Eric Adams Sworn In as NYC’s 110th Mayor

By Yehudit Garmaise

Eric Adams was sworn in last night, in front of a “reduced” crowd of 15,000, in Times Square as New York City’s 110th mayor, just after the “ball dropped:” indicating that the year has turned to 2022.

Adams’ son, Jordan Coleman held an Adams’ family Bible, and the Hon. Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, provided Adams with his mayoral oath, in which he enthusiastically repeated, his obligations to “support the Constitution of the Unites States, the Constitution of the state of New York, and the Charter of the City of New York.”

“And I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of the mayor of the city of New York,” Adams said to a cheering crowd, “according to the best of my abilities: so help me G-d.”

Adams held high, as he did on his victorious election night, a framed photo of his mother Dorothy Adams, who passed away last year. Mrs. Adams and her husband Leroy, who was a butcher, had raised Adams and his five siblings in Bushwick.

Mrs. Adams, who worked as a house cleaner, carefully saved her earnings until she could move her family to nicer living quarters in South Jamaica, Queens.

“It’s just great when New York shows the entire country how we come back,” Adams said. “You know, we all lived through our ‘Pearl Harbor moments,’” Adams said. “It may be the Great Depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor; it may be COVID. But the reality is the resiliency of our city and our country, we show the entire globe what we’re made of.

“We’re unbelievable, this is an unbelievable city and trust me: we’re ready for a major comeback because this is New York.”

On Wednesday, Adams outlined his plan to beat COVID, in which he said he will keep in place the city’s private sector vaccine mandate, consider whether to add booster shots to the existing mandates, and decide by the spring on whether the city’s public-school children should be mandated to get their shots.

In addition, to fight COVID, his focus will remain on providing more opportunities for New Yorkers to get vaccinated and tested.

When asked on Wednesday about whether Adams is swayed at all by the many different voices trying to influence the new mayor on whether he will or will not work to “boost secular education in yeshivas,” Adams expressed a view in which he said he will remain “culturally sensitive” to the educational needs of all the children in city: including those who attend yeshivas, charter schools, and public schools.

Instead of obsessing over the educations that parents of yeshiva students choose for them, Adams’ incoming Department of Education (DOE) Commissioner David Banks, who is full of ideas and plans for the beleaguered public school system, sounds focused on attending to the 65% of Black and Brown students who are not reaching proficiency in reading English, Banks told CBS.

Instead of a 25-year-old approach called “balanced literacy” that Banks said “has not worked,” the new DOE commissioner calls for a return to a phonetic approach to teaching that was very effective in teaching writing and reading to public school students in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We’re going to ensure that our kids can read by the third grade,” Banks said. “That’s been a huge part of the dysfunction.”

Adams, a retired police captain who campaigned on his commitment to providing public safety, also inherits a city that continues to see increases in crimes and hate crimes.

On his first day as mayor today, Adams led a roll call outside the 103rd police precinct in Jamaica, Queens, with NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell.

The location, the first police precinct where he appeared as mayor, is highly symbolic for Adams, who when he was a teenager, along with his brother, was brutalized by police officers at the 103rd precinct.

Both Adams and his brother later joined the NYPD to change it from the inside.

“New York is back,” Adams said to a cheering crowd, moments after he was sworn in last night.

Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.