UP TO YOU: Adrienne Adams makes the case for competence

Can the pragmatic, proficient, and progressive city council speaker defeat Andrew Cuomo?

In a mayoral contest pitting progressive firebrands against severely compromised political brawlers, can a veteran civic leader break through? Today in The Ink, journalist and author Nate Schweber ventures to City Hall Park to get a read on the candidacy of New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams as she tries to convince city voters, used to candidates who promise the world and aim to play on a national stage, to back her simply because she knows what she’s doing.

---

By Nate Schweber

At City Hall Park on Friday morning, there was a warm moment of connection as housing justice activist Winsome Pendergrass recalled a rent hike that threatened her home — if she hadn’t been willing to get a second job.

"I'm Jamaican, guess what?" Pendergrass said, locking eyes with mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams, the city council speaker who since 2017 has represented Southeast Queens.

The two women's faces spread into knowing grins.

"I got a third job!" Pendergrass said, drawing cheers from dozens of fellow activists gathered with City Hall as the backdrop.

Adams is similarly hardworking but is struggling to make the same sort of connection with voters. Dressed in a black-and-white houndstooth peacoat, she was surrounded at this Tenant Bloc press conference by competitors who are polling around and ahead of her. To Adams's left, standing straight and stern as a soldier, was State Senator Zellnor Myrie. To her left was comptroller Brad Lander, with whom she walked into the park, and seemed to have a rapport. Behind her, flashing the grin of a man running ahead of everybody around him, stood State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Other than the moment with Pendergrass, Adams stood out as the only one of the four to speak from a written script. Her remarks lacked the kind of zinger that made her first mayoral campaign speech, on Sunday, March 9, in front of an overflow audience inside Rochdale Village Shopping Center in Jamaica, Queens, so memorable.

“The last time a black woman ran was a few months ago, and we didn’t listen,” she had said, prompting whoops and screams. “Now we’re dealing with the consequences.”

But in the park, Adams, the city’s first Black city council speaker, aiming to become the city’s first woman mayor, delivered a platitude in the spirit of the themes of her campaign: experience and competence.

“As a public servant, I’ve always believed, if I can’t understand my neighbors’ lives,” she said, “I should never represent them.”