Speaker Adrienne Adams reflects on a career representing Queens

Outgoing City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams says goodbye to her time in the Council and representing Queens. File photo by Gerardo Romo/NYC Council Media Unit

By Ryan Schwach

Adrienne Adams, the first Black woman to ever serve as City Council speaker and only the second from Queens, presided over her final meeting as the legislature’s leader last Thursday.

Intermittently throughout the marathon day of meetings, hearings and votes that resulted in over 50 pieces of legislation being passed, several colleagues of Adams acknowledged her legacy as speaker of the body for four years. Her tenure was complicated by COVID, the migrant crisis and an often tumultuous relationship with the mayor down the hall.

She was thanked by colleagues for her leadership, and described as “history making,” for her time presiding over the first woman-majority Council and for the legislation heralded through the body in that time.

“It was humbling,” Adams told the Eagle inside her South Ozone Park district office the following day. “It caused me to reflect quite a bit on this role and on this incredible legacy. It felt amazing.”

This dignified send off for a city public servant, who showered with hugs and flowers from current and former colleagues, was not how Adams thought her life would end up.

Most of her career was spent in corporate America, working as a trainer with several Fortune 500 companies. Her public service began when she began volunteering as a member of Community Board 12. Soon enough, she was elected to serve as the board’s chair.

“I was a volunteer for a very, very long time doing the thing that I love the most, and that's serving the public,” she said.

The move to elected office was not one she said she ever intended to make. But she was pushed by others to give it a shot, she said.

“I hate politics, and I hate politicians, and I'll never be one of them,’” she recalled thinking at the time. “There was so much resistance from me to pull me into this level of public service.”

Her first campaign came in 2016, when she launched a bid for the State Senate, losing to Senator James Sanders Jr. by around 15 percentage points.

But she ran for elected office again the next year, and was elected to the Council in 2017, succeeding Ruben Wills.

She had jumped head first into the role.

“As a community board member and chair, everybody had my phone number,” she said. “I can't just block people that have known me for all these years. So my phone continued to ring.”

But armed with pre-existing local relationships and knowledge, Adams transitioned into the world of electoral politics, and following her second-term, was elected speaker.

She was something of a surprise victor, edging out another Queens representative in Francisco Moya, whose bid for speaker was supported by the then-newly elected mayor, Eric Adams.

The Adams and Adams partnership – they are not related – was billed as a new era for local politics. Both were Black political leaders from the outer boroughs, moderate Democrats and graduates of Queens’ Bayside High School.

Adrienne Adams was the first Black woman to serve as the speaker, and the second from Queens.  Photo by William Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit

What some expected to be a solid relationship between the two quickly deteriorated, the outgoing speaker said, and conflict became a consistent thread over their mutual terms.

“I expected and had hoped for so much more collaboration, good collaborations with Eric,” she said. “He and I have known each other since we were 15, 16 years old, and I watched his ascension from that kid that I knew in high school, to law enforcement, to becoming a part of the Senate, to becoming Brooklyn borough president. I was so proud of him and watching the things that he had done and the movement that he had made.”

She supported Adams mayor, something she now says she regrets.

“We had pretty much committed and communicated that this legacy was going to be something that New York City had never seen before," she said. “Think about it – two kids from Bayside High School governing together in the same building.”

“We had committed that to each other, and it just was not reciprocated, and the door started to slowly close,” she added, saying the deterioration began as soon as the first budget negotiations in 2021.

Over their mutual time as speaker and mayor, the pair were often at odds over budgets, public safety policy and other issues that, on more than occasion, resulted in a veto from the mayor and a veto override from the Council.

Still, much was accomplished.

The City Council passed “The City for All,” an amended version of the mayor’s “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” which reworks city zoning to encourage the construction of around 80,000 new homes. The Council’s final negotiations also secured $5 billion in funding to facilitate the plan.

Mayor Eric Adams and Speaker Adrienne Adams quickly agreed to a budget deal during their first terms in office. Their relationship would quickly sour.  File photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

“It is the biggest thing to happen to New York,” the speaker said. “This is the most housing that has been generated in decades, in generations. So we've never seen anything like this before.”

There was pushback to the plan, mainly from Queens' more suburban-esque enclaves that worried the City of Yes would harm the character of their neighborhoods. Some of the pushback came from the more home owner-centric areas of Adams’ own Southeast Queens district.

“This is my backyard,” she said. “It's personal to me, certain things we were not ready to let happen in the interest of maintaining our Queens resident’s way of life, and our quality of life, and the reason that we live in Queens in the first place.”

She said that she felt there was a lot of misinformation about the City of Yes.

“I think that the no was sold very well, that people came out to community boards, were able to get access to community boards to actually speak about why this should not happen,” she said. “There was just so much misinformation that was given to Queens and to the Bronx, and it just spread, like you put mayonnaise on a sandwich.”

The Council also approved two massive neighborhood plans for Long Island City and Jamaica, which felt personal to Adams.

“We're going to be doing tremendous things finally, right here in Jamaica,” she said. “It's going to be a boom for Southeast Queens. All I can say is it's about time. It's about time.”

While Adams made headlines for tiffs with the other Adams and for citywide issues, she was a uniquely Queens figure at a time when the borough had unprecedented representation in government.

For a period of time in 2025, Queens representatives in the Council included herself, Majority Whip Selvena Brooks-Powers, Minority Leader Joann Ariola, and Minority Whip Vickie Paladino.

“The world sees Queens,” she said. “We put Queens on the map. We feel that we have presented Queens as a beautiful borough, a welcoming borough, that we are an amazing, diverse borough.”

Her love of Queens was part of her broader governing strategy.

“The City Council, to me, was so Manhattan-centric, the laws were centered around the needs of Manhattan,” she said.

In leaving the Council, she’ll likely be passing the gavel off to Councilmember Julie Menin, a moderate councilmember from Manhattan who is expected to be elected speaker in January.

She’ll also be handing off her Southeast Queens district – the “Great 28,” as she calls it – to Ty Hankerson, who has worked alongside her for years and who currently works as her district chief of staff.

“Ty has been with me since I pretty much walked through the doors of becoming an elected official,” she said. “There is not too much that he doesn't know already. That's why I was perplexed why people chose to run against him, because nobody has as much knowledge as Ty Hankerson has, as far as governing right now, as far as sitting in these offices and listening to constituents, as far as building a staff.”

She struggled to come up with a key piece of advice to bestow upon Hankerson, who she said already knows so much about what the job entails.

“Make sure that you are taking all of the people of the city into consideration, and not just your district,” she said.

Speaker Adrienne Adams with Department of City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Councilmembers Nantasha Williams and Linda Lee, and then-First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer during a walkthrough of Downtown Jamaica in May 2023.  Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye 

“You are now governing for a city,” she added.

Following an unsuccessful bid for mayor, which she has admitted was an effort that began too late to pick up any steam, it became clear that Queens’ second speaker would be bowing out of politics, at least for now.

But Adams has not made up her mind on what comes next.

She told the Eagle a “staycation” was in order, as was more time with her family. She was looking forward to getting back to her “life without the speaker title in front of it.”

“Just getting back to being Adrienne,” she said.

Like most of her political career, Adams remains a reluctant candidate as she moves into her next chapter.

Motivated by civic responsibility, she said she stayed focused on public service and delivering for her neighbors in the far-flung and often forgotten sections of Queens where she was raised.

“It is not easy, it is not for the faint of heart,” she said. “But if you want to serve and make things better, it is your responsibility to get out and do just that.”