Eric Adams prides himself on staying out late. People sometimes refer to him as the “nightlife mayor” (though, in fact, that is a real position in the city that never sleeps, currently held by Jeffrey Garcia), and his line about “staying out late with the boys and getting up with the men” is repeated so frequently that I’ve seen it on T-shirts while walking around town.
What does Adams’s understanding of nightlife entail? Mostly it means going to expensive restaurants and bars — the club Zero Bond has effectively functioned as Adams’s after-hours office during his mayoral term — then mentioning those establishments by name as often as possible (and flaunting the B- and C-list celebrities he met there). Everyone who lives here knows at least a few New Yorkers like this, who are enthralled with the glamor of brushing shoulders with a celebrity and name-drop at every opportunity, who couldn’t possibly be paying for all those fancy dinners they post photos of on social media.
Yet there is a very different version of New York nightlife for many of the city’s residents, one that doesn’t make Page Six: the night shift, the workers who keep the city running and clean and healthy while the rest of us sleep. Speaking on a street corner of Jackson Heights, Queens, just before 1 a.m. on October 31, Zohran Mamdani was concerned with these New Yorkers.
“Less Zero Bond, more a mayor who visits nurses and hospitals after the sun is set, who speaks to EMS workers and bus operators working the late shifts and lifts the New Yorkers,” he said, flanked by a group of health care workers and taxi drivers.
While the candidate is happy to visit clubs and venues — a few nights later, Mamdani would go on a barhopping get-out-the-vote odyssey across Bushwick that stretched past 2 a.m. — Thursday night was about bringing politics to workers whose schedules make participation in the campaign difficult. In the final days before the election, there was a sense…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
