New York elects Eric Adams as its second Black mayor

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Democrat Eric Adams, Brooklyn borough president, won in a landslide victory on Tuesday to become New York City’s second Black mayor.

Eduardo Munoz/AP

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Eduardo Munoz/AP

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The final weeks of the race between Adams and GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa were dominated by personal attacks and public name-calling. Adams repeatedly slammed Sliwa as a «racist» and called him a Mini-Me of Donald Trump. Sliwa, on the other hand, has called the 110th mayor-to-be an elitist, as well as Bill de Blasio 2.0.

Sliwa, 67, is a well-known, if odd and controversial fixture in the city whose run was considered by a former radio host colleague to be the latest in a series of media stunts to gain attention.

He is best known as the founder of the Guardian Angels, a volunteer anti-crime group that was established in the 1970s during an alarming period of high crime in the city. The group was welcomed by some New Yorkers who felt abandoned and unprotected by the city government at the time. But after surviving a horrific shooting in 1992, Sliwa confessed he’d made up stories of bogus attacks on members of the Guardian Angels and fabricated reports that he’d been abducted by off-duty transit police.

In his campaign, Sliwa hoped to appeal to voters with an array of proposals that included opposing vaccine mandates and critical race theory in public schools, increasing property taxes on Madison Square Garden, boosting the NYPD’s budget and footprint, and converting the mayor’s mansion into a cat and dog sanctuary.

As he went to the polls to vote for himself on Tuesday, Sliwa carried a small kitten in his arms, boasting it is the 17th feline he has adopted with his wife.

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