Democrat Eric Adams’s victory last week in New York garnered the type of post-election headlines one would expect—second Black mayor in the city’s history, a former police captain who addressed public safety and inequality. But the Brooklyn borough president’s win also gave way to copy unlike any mayor-elect in recent memory, with write-ups of his exclusive NoHo after-party in New York and Bloomberg and Choire Sicha proclaiming on Curbed, “Welcome to the Boom Boom Room of Chaos, New York City!” Inside high-end member’s-only club Zero Bond, CEOs mingled with celebrities, including comedian Chris Rock, Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker, and rapper Ja Rule, who was featured in Instagram dispatches from Adams’s son. (Not every outlet got past the velvet rope: A reporter from the New York Post was reportedly allowed in, while The New York Times had no luck.) “We’re trying to get our nightlife up and operating,” Adams told NY1 the next morning when asked about the appropriateness of partying with the city’s boldface names, a firmly unapologetic stance to expectations of how a mayor should behave that has reporters excited for what’s to come.
“Covering New York City Hall might be the most fun job in American journalism,” said Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey, who did so for The Wall Street Journal before switching to national politics in 2016. “I think it’s going to be a particularly rollicking ride under this mayor.” Politico’s Tara Palmeri, a former Page Six writer turned political reporter, was early to Adams’s upscale tastes and nighttime escapades. Reporting on the incoming mayor in this space is perhaps “a blending of my two schools,” she says, given “he’s hanging out with the stars of the gossip column,” and “the kinds of regulars that talk to Page Six and that represent nightlife” have “suddenly become pseudo political players.”
The incoming mayor has been spotted breaking bread with everyone from Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis at Rao’s to Nets star James Harden and famous TikTok sisters at Zero Bond—an eclectic mix that’s fitting for the enigmatic politician, a Monaco-vacationing, vegan night owl who has referred to himself as a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” There’s been confusion about where Adams actually lives and what an Adams administration will actually entail. The Times couldn’t get a clear answer after talking to 130 friends, aides, and other associates, with former New York governor David Paterson remarking, “This should be a very interesting experience for us, having him as mayor.”
More than simply gossip fodder, Palmeri told me, Adams’s relationship to the nightlife scene is about proximity to power. “It’s all a matter of who has the mayor’s ear, and he’s spending time with some really influential people—the billionaires at Zero Bond, but also these P.R. types.” She added, “There’s a certain currency” in knowing “where can you catch one of the most powerful people in New York City, who is he spending time with, and how frequently is he going there? Turns out, all the time.”
Tao Group CEO Noah Tepperberg, for one, welcomes Adams keeping later hours than his predecessor. “This is exciting. You have a mayor that realizes what makes the city tick,” said Tepperberg, a Zero Bond member who has met Adams multiple times through P.R. executive Ronn Torossian, his friend since their days at Stuyvesant High School. Torossian, an unofficial adviser and confidant to Adams—and the person who brings him to the private club as a guest—organized the victory party at Zero Bond. In addition to Tepperberg, Torossian has introduced Adams to other nightlife power players such as Kamal Hotchandani, the CEO of Haute Living. “It’s been very refreshing” to have a mayor “who has the back of hospitality” and is committed to “really restoring the city back to one that never sleeps,” said Hotchandani, who has spent time with Adams and Torossian at venues like Zero Bond and in September helped arrange the star-studded party at Casa Cipriani after the Met gala—an event, Hotchandani says, that he’d encouraged Adams to attend. “I think it’s a good idea that you come by for 30 minutes,” he remembers telling Adams during a private dinner earlier that month.
“Almost all of these trendy places have given him the ability to have quiet meetings with people,” said one real estate executive and Adams donor, emphasizing that “the privacy that exists in a place like Zero Bond”—where the policy is “you can’t approach anyone unless they invite you to approach, and you can’t take pictures of anyone in the club unless the owner allows you to do that, which is almost never”—is nearly “impossible” to find elsewhere in the city. “Which is also one of the reasons why you have very high-profile people that go there on a regular basis…and as you can imagine, many of them want to interact with the next mayor of New York.” Adams has reportedly schmoozed into the early morning at the club alongside Paris Hilton, Equinox CEO Harvey Spevak, and Paolo Zampolli, the tabloid fixture and onetime modeling agent who reportedly introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump.
Adams rubbing elbows with the bottle-service crowd should be a gold mine for New York tabloids. “There is no past mayor who was youthful, who enjoyed the nightlife,” says political consultant George Arzt. Most mayors went out at night in the context of events—though Arzt notes Rudy Giuliani was known to frequent cigar bars (“I mean, God only knows”)—but generally “eleven o’clock came and they used to pick up The Times,” says Arzt, a former adviser to Mayor Ed Koch and, before that, a longtime City Hall reporter. Adams, Arzt tells me, is “a fresh breeze into City Hall” whom Arzt expects to be “a great deal of fun” and “accessible, which is what every reporter in room 9 will want.”
While Bill de Blasio promoted the nighttime economy by establishing the Office of Nightlife, he hardly had his own finger on the pulse of the scene: Best known for spending mornings at the Park Slope YMCA and being something of a homebody, de Blasio instead appointed a so-called “nightlife mayor” to make the rounds. Now, with Adams poised to be an actual nightlife mayor, some are wondering whether there’s even a need for a separate czar. “When he becomes mayor, there will be somewhat of a crimp in his style because of the demands of the job,” said Arzt, but “Eric enjoys people. He’s not going to give that up for anything.”
The city’s biggest tabloid, however, doesn’t appear to be taking advantage of Adams’s penchant for the club scene—perhaps because, as Palmeri has reported, Post owner Rupert Murdoch is in Adams’s corner (while the mogul’s ex-wife, Wendi Deng, was among the partygoers on election night). “I used to work at the New York Post; I know they would have covered these stories,” Palmeri told me, observing that the tabloid praising Adams for his “nightlife stamina” is “just not the typical tone of the Post”—a paper, she noted, that “happens to relish in covering people’s personal lives” and whose “bread and butter” is mayoral politics. Arzt remarks that while Adams’s relationship to nightlife may be “a gold mine” for the Post, he’s also a centrist—and was briefly a Republican—with whom Murdoch shares some views. So the tabloid is giving him a honeymoon. Does he think it will last? “The honeymoon always, always ends,” Arzt says. “The more relevant question is how long will the honeymoon be. Koch’s lasted four years—into his second term.”
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