Mayor Adams sat down with Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday, marking their first face-to-face since Mamdani won last month’s race for City Hall — and the meeting appears to have been cordial despite long-running tensions between the two men.
“It went well,” Mamdani told reporters after meeting privately with Adams at Gracie Mansion for just over an hour. “I appreciated the conversation that I had with Mayor Adams and his team, and we focused on how to make this as smooth as possible of a transition and how to continue to serve New Yorkers.”
While acknowledging he has “obviously made my critiques clear” of the outgoing mayor, Mamdani offered praise for some Adams administration initiatives, including the expansion of trash containerization programs and the “City of Yes,” a rezoning plan aimed at facilitating more housing development citywide.
“There are good things that this administration has done. I think these are the two examples,” Mamdani said.
A spokesman for Adams, who’s leaving office Dec. 31, said the meeting was about making clear to Mamdani that “our team is here to help ensure a smooth transition so that he can hit the ground running on day one.”
“Mayor Adams took the opportunity to discuss some of the programs and initiatives he has felt have been successful over the last four years, as well as some of the potential issues the incoming mayor may face once in office,” the spokesman, Fabien Levy, said. He declined to elaborate on them.
Before the meeting, Adams said at an unrelated press conference in Harlem he planned to “turn over a document of our transition” to Mamdani. An Adams administration source familiar with the meeting said later the document includes details about “the state of everything” at the city government’s various agencies.
Also on hand for the Gracie Mansion confab was Randy Mastro, Adams’ first deputy mayor, and Camille Joseph-Varlack, his chief of staff, according to Levy. From the Mamdani side, Dean Fuleihan, his incoming first deputy mayor, and Elle Bisgaard-Church, his incoming chief of staff, were also in attendance.
It’s standard practice for outgoing mayors to meet with their successors as part of the transition process, though they often happen sooner after the election. Mamdani was elected mayor on Nov. 4.
Tuesday’s meeting follows a highly-charged election campaign that saw both men level sharp criticism at one another.
In late September, Adams abandoned his own bid for reelection as he faced record-low approval ratings amid fallout from his federal corruption indictment. He then endorsed Mamdani’s chief mayoral race opponent, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and railed harshly against Mamdani, blasting him as “the king of the gentrifiers” and a “silver spoon” socialist.
Since Mamdani’s election, Adams’ administration has also taken steps to try to block some of the incoming mayor’s campaign promises. For instance, Adams’ team has said he plans to make new appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board in an effort to block the incoming mayor’s pledge to freeze rent for the city’s 2 million stabilized tenants.
The democratic socialist Mamdani, for his part, spent time on the campaign trail depicting Adams as a corrupt politician of the past.
“While New Yorkers struggle to afford the most expensive city in America, Eric Adams and his administration are too busy tripping over corruption charges to come to their defense,” Mamdani said in August after the mayor’s ex-chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, was indicted for a second time. “Corruption isn’t just about what a politician gains, it’s about what the public loses.”
Still, at the Harlem appearance before their Gracie meet, Adams said he was confident Mamdani will try to duplicate some of his administration’s efforts.
“I think the best level of appreciation is duplication, and I think they’re going to duplicate a lot of things that we’ve done,” he said.
Asked after the meeting if he agrees with that characterization, Mamdani did not answer directly.
Mamdani did tell reporters he still hasn’t decided whether he’s going to move into Gracie Mansion full-time once he takes office Jan. 1. “That is a decision I haven’t yet made,” he said.
As part of the transition, Mamdani’s team angered Adams administration officials last week by delivering a list to the mayor’s office with the names of more than 170 City Hall employees that will be fired on Jan. 1 if they don’t resign before then. It’s common for new mayors to hire their own staff, but last week’s missive was seen as unusual in its scope, given that it targeted nonpolitical appointees, some of whom are holdovers from the de Blasio and Bloomberg administrations.
“We weren’t even specifically appointed by the mayor. We just work for the city overall and figured we would be safe,” one axed City Hall staffer told the Daily News, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Since Mamdani’s election win, Adams has been on several taxpayer-funded overseas trips to Israel and Uzbekistan, jaunts that have at least in part been related to his effort to line up a new job, sources familiar with the matter said. He’s considering taking a job with an Israeli construction company, and there’s still a possibility President Trump could appoint him to a U.S. ambassadorship, sources say.
Adams is expected to head on another trip — to New Orleans — this week.
