Mayor Adams was out “bright and early” Saturday, traveling the five boroughs as a powerful bomb cyclone snowstorm rocked the city — eventually making good on a promise to The Post to keep his own Brooklyn sidewalk clear.
The mayor arrived outside his Bedford-Stuyvesant home just before 3 p.m. toting a big black shovel, and did his part to dig out from Winter Storm Keenan that dropped nearly a foot of snow on parts of the Big Apple.
“I find creative ways to exercise,” he said.
Hizzoner boasted to reporters and neighbors that he acquired “excellent” shoveling skills as a teen in South Jamaica, Queens which helped him “pay his way through school.”
“I have it down to a science,” he said, even though he started the job bare-handed. An aide eventually brought him a pair of mittens.
The mayor recommended rookie shovelers do back exercises and stretch before picking up a shovel.
“I tell people to stretch and take their time; it’s not a marathon,” said Adams, who jokingly sent a shovel-load in the direction of a gaggle of reporters.
Adams told reporters Friday that he didn’t want to get caught red-faced — like his predecessors — by failing to shovel.
“If I don’t, The New York Post will be outside my house making sure they take a picture of snow I didn’t shovel, so I’m going to be there bright and early to shovel snow,” he said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio attempted to get ahead of any potential criticism at the beginning of his time in office in 2014 by arranging photo ops where he shoveled snow off the walk of his Park Slope home.
But it didn’t allay the avalanche of criticism he had to dig out from under just a few weeks later when his administration botched the snow removal during the second major snow storm of his first term, leaving neighborhoods — including the posh Upper East Side — unplowed.
De Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, saw his approval rating crater after his administration botched its response to a December 2010 blizzard.