the city would sue the federal government to retrieve $80 million that had been suddenly snatched from its bank account. The money, allocated by Congress, was from dedicated Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to help pay for the influx of migrants to the city.
Still, there was broad skepticism about the mayor’s stance toward the president and his antagonistic attitude to his opponents.
The mayor was recently grilled about his use of the word “Negro” to apparently target Black leaders who criticized him. (Mr. Adams also used the term while speaking to congregants at a Black church in Queens in February, saying, “If you’re not going to be with the brother, Negro, shut up.”)
“So anybody who’s Black who calls for you to step down, they need help from God?” Curt Menefee, a Fox 5 anchor who is Black, asked the mayor during an interview on Fox 5 on Wednesday.
The mayor said he was referring to anyone who wanted his “flame to prematurely be extinguished” by calling for his resignation or dismissal.
“I have not been convicted of a crime,” Mr. Adams continued. “I’ve moved the city forward. I’ve done the job that New York is asking me to do. And so when you have those that are trying to usurp the power of the voting rights of the people, that is not democracy and God forgive them.”
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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