For Mayor Eric Adams, the challenge of leading New York City has taken on an almost absurd quality, with his administration peppered in recent weeks by a half-dozen significant resignations, four federal investigations and two federal indictments, including one against the mayor.
Two of his deputy mayors and his police commissioner have resigned. His schools chancellor was just replaced. And he withdrew his pick for the city’s top lawyer when it became clear that the City Council would reject him.
With the flood of departures and chaos leaving a considerable vacuum at the top of City Hall, Mr. Adams must now rely on a flurry of new appointees and promotions to keep a complex bureaucracy running.
Earlier this week, Mr. Adams elevated Maria Torres-Springer, a veteran civil servant, to become his new first deputy mayor. She and three other highly respected women in the administration — Camille Joseph Varlack, the mayor’s chief of staff; Meera Joshi, the deputy mayor for operations; and Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services — are expected to largely oversee City Hall’s key administrative responsibilities.
Of them, Ms. Torres-Springer will play the most critical role in the coming months, handling daily operations across a vast bureaucracy of roughly 300,000 city workers with a $100 billion annual budget.
Her promotion seemed to signal a shift from the cronyism that had typified many of Mr. Adams’s significant hires, and was celebrated by a range of civic leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton; Kathryn Wylde, the leader of a business group; and progressive officials including Chi Ossé, a City Council member who has urged Mr. Adams to resign.
How Eric Adams Could Leave Office, and Who Hopes to Succeed Him
Mr. Adams’s political future is in doubt after federal prosecutors indicted him on corruption charges in one of several inquiries ensnaring City Hall.
Tracking Charges and Investigations in Eric Adams’s Orbit
Five corruption inquiries have reached into the world of Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Here is a closer look at the charges against Mr. Adams and how people with ties to him are related to the inquiries.
The Premier League’s Fight With Manchester City Won’t End Well for Anyone
One, single, lonely thing has become abundantly clear to English soccer after a week filled with jarring acronyms and dense legalese and furious, desperate spin: Manchester City’s ongoing courtroom struggle against the Premier League is not going to conclude with either side winning. At the end of all this, everyone involved is going to lose.
To recap: On Monday, an independent tribunal handed down its verdict on City’s attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the Premier League’s rules on so-called Associated Party Transactions. Those are sponsorship deals struck by clubs with other companies linked to their owners.
Quite what that verdict was might best be considered a “choose your own adventure” sort of situation. City claimed that the judges had decided that the rules were unlawful, and therefore celebrated what it saw as a decisive victory. The Premier League claimed that, while the panel had identified a couple of minor, procedural discrepancies, the system had largely been upheld.
Manchester City was so incensed by that reading of the decision that its lawyers — who, by this stage, probably need a few days off — immediately sent a letter to the league’s 19 other clubs, dismissing the league’s conclusion, stating that the sponsorship rules had been thrown out, and suggesting its rivals should now direct all further communication to them.
The reaction to that was, well, what you might expect. Executives are now openly wondering whether the democratic approach that has helped fuel the league’s growth is sustainable. There are dark whispers of City’s rivals’ submitting warnings of further legal action in advance of a conclusion to the club’s unrelated and more significant case against the league.
Joseph H. Reich, Charter School Pioneer, Dies at 89
Joseph H. Reich, a financier and philanthropist who with his wife created one of New York City’s first independently run public schools, proving that impoverished students could outperform expectations in such a setting — and which helped to kick-start the city’s charter-school movement — died on Sept. 29 at his home in Sheffield, Mass. He was 89.
The cause was respiratory failure, his daughter Marcia Walsh said.
Convinced that city-run schools were failing to educate students in high-poverty neighborhoods, Mr. Reich (pronounced rich) and his wife, Carol F. Reich, raised $1 million and secured a building, opening the Beginning With Children school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1992.
It was largely funded with taxpayer money and free to students, but it operated outside the bureaucracy of the local school district.
That model was largely a novelty; it would be another six years until New York State passed the Charter Schools Act, codifying rules for such experiments. The year before that, Beginning With Children had been named the city’s most improved elementary school, a beacon to hundreds of charter schools that would follow.
“We both shared a common and basic belief: Families of means can afford to send their children to private schools or relocate to an affluent neighborhood where public schools have greater resources. The poor cannot,” the Reiches wrote in a mission statement. “We recoiled against this injustice.”
Today, 15 percent of New York City schoolchildren are enrolled in one of the city’s 281 charter schools — though the school choice movement still ignites fiery debates over whether charters siphon off motivated students and money from traditional neighborhood schools.