Eric Adams, who can now add Gracie Mansion to his list of “New York residences” where he definitely lives, told reporters on Monday that he really won’t be doing much to redecorate once he moves in. “All I need is a mattress on the floor, that’s all I need,” Adams said, bringing the energy of all four of the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the city’s historic mayoral home. Adams also said that he plans to bring a cot into City Hall, similar to when he brought a mattress into his Borough Hall office, presumably because he will be working so hard that he won’t have time to go to, hypothetically, a co-op in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Michael Bloomberg took a $1 salary? Bill de Blasio only shopped at West Elm? Well, Adams will literally eat his dinner on the floor.
Reporters and voters have questioned whether or not Adams actually lives in the city, suspicions that only deepened after he gave reporters a tour of his “home” in Bedford-Stuyvesant that seemed like it was decorated solely by three people: Raymour, Flanigan, and Adams’s 25-year-old son (the combination of the leather sleigh-bed monstrosity in the middle of the room and the sneakers lined up on a sill will forever be burned into our brains). Adams has said before that he may split his time between Gracie Mansion and the brownstone, telling reporters over the summer, “I love my brownstone. I’m able to sit down and look at my art.” At Gracie Mansion, it seems, Adams will have neither art nor a place to sit. Still, as performative a move as it may be, there’s something fitting about a mayor representing a distinctly New York aesthetic: having no furniture because you spend all of your money on rent and all of your time in the office.
