If you’re a New Yorker, you probably know how Mayor Eric Adams spent part of last Friday afternoon: getting his eyebrows threaded at a salon in Corona, Queens. The now-viral moment was meant to symbolize how civilized the whole area had become in the past 90 days.
Watch the mayor get his eyebrows done here:
A few months earlier, locals had complained that this wasn’t the kind of block you’d want to set foot on, let alone visit for a spa treatment. The only massage parlors and salons open for business seemed to be fronts for the neighborhood’s booming sex trade, with police estimating as many as 50 brothels operating in the area. The neighborhood had even developed a nickname: the “Market of Sweethearts.”
“It was anarchy outside,” said Ramses Frías, a second-generation Queens native. “People were scared to leave their homes.”