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    On Live TV, Guardian Angels Tackle Man Sliwa Misidentified as Migrant

    “We’ve got to take back 42nd Street,” Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the anti-crime group, said on “Hannity” as the Guardian Angels pushed a man to the ground.The Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa was being interviewed live from Times Square on Tuesday night by the Fox News host Sean Hannity when their exchange took a startling turn.The topic was what both men seemed to agree was a migrant-fueled wave of crime and chaos that they claimed had overtaken New York amid a surge of arrivals into the city from the southern border over the past two years.Suddenly, Mr. Sliwa had a prime-time example. As he spoke, the half-dozen red-jacketed Angels flanking him slipped out of the frame.“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys right here on the corner of 42nd and Seventh where all this is taking place,” Mr. Sliwa said, pointing off camera.“Can you pan the camera?” Mr. Hannity asked his cameraman.The cameraman swung around and captured the Angels confronting a slightly built man in a hooded sweatshirt, throwing him to the ground and putting him in a headlock.“He is out of control,” Mr. Sliwa said as the camera turned away and Mr. Hannity shifted to criticizing President Biden over his administration’s border policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Election Day Silver Linings!

    Walking to the polls on Election Day, I suddenly had a vision of all my neighbors trying to break out of the doldrums by voting for Curtis Sliwa for mayor.Sliwa was the nominee of the desperate, massively outnumbered New York City Republican Party, and while he has plenty of conservative positions on issues like mandatory vaccinations (no), he is better known as an animal lover who has 17 cats in a studio apartment he shares with his wife.On Tuesday, Sliwa’s big moment involved an attempt to bring a kitty into the polling site. It was one of several dust-ups between the candidate and the election workers that ended with his ballot jamming the scanning machine.At about that point I suddenly wondered: What if this guy wins? It was not an outcome most people had ever considered, for obvious reasons. But gee, the country was in such a foul mood, the status of the Biden administration so subterranean. The image of Congress wasn’t really much better than that apartment full of cats. What if, just to show their profound irritation, the voters went Sliwa?Didn’t happen. The winner, Eric Adams, a Democrat, is a former police officer who ran a smooth campaign about his plans for reforming crime-fighting in New York. Early results suggest Sliwa will be very, very lucky to get a third of the vote. I am sharing this because I know a lot of you need some happy political news to tell friends over the weekend.Some Possible Post-Election Conversational Strategies for Liberal Democrats:— Find a few next-generation stars to burble over, even if they just got elected to your town’s zoning board of appeals.— Funny stories about other cats.— Ranting about Joe Manchin.Perhaps you noticed that, just before Election Day, Senator Manchin called a press conference to announce that he wasn’t sure he could support Joe Biden’s social services program because of his concern about the “impact it’ll have on our national debt.”Given Manchin’s super-status as a Democratic swing vote, we certainly have to pay attention to his fiscal conservatism and obsession with the national debt. After we stop to muse — just for a minute — that his state, West Virginia, gets about $2.15 in federal aid for every dollar its residents send to Washington.But back to the positive side of the elections — or at least the less-depressing-than-originally-perceived side. That big governor’s race in Virginia, won by the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, was maybe the worst blow of the evening for Democrats. But when you’re having those dinner table conversations — or, hey, drinking heavily at a bar — be sure to point out that the loser, Terry McAuliffe, is a former Virginia governor. His state seems to have a real problem with chief executives who hang around, and there’s a law that makes it impossible for a sitting governor to run for re-election. McAuliffe was trying for a comeback after his enforced retirement — a feat that’s been achieved only once since the Civil War.Didn’t work. Will you be surprised to hear that Donald Trump is taking credit?The other governor’s race, in New Jersey, was way more dramatic than expected, with incumbent Philip Murphy fighting off a surprisingly strong challenge from Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman. Very possible this one could still be in recount purgatory during the holidays.I really hope Murphy, a rather fearless leader in the war against Covid, is not being punished for vaccine mandates and mandatory school masking, which Ciattarelli complained about endlessly. Or that the irritable voters wanted to get back at their governor for remarking, a few years ago, that if you’re a person whose only concern is tax rates, New Jersey is “probably not your state.”Ciattarelli reportedly spent about $736,000 running that quote in a 10-day broadside of ads. But I’ll bet most New Jersey voters accept the governor’s view, however grudgingly. Almost all of them must have some state concerns besides taxes — schools? Street lighting? The end of black bear hunting?Fortunately, you won’t be expected to argue that Tuesday was one of the great days in the history of American democracy. Otherwise, some detail-oriented colleague might mention that a House district near Columbus was won by the chairman of the Ohio Coal Association.Yeah, and Minneapolis failed to pass its public safety program. It seems that Seattle will end up with a new law-and-order mayor rather than criminal justice reform.On the other hand, there were loads of stories to remind you how our country, for all its multitudinous failures to live up to the American dream, still also manages to come through. A lot. Boston elected its first woman and first person of color as mayor. Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Kan., each elected its first Black mayor. Cincinnati chose an Asian American mayor, and Dearborn, Mich.’s next mayor is going to be an Arab American Muslim.Cheer up, people. We made it through another election. Take the holidays off from politics if you want. Just ignore the new flood of emails asking you to donate to some worthy candidate’s quest for a House seat in 2022. What’s the rush? You’ll hear from them again next week. And the week after that. …The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Eric Adams, Mayor-Elect

    Good morning. Eric Adams, who found a place in New York City’s political consciousness as a reform-minded police officer more than 20 years ago, was elected mayor. And scroll down to meet some deep-sea look-alikes that could scare you — unless you like sharks.“New York has chosen one of its own,” Eric Adams said on election night. “I am you.”James Estrin/The New York TimesAdams claimed victory as New York City’s second Black mayor — he will take office 32 years after the first, David Dinkins — and immediately called for unity.“Today we take off the intramural jersey and we put on one jersey — team New York,” he declared during his victory celebration. He said his administration would focus on the communities of color and the poor and working-class New Yorkers who helped send him to City Hall.Adams, the Brooklyn borough president since 2014, will face monumental tests as New York addresses the continuing consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. There are persistent problems, like homelessness and affordable housing, and new ones, like an economy redefined by remote work. Adams will also be under pressure to drive down the crime rate and build jails in each borough after closing the Rikers Island complex, a move he said that he supported during the campaign.Adams acknowledged the challenges, referring to a “three-headed crisis” — “Covid, crime and economic devastation” — in his victory speech. But he also said it was neighborhoods like those in southeast Queens, where he grew up, that needed his attention as mayor.“New York has chosen one of its own,” he said. “I am you.”Adams’s victory will send a center-left administration to City Hall after eight years under Mayor Bill de Blasio, who tried to steer a more populist, leftward course — and the new political landscape will be complex. Brad Lander, elected New York City’s comptroller on Tuesday, appears to be to Adams’s left on several issues, among them policing.But Albany, a perennial concern for mayors, looks less fraught than when de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo were sparring partners. Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who replaced Cuomo in August and joined his victory celebration on Tuesday, have promised to have a productive relationship.The Associated Press called Adams’s victory minutes after polls closed. He defeated Curtis Sliwa, who ran as a Republican presenting his main qualifications as the decades he has spent patrolling the subways and leading the Guardian Angels, the beret-wearing vigilante group he founded.Sliwa conceded the race, saying he pledged support to Adams “if we’re going to coalesce.”How they votedAdams, the son of a working-class single mother, carried a framed photograph of her under his arm when he voted in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on Tuesday. Sliwa took one of his cats to his polling place on the Upper West Side.But Gizmo — who lives with Sliwa, Sliwa’s wife, Nancy, and 16 other rescue cats — was denied entry. Sliwa, already angry about Gizmo, became angrier when election officials told him to take off a red jacket with his name on it, an apparent violation of electioneering regulations. “Arrest me,” Sliwa shouted.Then his ballot jammed in the scanner, and the device had to be repaired. And then an election worker used an expletive while asking him to leave.In other New York City racesManhattan district attorney — The winner was Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee. A former federal prosecutor, he will inherit the high-profile investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.City comptroller — Brad Lander, a Democrat and a three-term City Councilman from the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, defeated Daby Carreras, who ran as a far-right Republican aligned with the Trump wing of the G.O.P.City Council — Shahana Hanif, a Bangladeshi American, became the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council. She won a district that covers Park Slope, Kensington and parts of central Brooklyn.New Jersey governorThe incumbent governor, Philip D. Murphy, was narrowly trailing a relatively obscure Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, and when the vote-counting ended for the night the race was too close to call. A mainstream liberal with ties to the White House, Mr. Murphy is now staking his hopes for victory on a strong performance in several solidly Democratic areas where votes were slow to report.Mr. Ciattarelli appeared to benefit from robust turnout in rural and conservative-leaning areas of the state while making inroads in denser areas such as Bergen County, the populous suburb of New York City.WeatherIt’s going to be a sunny day with temps in the low 50s. In the evening, expect some clouds and temps in the high 30s.alternate-side parkingIn effect until tomorrow (Diwali).Other New York newsDecades after his wife’s disappearance — and just weeks after he was convicted of murder in another woman’s death — Robert Durst was indicted in White Plains on a single count of second-degree murder.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesReadying replica relatives of “Jaws”A megalodon, a giant relative of the great white shark that ranks as the biggest predator fish of all time, has arrived on the Upper West Side. It is a fearsome fish so big it could eat a whale. It has lots of extremely sharp incisors that could do what extremely sharp incisors do.This one is not real, and it has landed in a landlocked spot between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.It is a fiberglass-and-epoxy replica in a workshop at the American Museum of Natural History. The last live megalodon was seen some 3.6 million years ago by whatever creatures avoided its giant jaws. If the heart-pounding theme from a certain Steven Spielberg movie is not already running through your head, this is when it might well start.The replica has been built for an exhibition that is scheduled to open next month. It is 27 feet long, and it is just the head, the only part of the megalodon that visitors will see once the exhibition is installed. The whole megalodon would have been 50 feet long, too big for the gallery the curators have in mind for it.Still, it is high on the fear factor. “When people come to an exhibition on sharks, they expect to be terrified, like on a roller coaster,” said Lauri Halderman, the museum’s vice president for exhibition. “Well, great whites are nothing compared to what we’ve got.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The megalodon and other replicas are being finished in the museum’s workshop, a warren of dusty rooms that is more art studio than biology lab. Seeing great whites and hammerheads there is like seeing the Queen Mary II in dry dock. The sharks are up in the air, on pedestals, to be shaped, sanded and painted.On a recent morning, Jason Brougham was playing shark periodontist, gluing in rows of replica teeth made on a 3-D printer. They will stay in the replica megalodon’s mouth longer the real ones did. Some megalodon teeth fell out and new ones grew in as often as twice a month.The inevitable question for Halderman and John Sparks, a curator in the museum’s department of ichthyology, was: Have you seen “Jaws”?Sparks said he saw it when it first came out. “That was terrifying,” he said.Halderman said it was filmed when she was in high school. “I wasn’t into horror films,” she said. She finally saw it last year, a work assignment in preparation for the exhibition.What we’re readingRestaurants in New York, from the budget-friendly to the high end, are preparing for a Thanksgiving rush, New York Magazine reports.The Radio City Music Hall Christmas show opens on Friday. Some of the people who put on the show are upset that the Covid protocols do not match those at Broadway theaters.Intercollegiate golf was born in 1896 when Yale swept Columbia. Earlier this month, after 125 years, Columbia finally got its rematch.METROPOLITAN diaryAfternoon breakDear Diary:I was on Riverside Drive between 89th and 88th Streets, heading home after shopping for groceries at the Food Emporium on Broadway. It was a quiet weekend afternoon and not many people were around, so I decided to take a break in the middle of the sidewalk.I dropped the plastic shopping bags I was carrying on the ground, inhaled the cool fall air coming off the Hudson River and looked upward.There, a brilliant blue sky was framed by shining golden leaves. As I looked around, I realized that the leaves on all of the trees on the drive and in Riverside Park had turned to gold.I had just pulled out my phone to take a photo of the view and was punching in my mother’s email address to send her the picture when I heard a man’s voice behind me.“It’s beautiful, huh?” he said.“Yeah,” I said, turning to look at him.He smiled and quickly walked off. I again owned the view.— Aiko SetoguchiIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero, Emma Grillo, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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    One Final Day of Campaigning

    The elections for mayor in New York City and Buffalo could signal the direction of the Democratic Party in the state.It’s Monday. We’ll take a last look at the campaigns and the candidates. Did I mention that tomorrow is Election Day?Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFrom Buffalo to Brooklyn, the contests voters will decide tomorrow pose fresh tests and create fresh tension about the identity and direction of the Democratic Party in New York.Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York City, has presented himself as both a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” A former police captain who fought for reforms from within the system, he disdained the “defund the police” movement. He has said that public safety was a prerequisite to prosperity and has reached out to the city’s big-business community. And he defeated several more liberal candidates in the June primary.A different face of the Democratic Party has emerged in the closely watched contest for the mayor of Buffalo. India Walton, a democratic socialist, defeated the incumbent, Byron Brown, in the June primary. Brown is now running as a write-in candidate in what has become a proxy battle between left-wing leaders and more moderate Democrats. Walton has referred to Brown as a “Trump puppet” who has become complacent about Buffalo. His campaign has questioned her character and painted her proposals as “too risky,” a message that she countered was fearmongering.My colleague Katie Glueck writes that power dynamics are now being renegotiated at every level of government. “There’s a battle of narratives in New York,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a Brooklyn socialist. “New York is in the midst of finding itself.”Curtis Sliwa as the Republican in the raceIn New York City, Adams’s opponent is Curtis Sliwa, who presents his main qualifications as his decades of patrolling the subways and leading the Guardian Angels, the beret-wearing vigilante group he founded.What a Sliwa mayoralty would look like is an open question, a question that also trails Adams. Sliwa is a Republican newbie — he registered as a Republican only last year — and when he announced his candidacy, some people wondered whether it was just another publicity stunt.Attention-getting soon defined Sliwa’s campaign. He went to an apartment building in Fort Lee, N.J., where Adams co-owns an apartment with his partner, to suggest that Adams did not live in New York. On Twitter, Sliwa called Adams’s residency “the biggest unanswered question since Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster & Bermuda Triangle combined.” (Adams has said that his primary residence is a townhouse he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.)Sliwa’s tactics were no surprise to those who have followed his career. “For the most part, the person you see in public making bad rhymes before the camera is now the actual person,” said Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who once co-hosted a talk-radio show with Sliwa and is now a trenchant critic. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention.”A likely district attorney who has been a police adversaryAlvin Bragg, who is favored to be the next Manhattan district attorney, spent time last week in a virtual courtroom. He was questioning a police lieutenant about the day that an officer held Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold.For the last several years, Bragg has represented Garner’s family in their continuing fight for details about what happened before Garner, who was accused of selling untaxed cigarettes, died in 2014. The Garner case underscored some of the messages of Bragg’s campaign. He has said that he will not pursue some low-level crimes.He has also spoken frequently about police accountability. The district attorney typically works closely with the New York Police Department. Bragg’s involvement in the Garner inquiry — which highlighted a shameful episode for the department — suggested that his relationship with the police is likely to be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.Where Republicans stand a chanceIn some New York City Council races, Republicans are trying to win over voters who cast their ballots for Republicans for president and Democrats in local races. In a race in a Brooklyn district that is home to many Orthodox Jews and Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a robocall for the Republican City Council candidate, Inna Vernikov.“They’re trying to make it about the presidential election,” said Steven Saperstein, the Democrat in the race. “People in this district understand and they know that national elections are one thing, but on the local level you have to vote for the person.”In Queens, Democrats hope to flip the last Republican-held City Council seat in the borough. The Democrat in the race is Felicia Singh, a teacher who has been endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party. She is running against Joann Ariola, the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party.Voting maps and environmental rightsThere’s more on the ballot than the mayoral elections. All 51 City Council members will be chosen in New York City. And five potential amendments to the State Constitution are also on the ballot.One would redraw the state’s legislative maps, which occurs every 10 years. Among other things, it would cap the number of state senators at 63. Michael Li, a senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told my colleague Ashley Wong that the cap was necessary to prevent gerrymandering.Another ballot measure — a so-called environmental rights amendment — would enshrine a constitutional right to clear air, clean water and a “healthful environment.” The language is vague on just what a “healthful environment” is or how such a standard would be enforced.WeatherIt’s a new week, New York. Enjoy the sunny day in the high 50s, with clouds moving in at night and temps dropping to the mid-40s.alternate-side parkingSuspended today (All Saints Day) and tomorrow (Election Day).The latest New York newsSexual harassment and assault by detainees are compounding the crisis at Rikers Island.And in case you missed it …Complaint against Andrew Cuomo: Craig Apple, the Albany County sheriff, defended the decision to file a criminal complaint against Cuomo, who resigned as governor in August. Apple said he was confident that the district attorney would prosecute even though Apple had not coordinated the filing with prosecutors. The district attorney, David Soares, has not committed to going ahead with the case.Apple also rejected accusations that the filing was a “political hit job.”Cuomo was charged with forcible touching, a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to one year in jail, in connection with allegations that he groped a female aide’s breast. Cuomo’s lawyer, Rita Glavin, said he had “never assaulted anyone.” Cuomo is scheduled to be arraigned on Nov. 17.Letitia James’s candidacy: James, the New York attorney general who oversaw the inquiry into the sexual harassment claims that led to Cuomo’s resignation, declared her candidacy for governor. She begins the campaign as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most formidable challenger. Others, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, may throw their hats in the ring, too.James, the first woman of color to be elected to statewide office in New York, is seeking to become the first Black female governor in the country. As attorney general, she made headlines for suing the National Rifle Association and investigating President Donald Trump. “I’ve sued the Trump administration 76 times — but who’s counting?” James said in the video announcing her campaign.Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and is white, was the first governor in more than a century to have deep roots in western New York. Either would be the first woman elected governor.What we’re readingNew York’s Irish Arts Center is moving from a former tenement to a $60 million state-of-the-art performance facility.Inevitably, the last of the authentic delis have been joined by an increasing number of designer delis.MetROPOLITAN diaryDiscovering schavDear Diary:I was shopping for groceries with my mother at a supermarket in Riverdale. I noticed a dozen or so jars of something called schav lined up against a wall in the Jewish food section.I had never seen it before. It looked like a greenish vegetable soup.When we got out to the street, I asked my mother what it was.Before she could answer a man who was walking in front of us turned around.“What?” he said, looking me right in the eye. “You don’t know what schav is? You eat it with a cold boiled potato and it’s delicious!”— Nancy L. SegalIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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    Curtis Sliwa Has New York’s Attention Again. Was That Always the Point?

    When New Yorkers feared their subway and streets amid a crime wave in the late 1970s, Curtis Sliwa donned a red beret and seized the moment, pioneering a movement of citizen patrols — the Guardian Angels — that made him famous. He was 24.If ever he risked fading from public view in the years after, Mr. Sliwa found increasingly outlandish ways to hold onto the spotlight: faking his own kidnapping, wearing a red wig on television to impersonate a New York City Council speaker, even getting arrested while waving court papers at Mayor Bill de Blasio outside Gracie Mansion.Not surprisingly, perhaps, some people questioned whether it was just another publicity stunt when Mr. Sliwa, who registered as a Republican last year, announced that he was running in the party’s primary for mayor. Yet he won, riding his decades-old name recognition and casting his time patrolling the streets and his leadership of the Guardian Angels as his main qualifications for becoming mayor.With Election Day approaching on Tuesday, he is trying to ride that celebrity again in his campaign against a heavily favored Democrat, Eric Adams.“I’ve been shot, stabbed, beaten in the streets of New York City, locked up 76 times,” he said at a recent campaign stop. “I’ve been David versus Goliath from Day 1 in my entire life.”But an examination of Mr. Sliwa’s career reflects a record far messier and more complicated than the comic-book hero image he has worked to foster. Interviews with more than 40 current and former members of his group, critics and other associates portray a charismatic figure whose frequently clownish acts belie a sharp intellect and keen media savvy. They also reveal a string of missteps in his public and private lives that have harmed his credibility, and a comfort with physical aggression, machismo and racist and sexist rhetoric that has made even some who are close to him uneasy.What a Sliwa mayoralty would look like is anyone’s guess — an unpredictability he shares with his opponent, Mr. Adams. Would he dress up in costumes for news conferences? Tackle a purse snatcher on the street?His campaign platform calls for hiring thousands of police officers, placing homeless people in psychiatric beds at hospitals, expanding the gifted program in the city’s schools, overhauling the property tax system and eliminating the killing of animals at shelters. He has said less about creating jobs or reviving New York’s flagging economy, closing the city’s gaping budget shortfall or addressing the inequalities that the pandemic laid bare.Mr. Sliwa confronting his Democratic opponent, Eric Adams, at the second mayoral debate.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozBut for a Republican, the underpinnings of any policy decisions would spring from an unusual place. Mr. Sliwa said he grew up reading Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” an influential blueprint for liberal activism. And although he has named Rudolph W. Giuliani as the ideal New York mayor, he said in an interview that he identifies most closely with Huey P. Long of Louisiana, the Depression-era Democratic governor and senator known for his progressive politics, and for allegations of corruption and demagogy. Mr. Sliwa said he appreciated Long’s populism but added: “He was also a real scoundrel, you know, and pretty crooked.”After winning the primary, Mr. Sliwa brought the full force of his publicity-seeking skills to bear in the general election campaign. He showed up at a New Jersey apartment building to suggest that Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, lived there and not in New York. He also carried a milk carton bearing his opponent’s picture on to the B train in Brooklyn, asking passengers, “Have you seen this man?”Although he struggled at times to break through in the media, Mr. Sliwa made a splash at the final debate, seeming to put Mr. Adams on the defensive by accusing him of being too willing to meet with gang leaders in the past. (Mr. Adams said he had met with them to encourage them to leave gangs.)In the campaign’s final days, Mr. Sliwa has continued to court controversy, becoming a cheerleader for city workers who are resisting Mr. de Blasio’s vaccine mandate and appearing at protests.Few who have followed Mr. Sliwa’s career are surprised. “For the most part, the person you see in public making bad rhymes before the camera is now the actual person,” said Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who once co-hosted a radio show with Mr. Sliwa as his liberal foil and is now a pointed critic. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention.”Making headlinesMr. Sliwa, left, with a group of Guardian Angels in 1984.Joe McNally/Getty ImagesMr. Sliwa, 67, loves to tell stories. He has not always been a reliable narrator.He can hold forth on the history of Brooklyn political bosses in one breath and in the next recount a showdown with an Oregon religious sect. He will describe the used car commercial he shot with the Times Square performer known as the Naked Cowboy. He can demonstrate a wrestling move called the Sicilian backbreaker that he says he used to subdue wrongdoers.There was the time on a trip to Washington when he was thrown into the Potomac River by parties hostile to the Guardian Angels. The time he assaulted an undercover police officer he mistakenly thought was attacking a mechanic. And the time he buried a kindergarten classmate in a sandbox for pulling on a girl’s pigtail once too often.Pinning down facts can be difficult, as intertwined as many tales told by Mr. Sliwa — and by others about him — have become with Guardian Angels lore.But he was born in Brooklyn in 1954. When he was growing up in Canarsie, his father, a sailor with the United States merchant marine and a liberal Democrat, and his mother, a churchgoing Catholic, encouraged him and his two sisters to embrace public service. His younger sister, Maria Sliwa, recalled him as a fiercely intelligent child. “He would inhale books,” said Ms. Sliwa, who works for his campaign. “He didn’t have to study, and he’d get an A.”Yet Mr. Sliwa dropped out of high school. He married briefly in his early 20s and moved to the South Bronx, where he worked as a night manager at a McDonald’s on East Fordham Road — regularly chasing robbers out of the restaurant, he said. With a stream of shockingly violent crimes playing on the evening news, an idea took hold. Soon, he had banded with a dozen other young men, and they began to patrol the subway in red berets. In 1979, the group became known as the Guardian Angels.City officials quickly branded them vigilantes.“He wanted to play cops and robbers with the so-called Guardian Angels, who were underage, untrained, and had no business trying to police the subways,” said Bill McKechnie, who led the transit officers’ union at the time and became Mr. Sliwa’s nemesis.The public took a different view. As the Guardian Angels’ exploits were recounted in the city’s newspapers, many New Yorkers cheered them on: The group’s members returned a wallet full of cash to its rightful owner. They tried to stop a mugging. They saved a token booth clerk. Mr. Sliwa kicked a shotgun from the clutches of a much larger man, while falling off a subway platform.Mr. Sliwa spent his days giving interviews, sometimes on national television. With his second wife Lisa, also a leader of the Guardian Angels, he was photographed for magazine stories. The group became the subject of a TV movie in 1980. Soon, he expanded to cities across the United States, and then to other countries.Mr. Sliwa and his second wife, Lisa Evers, on their wedding day, Christmas Eve, 1981. Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesIn later years, Mr. Sliwa would parlay his fame into lucrative radio and TV contracts. By the late 2000s, he was earning about $600,000 a year and had married his third wife, Mary. In 2006, they bought a $1.6 million apartment on the Upper East Side.Some who have patrolled with Mr. Sliwa say that he inspired them into activism and was a strong leader who always stayed at the front if they ran into danger.“People think Curtis is only there when the cameras are there,” said Keiji Oda, the group’s international director, who joined as a college student. “Curtis likes the camera, nobody denies that. But he is always there, even without the reporter.”But other former members became embittered by his tactics. Some accused him of faking heroics for headlines; he called them liars. Others grew angry about group members who had gotten hurt in the line of duty, with some saying training was inadequate.Six members of the Guardian Angels died. The first, Malcolm Brown, was 19 when he was fatally shot trying to stop a robbery in 1981. Malcolm’s mother, Ruthie Nelson, said in an interview that she believes her son might still be alive if he had not joined the organization. “He wanted to make a difference, but in hindsight I would have done anything I could to deter him from joining the group,” she said.In an interview, Mr. Sliwa said he was sorry for Ms. Nelson’s loss, but that all members joined the group voluntarily.Then came a revelation so damaging to Mr. Sliwa’s credibility that, by his own admission, he has never recovered. It followed a bout of conscience he said he had after nearly being fatally shot by a member of the Gambino crime family, whose leaders Mr. Sliwa had skewered on the radio.Upon seeing the outpouring of well wishes from New Yorkers in 1992, Mr. Sliwa confessed to The New York Post that he had made up stories to burnish the Guardian Angels’ image. The return of the wallet had been staged. There was no man with a shotgun on a subway platform.More recently, he said in an interview that he had invented the stories to gain traction against his critics and that he deeply regretted it. “If I could do it again, I would never do it,” he said. “It has followed me everywhere.”A second actBill McKechnie, a former leader of the transit officers’ union, has kept newspaper clippings about Mr. Sliwa’s fabrications. Saul Martinez for The New York TimesEventually things began to take a turn for Mr. Sliwa.His third wife, Mary, with whom he had a son, had become a formidable fund-raiser for the Guardian Angels, helping to organize golf games, poker tournaments and lavish galas that attracted prominent figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The group was raising more than $1 million a year, tax filings show.Mr. Sliwa and his third wife, Mary, in 2010. Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBut Mr. Sliwa was having an affair with another woman, Melinda Katz, who is now the Queens district attorney. They had two sons who they say were conceived through in vitro fertilization while he was married to Mary, leading to a messy breakup.Less than a year after they divorced, in 2012, the marital breakdown exploded in the tabloids. Mary Sliwa sued her former husband and Ms. Katz, accusing them of scheming to divert hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Ms. Katz and their two children and calling Mr. Sliwa “an inveterate, world-class liar.” The suit was later dismissed.Ms. Katz ended their relationship in 2014 and declined to discuss it beyond issuing a statement: “Curtis is the father of my children and obviously holds a very special place in their lives,” she said.Melinda Katz, who is now the Queens district attorney, with Mr. Sliwa in 2014. He is the father of her two sons. WENN Rights Ltd, via AlamyMr. Sliwa now pays about $15,000 in monthly child support for his three sons, a large share of the $400,000 annual income listed on a copy of the 2019 tax return that he provided to The New York Times. He also had judgments of nearly $250,000 recorded against him in 2016 for debts to his divorce lawyers, and he said he could not afford to pay $2,600 in taxes, penalties and interest owed to New York State by a company he used for paid speaking engagements. “I don’t have two nickels to rub together,” Mr. Sliwa said.As his romantic relationships were imploding, his career as a commentator was also heading in the wrong direction.A frequent guest on NY1 news segments, Mr. Sliwa had begun wearing costumes and incorporating props to ridicule elected officials. As time went on, the skits flirted with and sometimes crossed the line between satire and racism and sexism. In a 2010 NY1 appearance, bantering about the outgoing governor, David A. Paterson, who is Black, Mr. Sliwa broke into street slang and said, “My brother, my brother, give me some skin.”He mocked the New York City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, by wearing a bright red wig, which Ms. Quinn described as a sexist attack; he wore a sombrero and waved miniature Mexican flags while criticizing undocumented immigration; and he commented on the physical appearance of another female council speaker in sexually explicit terms.In 2018, NY1’s new owners let him go, but Mr. Sliwa continued doing talk radio on the conservative AM station WABC, where he takes phone calls and holds forth on culture, politics and relationships.Mr. Sliwa with the lawyer Ronald Kuby, his radio co-host, in 1998. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention,” Mr. Kuby said of Mr. Sliwa’s career.Librado Romero/The New York TimesHe acknowledged mistakes but he also lamented what he called a “snowflake culture” that made his brand of political satire unacceptable. “I’m not a wallflower, OK?” he said. “I don’t know how you do satire and parody and do costumes and not offend people.”Mr. Sliwa said he had been sleeping on the floor at WABC when he met his fourth wife, Nancy. They live together in her small studio apartment with, by the latest count, 17 cats.Then, in March 2020, he said he would run for mayor, hoping to capitalize on his background at a time when New Yorkers were worried about crime. He took a leave from his radio show and went on to defeat his Republican opponent, Fernando Mateo, in June.Mr. Sliwa has waded into the culture wars during the campaign, lambasting Black Lives Matter protesters, and saying that looters had hit him in the jaw with a ball-peen hammer after the murder of George Floyd. His campaign hired a consultant who wrote a supportive opinion piece about the far-right Proud Boys group. And Mr. Sliwa falsely stated that subway crime had reached record highs and pledged to take “the handcuffs off the police.”At his second debate with Mr. Adams, Mr. Sliwa continued the provocations, falsely claiming that a City Council member who was born in the Dominican Republic was not a U.S. citizen.Mr. Sliwa has strolled the city’s neighborhoods in the final weeks of the campaign, sometimes receiving the sort of reception he might have gotten at the height of his fame 40 years ago.He was on a subway in Washington Heights on a recent Tuesday when a man in an army jacket called out to him. “I’ve got a lot of respect for you,” said the man, Frank R. Hooker Jr., a filmmaker who said he had followed Mr. Sliwa’s career since he was a child. Then he added: “I wish you were a Democrat, that’s the only thing.”Campaigning at a barbershop in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. “Most people don’t think of me as anything but Curtis Sliwa,” he said. James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Sliwa didn’t miss a beat. He urged Mr. Hooker to vote for him on an independent line.“Most people,” he said, “don’t think of me as anything but Curtis Sliwa.”Susan C. Beachy contributed research. More

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    Adams vs. Sliwa: A Guide to New York's Mayoral Race

    With the New York City election just days away, we cut through the personal attacks to show where the main candidates, Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, stand on the issues.Eric Adams, left, and Curtis Sliwa will face off in New York’s mayoral election on Tuesday.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe final weeks of the New York City mayor’s race have been dominated by personal attacks between the two leading candidates. Eric Adams, the Democratic front-runner, called his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, racist and a “Mini-Me of Donald Trump.” Mr. Sliwa has criticized Mr. Adams as an elitist and “Bill de Blasio 2.0.”It should be no surprise that the two candidates also have very different visions for the city as it emerges from the pandemic.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, wants to trim the police budget by cutting back on overtime pay; Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels subway patrol group, wants to hire 3,000 more officers. Mr. Adams is a cyclist who wants to build 300 miles of new protected bike lanes; Mr. Sliwa wants to remove bike lanes. Mr. Adams wants to keep vaccine mandates for city workers and indoor dining; Mr. Sliwa would reverse both.There are some areas of common ground: Both want to expand the gifted and talented program for elementary schools instead of ending it. Both have called for hundreds more “psychiatric beds” at hospitals to be used for people with mental health problems who are living on the streets. Both want to bring back the Police Department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which was disbanded under Mayor de Blasio.The candidates have also proposed somewhat overlapping economic recovery initiatives focused on getting New Yorkers back to work and removing regulations for small businesses.Whoever wins on Tuesday will face enormous challenges when he takes office in January. Here are the candidates’ plans for the city.— Emma G. FitzsimmonsEric AdamsAge: 61.Born: New York.Professional experience: Brooklyn borough president; former state senator and police captain.Mr. Adams has long had his eye on becoming mayor. He first ran for office in 1994 and was briefly a Republican during the Giuliani administration.Salient quotation: “The city betrayed Mommy,” Mr. Adams said as he voted for himself during the primary in June, explaining that the city has failed poor Black families like his.Personal detail: Mr. Adams is vegan and has eaten a plant-based diet since discovering he had diabetes at age 56.Curtis SliwaAge: 67.Born: New York.Professional experience: Founded the Guardian Angels subway patrol group; has been a conservative radio host.Mr. Sliwa has never run for office before. He became a Republican last year, once led the Reform Party of New York State and was a Democrat earlier in his life.Salient quotation: “Who at the age of 67 is running around wearing a red beret and a red satin jacket and going out there like a crime fighter and a superhero from our days reading comic books?” he told The Times earlier this year.Personal detail: Mr. Sliwa lives in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side with his wife — his fourth — and 16 cats.TransportationSubway ridership has not rebounded to prepandemic levels, a problem for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesNew York City’s recovery from the pandemic will depend heavily on mass transit and other transportation. But the subway is facing a looming financial emergency, with ridership significantly below prepandemic numbers.Like his predecessors, the next mayor’s influence over the subway system will be limited: The subway and its daily operations are overseen by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is largely controlled by the governor.Still, both Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa say that it is crucial to restore confidence in the subway system and bring back riders. To do so, they are both targeting public safety underground. Though subway crime was down for the first nine months of the year relative to the same period in 2020, felony assaults there are up not just compared to last year, when ridership was very low, but also compared with 2019. A string of high-profile attacks has pushed the issue to the forefront.Both candidates want to deploy more police officers in the subways and direct homeless and mentally ill people off the trains and toward services. Mr. Sliwa, who has falsely stated that subway crime has reached all-time highs, wants to add 5,000 city police officers to patrol the system, some of them redirected from other duties. He also proposes relocating mentally ill and homeless people from the trains to psychiatric facilities or homeless shelters, though he has not explained how he would do so.Mr. Adams, a former transit police officer, wants the Police Department to shift officers from other roles to subway patrol, though he has not stated a specific figure. He also seeks to restore the department’s homeless outreach unit, which was defunded by Mr. de Blasio, and have mental health professionals team up with police officers. He also seeks to invest in better cell service, Wi-Fi and surveillance cameras in stations to help deter crime.The mayor’s largest sway over transportation in the city is in control over its streets, where there have been severe congestion and a surge in traffic deaths. Here, the candidates have markedly different approaches.Mr. Adams has thrown his support behind the state’s plan to enact congestion pricing in parts of Manhattan, which would charge a fee on vehicles in the area and aim to both reduce traffic and provide new funding for the transit system. Mr. Sliwa opposes it.Mr. Adams says he favors redesigning streets to address safety issues, including by encouraging alternatives to car travel. Over four years, he wants to build 300 new miles of protected bike lanes and 150 miles of new bus lanes and busways with a particular focus on transit deserts and busy corridors like Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn.Mr. Sliwa has accused the city of a war on vehicles and has proposed removing underutilized bike lanes that he says could better serve as parking spots. He has called for eliminating speed cameras but wants the Police Department to enforce traffic laws more actively and would provide funding to help it do so.— Michael GoldEducationThe first day of the academic year at P.S. 25 Bilingual School in the South Bronx.Anna Watts for The New York TimesMr. Adams’s most concrete education proposal may also be one of his least-discussed plans: blow up the school calendar and introduce year-round schooling. A 12-month academic year would be logistically complex and likely to be unpopular with some families and teachers. It would also require an overhaul of the teachers’ union contract, and significant funding to pay for many more educators to work outside of the traditional year.Mr. Adams has also made screening young students for dyslexia and other learning disabilities a priority. Asked how he would approach the task of desegregating schools, Mr. Adams said he would focus on making sure that children with disabilities and other challenges were not separated from their peers unnecessarily. He also said he would dedicate more funding to struggling school districts, a strategy used by Mr. de Blasio that produced disappointing results under his $773 million Renewal program for low-performing schools.The Democratic nominee has said he would keep the city’s gifted-and-talented program, despite Mr. Blasio’s announcement that he would seek to eliminate the current system. Mr. Sliwa has also said he would keep gifted classes.Mr. Adams also reiterated his support for keeping the admissions exam that dictates entry into the so-called specialized high schools, and said again that he would add five more specialized schools. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg tried a similar strategy in an effort to diversify the schools in the early 2000s, but the schools have enrolled fewer Black and Latino students in recent years. Mr. Adams also said he would “replace” the current admissions process for competitive middle and high schools, without offering more details.Mr. Sliwa said he would transform struggling schools by bringing vocational training programs into more high schools and add financial literacy courses to high school curriculums.Asked how he would combat racial segregation in schools, Mr. Sliwa said he would focus on reducing class sizes, an expensive project that several mayors have struggled to implement, and increase teacher bonuses, particularly for educators willing to teach in low-performing schools. Mr. de Blasio has already tried the latter proposal, with mixed results. And the powerful United Federation of Teachers has viewed bonuses based on performance with skepticism for many years, frustrating Mr. Bloomberg and, to some extent, Mr. de Blasio.— Eliza ShapiroHealth CareA vaccination site in August in the South Bronx. The mayoral candidates differ on their approaches to vaccine mandates. James Estrin/The New York TimesBoth Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa say they share a goal of making health care more accessible and affordable for average New Yorkers. But many of the details of their ideas — and how they want to go about making them happen — differ.Mr. Adams said his top priority would be to focus on ending the racial inequities that made Covid-19 “a tale of two pandemics, where Black and brown New Yorkers died at twice the rate of white New Yorkers.” He wants to enroll all New Yorkers who lack health insurance in low-cost plans run by the city’s public hospitals. He also wants to create more community health centers, put housing assistance and social services in hospitals and introduce a citywide network that would better distribute care for indigent patients between private and public hospitals, particularly in emergencies.Healthy eating is a particular passion of Mr. Adams. He is motivated by his own experience of waking up almost blind, with full-blown diabetes, at age 56 and says he reversed his illness by switching to a vegan, unprocessed-food diet. He has written a book, “Healthy at Last,” about his journey, and wants to scale up a clinic at Bellevue Hospital that he helped spearhead which focuses on treating disease by changing lifestyles.“One of the most important things we can do to prevent chronic diseases is to provide better access to quality, healthy food for underserved New Yorkers,” he said.Mr. Sliwa has not published a health care platform. But in a statement, he said his focus would be bringing down costs for working-class New Yorkers “across all demographics, from our young to elderly.” To do this, he focused on involving the private sector, with “public-private partnerships to increase access to medicine, treatment and other remedies” Like Mr. Adams, he also wants to encourage healthy eating and exercise in public schools.The plight of mentally ill homeless New Yorkers is a particular concern of Mr. Sliwa’s as the founder of the Guardian Angels, which has spent decades patrolling the city’s subways. “Increased access to psychiatric resources will ensure that no New Yorker is left behind in our road to emotional and physical recovery,” he said.The candidates are at odds on coronavirus vaccine mandates. Mr. Adams said he wanted to “double down” on the city’s vaccine mandates and its “Key to NYC” policy, which requires vaccination for indoor dining and entertainment. Mr. Sliwa has railed against such mandates at political rallies, though he is vaccinated and says he wants others to be. “Vaccine mandates only serve to hamper down our revitalization efforts for small businesses and restaurants,” he said in a statement.— Sharon OttermanLaw EnforcementMr. Adams seeks to cut back the Police Department’s budget while Mr. Sliwa wants to expand the force.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesNew York’s next mayor will inherit a police department — the largest police force in the country — at what is perhaps its most critical juncture in recent memory. Following a national reckoning over police brutality spurred by mass protests over the murder of George Floyd, public pressure has mounted to trim back police department budgets and shrink forces, even as violent crime rates have reached historical highs in big cities across the country.In New York, the crisis has been particularly acute: 2020 was the bloodiest year for the city since the notorious 1990s, and while gun violence rates have leveled, they remain well above prepandemic levels. Transit crime has risen, in part because of emptier subways.Much of the department’s future depends on whether the budget shrinks. The City Council voted last year to shift $1 billion from the N.Y.P.D.’s annual budget, a decision that incensed police unions and advocates of criminal-justice reform alike. On this, the two candidates could not be more opposed: Mr. Adams advocates strategically cutting back the Police Department’s budget and footprint; Mr. Sliwa wants to reverse budget cuts and expand the force.“I believe we can save at least $500 million annually through strategic civilianization of N.Y.P.D. units,” Mr. Adams told The Times, referring to officers spending significant parts of their day doing civilian jobs or clerical work, like moving trucks and barricades, or doing crowd control.Mr. Adams called the increase in gun violence “the most pressing challenge facing the New York City Police Department.” He said that the Police Department was bloated and that he would pare back its overtime, but he also endorsed reinstating gang and gun task forces, the latest iteration of which were disbanded last year amid mounting public complaints that the units were abusive.Mr. Adams also supports creating a requirement that new officers live in the five boroughs and an incentive for current officers — who are allowed to live in surrounding counties — to move back into the areas they police.Mr. Sliwa, meanwhile, wants to fully reinstate $1 billion to the budget and hire more police officers, who he says should be diverted to high-crime areas. He also advocated reinstating the N.Y.P.D.’s anti-crime unit.“We need to put $1 billion back into the police budget and hire more cops,” he said. “Under current city leadership, our police force has become reactive to crime, not proactive in crime prevention.”— Ali WatkinsEconomyInitiatives to spur economic recovery in New York City are foremost in many people’s minds.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe next mayor of New York will take over an economy still struggling to mount a robust and sustained recovery 19 months into the pandemic. More than in any other large American city, New York’s extreme income inequalities were brutally exposed.The city’s unemployment rate is 9.8 percent, down slightly from early summer but still stubbornly high and nearly double the national rate. Two major drivers of the economy in the city — office workers and tourists — remain at home, cutting off significant sources of spending.And if office workers continue to work remotely after the pandemic, even if it is just a few days a week, it would most likely reshape the city’s economy for years to come.Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa have proposed somewhat overlapping recovery initiatives, both pledging to use the city government to help get New Yorkers back to work and to eliminate regulations they claim hurt small companies and deter the creation of new businesses.Mr. Sliwa has sought to cast his major campaign proposal of a property tax overhaul as potential fuel to jump-start the economy. His plan would provide tax deductions to some homeowners, place a 2-percent cap on annual property tax increases and eliminate tax breaks for wealthy institutions like hospitals, universities and Madison Square Garden.The plan would require approval from the State Legislature. It also mirrors an initiative announced by Mr. de Blasio in early 2020 to overhaul the property tax system, which ultimately lost political momentum when the pandemic emerged.Another top initiative by Mr. Sliwa would to test the feasibility of establishing universal basic income; he aims to set up a pilot program that would provide $1,100 a month to 500 New Yorkers.To help small businesses, Mr. Sliwa said the city would offer up to $45,000 in low-interest loans and extend tax incentives to companies with fewer than 50 employees that operate in the city outside Manhattan.Under Mr. Adams, the city would create a jobs program driven by real-time data from private businesses about their current openings and the skills they require, connecting applicants with employment opportunities that best match their skills. The city would also streamline its own hiring system with an online portal that would simplify the process of applying for municipal jobs.The ultimate goal, Mr. Adams said, would be to position New York City as a leader in the jobs of the future, especially in scientific research and cybersecurity, two industries that were growing before the pandemic. He also wants New Yorkers to work in renewable energy, part of his effort to make the city a major hub of wind power.— Matthew HaagHousingThe pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers struggling to pay rent. Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesThe next mayor will take the reins of a city with a chronic shortage of affordable housing, which is in turn a main driver of homelessness. More than a quarter of city residents spend more than half their income on housing, and the number of single adults in the city’s main shelter system has risen 60 percent during Mr. de Blasio’s tenure.On housing, Mr. Adams says he will focus on adding more lower- and middle-income homes in wealthier neighborhoods with good transit access and good schools — what he calls a reversal of gentrification. He would push to legalize unpermitted basement and cellar apartments, an idea that has proved difficult to execute in the past. Mr. Sliwa favors building more housing in manufacturing zones.The pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers struggling to pay rent. A state moratorium on evictions has kept many in their homes, but it is set to expire in January, threatening some renters with homelessness. Mr. Adams says he will let the State Legislature reassess the need to extend the moratorium, while Mr. Sliwa would press the state to better distribute millions of dollars in rent relief to landlords to address residents’ rent debt.The city’s public housing system, NYCHA, is also in dire trouble: It faces a backlog of over $40 billion in capital needs. Mr. Adams says he will push to let developers build on existing NYCHA land — a plan that he said could address less than a quarter of those needs. Mr. Sliwa says he will make sure repairs are done faster, and train and employ NYCHA residents to make repairs themselves.While both candidates emphasized the need for more permanent housing, Mr. Sliwa also wants to increase the capacity of the city’s shelters, which many homeless people avoid because they say they are dangerous and unpleasant. Mr. Sliwa says he would add police officers and social workers to make shelters safer. Mr. Adams opposes expanding shelters.The homelessness crisis is also a mental- health crisis. People with serious mental illnesses who live on the streets and in the subways have committed violent assaults and hate crimes that have grabbed headlines and raised alarms in recent months.Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa stress the importance of reversing a decline in hospital psychiatric beds and accelerating the creation of so-called supportive housing that includes on-site social services for mentally ill people. Mr. Adams touts a plan to convert thousands of empty hotel rooms into supportive-housing apartments.— Andy Newman and Mihir ZaveriIllustrations by Eden Weingart

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    You Can’t Fight City Hall. But You Can Pick Who Runs It.

    Guess I’m going for the vegan.Next week we’ll be voting in local elections all around the country. In New York the big contest is for mayor, and it pits Democrat Eric Adams against Republican Curtis Sliwa.Challenged to say something nice about Adams during the final mayoral debate on Tuesday night, Sliwa praised the Democrat’s vegan diet, adopted during a struggle against diabetes. Adams commended Sliwa on his kindness to animals.Sliwa and his wife are into sheltering abandoned cats, and they currently have 16 in their 320-square-foot studio apartment. I’ve got to admit this is the election factoid that has me most fascinated. The idea of vegan meals being served at Gracie Mansion is sort of interesting — bet we’d get more discussions of the menus than we ever got during Bill de Blasio’s long tenure. But how many cats could you fit in there? Dozens? Hundreds?OK, people — your turn. If you’ve got a mayoral election coming up in your town, tell me one interesting thing about a major candidate.Hey, there’s got to be something. If you’re still mulling, maybe you’re failing to focus. Keep thinking. We’ve still got … days.Do I see a hand over there in Connecticut? Yes, Stamford? You’ve got the former manager of the Mets running? And he called the Democratic candidate “a 35-year-old girl?” Wow, is he promising to make Stamford a municipal version of the Mets?Like residents of many cities, New Yorkers frequently feel as if their November vote is a tad anticlimactic. The real drama came in the Democratic primary — as the winner, Adams now enjoys a certain advantage that comes with being standard-bearer for a party with 3.7 million voters, compared with the Republicans’ 566,000.But we political junkies are hanging on until the bitter end. Still lots to gnaw over. Does everybody know that Sliwa’s been married four times and has two children from a long-running entanglement with the Queens district attorney? Meanwhile, where does Adams, a former police officer running on his promise to reform the city’s law enforcement culture, actually live? Brooklyn? New Jersey? His office? If we’re confused, Adams says it may be the fault of his having employed a homeless man to fill out his tax forms.OK, your turn to complain about your options.Yes, Minneapolis, I see your hand. You’re right: People who live in cities where the choice is basically between two names on the ballot should not be whining near folks who are going to have to pick from — my gosh, did you say 17?Indeed. Minneapolis has 17 candidates for mayor. The poor voters are supposed to go through the whole pile and pick a favorite, a runner-up and a third selection. This is called ranked-choice voting and it’s gotten very popular around the country. As the votes are counted, the biggest losers are tossed off and the people who picked them get their next choice put in the mix. The system has many advantages, but it does add one more responsibility to your good-citizen agenda. I remember being stuck at my Manhattan polling place, trying to imagine who my third-favorite candidate for comptroller might be …The Minneapolis election is theoretically nonpartisan but the candidates are allowed to give themselves a tag. Seven say they’re Democratic Farmer-Labor, which is going to give the voters quite a bit to scramble through, when they aren’t being distracted by the difference between the Independent, Independence Alliance and For the People parties. Or the self-declared nicknames, like Nate “Honey Badger” Atkins and Kevin “No Body” Ward. Another candidate calls himself Bob “Again” Carney Jr. and that’s a great reminder of how many times you’ve gone to vote, looked at the ballot and moaned, “Not again …”So, bottom line: big election doings coming on Tuesday. For your town, for your city and for all those candidates. Winning a job like mayor is certainly an opportunity to serve the community. And maybe it’s a political steppingstone to — what?A. Being elected presidentB. Being elected mayor againC. Being indictedWell, only three American mayors have ever gone on to the White House, and the last of those was Calvin Coolidge. As far as lengthy tenure goes, lots of towns now have term limits, but for those that don’t, the sky’s the limit. (By the way, feel free to congratulate Robert Blais of Lake George, N.Y., on his 50th anniversary as village mayor. Blais, 85, recently told a local paper that he was leaning heavily toward retirement a couple of years down the line.)On the indictment front, I noticed that a leading candidate for mayor in the upcoming Cincinnati election had his campaign sidetracked when he was charged with accepting bribes last November. Certainly sounds like time for a change, but observers are noting that the Cincinnati electorate seems a little, um, detached. “Does anyone care, including the candidates themselves?” demanded a local columnist.Well, you can understand why the voters might be a tad depressed, given that a third of the City Council has been arrested on charges like bribery and extortion. But really, citizens, this is exactly the time you have to put on your boots and march over to the polling places, demonstrating that you’re paying attention and want to turn things around.Really, it’ll perk up your day. Even if it’s raining.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    5 Takeaways From the Last N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate

    The final debate in the New York City mayor’s race devolved into a chaotic contest Tuesday night marked by name-calling, lecturing, personal remarks and even profanity as the long-shot Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, sought to knock Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee, off-kilter at every turn.Mr. Sliwa faces extraordinarily difficult odds against Mr. Adams, and for much of the campaign, Mr. Adams has cast himself as a mayor-in-waiting who is already preparing to govern the nation’s largest city, ignoring Mr. Sliwa’s efforts to coax him into confrontation.But on Tuesday, the candidates did clash at times, and Mr. Sliwa spent much of the debate hectoring and interrupting Mr. Adams, and occasionally jolting him out of the rise-above-it-all demeanor that he deployed during their first debate last week. Mr. Adams lashed Mr. Sliwa for faking crimes and even over his record on child support.“That is scurrilous,” Mr. Sliwa protested.The two candidates staked out starkly different positions on matters from vaccine mandates to congestion pricing to outdoor dining, while finding common ground on some education and public safety issues.Still, the personal and political divide between the nominees was repeatedly thrown into sharp relief for viewers who tuned in one week before Election Day.Here are five takeaways from the debate:Mr. Sliwa needed an election-altering moment. He didn’t get one.Given New York City’s overwhelmingly Democratic tilt, any Republican nominee would face a steep climb in a mayoral contest. But Mr. Sliwa, whom Mr. Adams has referred to as a “clown,” may face an especially hard challenge.He has admitted, as Mr. Adams noted repeatedly, to faking crimes for publicity when he was younger. He is perhaps as well-known these days for owning more than a dozen cats as he is for any sweeping vision for the city. And while Mr. Sliwa has tried to make public safety a signature issue that galvanizes voters, that effort is complicated by Mr. Adams’s background as a former police officer.Taken together, Mr. Sliwa needed something of a miracle to change the seeming trajectory of the race — and he did not appear to get one. He did seem to catch Mr. Adams off guard at times, opening the debate by forcefully questioning Mr. Adams about interactions with gang members, which sent Mr. Adams veering into attack mode himself.But if Mr. Sliwa sought to produce any damaging new information about Mr. Adams that would make many voters seriously reconsider their choices, it was not immediately clear what that would be, since he pushed many familiar lines of attack.And as the debate wore on, Mr. Adams returned to his posture of ignoring Mr. Sliwa, looking at the camera instead of at his opponent, skipping opportunities to question or engage Mr. Sliwa, and insisting that his focus was on the voters of New York City.The two men clashed over one of the city’s biggest crises: homelessness.Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor, criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio’s social services commissioner, while his Democratic challenger, Eric Adams, called for building more housing and converting empty hotel rooms to address the crisis.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozHomelessness is one of the most pressing issues that the next mayor will face.There were nearly 48,000 homeless people, including almost 15,000 children, sleeping in the city’s shelter system every night in August, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.The overall figure for August also included 18,357 single adults, close to a record.Asked how they would tackle the homeless issue, Mr. Sliwa skirted the question and instead attacked Mr. Adams and his relationship with Mayor Bill de Blasio.The single adult population in homeless shelters has increased 60 percent since Mr. de Blasio took office in 2014. The mayor has cited homelessness as one of the issues he has struggled with the most during his two terms.“We’ve been out in the streets tending to their needs, getting them food and clothing, these lost souls,” Mr. Sliwa said before quickly pivoting to criticizing Mr. de Blasio and his social services commissioner, whom Mr. Adams has praised.“I would like you, Eric Adams, to condemn your partner and your teammate Bill de Blasio,” Mr. Sliwa said.Mr. Adams ignored Mr. Sliwa’s remark, calling homelessness a “real issue” before laying out a more detailed proposal..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Adams talked about his plan to turn 25,000 underused hotels rooms in the boroughs outside of Manhattan into permanent single-room occupancy housing for the homeless. Many hotels outside the main tourist and business districts in Manhattan were “built to be shelters,” Mr. Adams said.“We have to get out of the shelter business and get into the business of getting people permanent housing,” he said.Mr. Adams also said he would increase housing subsidies for families at risk of losing their homes, use a state law to get homeless people who can’t take care of themselves off the street, and partner with the police and mental health professionals to move homeless people out of the subways.“These are our neighbors. These are our former residents that lived next to us,” Mr. Adams said. “There’s a level of compassion that comes with it.”The debate turned nasty quickly.Eric Adams chastised Curtis Sliwa, saying he was acting immaturely, and Mr. Sliwa accused Mr. Adams of actually living in New Jersey.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozMr. Sliwa suggested that Mr. Adams consorted with murderers. Mr. Adams noted that Mr. Sliwa had admitted to faking crimes.And the debate had barely begun.On substantive issues, this debate proved similar to last week’s contest. But tonally, it proved far nastier.After Mr. Adams argued that he would have engaged more energetically with union leaders on vaccine mandates, Mr. Sliwa suggested that Mr. Adams talk to his “friend and teammate” Mr. de Blasio, who will soon be leaving office.“You are acting like my son when he was 4 years old,” Mr. Adams shot back. “Show some discipline so we can get to all of these issues. You’re interrupting, you’re being disrespectful.”Mr. Sliwa countered that Mr. Adams should stop being a “robot” and show compassion for city workers who risk losing their salaries for failing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.Soon enough, the conversation got even more personal.Mr. Sliwa accused Mr. Adams of actually living in New Jersey, an allusion to questions that have been raised about Mr. Adams’s residency, and he mocked Mr. Adams’s decision to blame his tax-filing errors on his purportedly homeless accountant.“You fake where you live, Eric Adams,” Mr. Sliwa said.Mr. Adams said that Mr. Sliwa was demonstrating “clown-like actions,” and then accused him of hiding money so he would not have to pay child support.“That is scurrilous that you would say that,” Mr. Sliwa said. “How dare you bring my family into this?”The tenor of the debate did not go unnoticed.“I assume you’re not going to send each other holiday cards come December,” said Bill Ritter, who moderated the debate.On some hot-button issues, the candidates agreed — a reminder that the next mayor will not come from the city’s left wing.Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee, and his Republican challenger, Curtis Sliwa, both advocated increased policing in New York City to combat a rise in crime.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozMr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa may disagree on many of the specifics, but both fundamentally believe in expanding the role of the police in promoting public safety.Mr. Adams, who has said he was a victim of police brutality and spent much of his police career advocating for changes from within the system, also described his plan for bringing back an overhauled plainclothes unit to target gangs, “target those who are using guns.” His proposal has discomfited some New Yorkers who want to see the power of the police scaled back.And Mr. Sliwa indicated, in his typical forceful language, that he wants to empower the police to the greatest extent possible.Issues of education — and the best way to make public schools more integrated and equitable — do not necessarily break down along neat ideological lines. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa have expressed concerns over Mr. de Blasio’s decision to end the gifted and talented program for elementary school children. They have said, instead, that they want to expand the program, positions that they revisited on Tuesday night.A moment of levity over pets and diet.When asked near the end of their debate to say something nice about each other, Eric Adams admired Curtis Sliwa’s dedication to saving cats and Mr. Sliwa praised Mr. Adams for choosing not to eat animals.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersFor a brief moment, the candidates did not fight with each other. They communed over animals. More precisely, Mr. Sliwa praised Mr. Adams’s decision to forgo eating animals, while Mr. Adams praised Mr. Sliwa’s work in rescuing them.The moment of bonhomie did not happen without some prodding.Toward the end of the debate, Mr. Ritter asked the candidates to say something “nice” about their opponent.“I take my hat off to Curtis, what he is doing with cats,” said Mr. Adams, perhaps referring to Mr. Sliwa’s advocacy for no-kill shelters, or perhaps to the more than a dozen cats that share a 320-square-foot studio apartment with Mr. Sliwa and his wife. “I think we need to be humane to all living beings.”Mr. Sliwa was even more effusive in his praise for Mr. Adams’s decision to become a vegan.“His promotion of a vegan way of life to avoid serious medical issues has probably already helped dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of people,” Mr. Sliwa said. “As someone who has been in the hospital many, many times, I hope one day to be a vegan.”Right now, Mr. Sliwa added, he is “at the vegetarian stage.” More