Mayor Eric Adams gave a doughy defense of his administration’s controversial new edict targeting New York City’s iconic eateries that use pollutant-spewing coal-and-wood-fired baking methods — but left the oven door open for compromise.
“Everyone likes pizza! You see that pie in front of you, you start to get happy,” said Adams, who faced the fire while responding to a Post report on the city’s green crackdown on pizzerias during an unrelated press conference Monday.
“But let’s be clear, every toxic entity that we remove from our air is adding up to the overall desire to deal with shrinking our carbon footprint,”
The city Department of Environmental Protection drafted new rules — to comply with a 2015 law — that orders eateries that use the decades old coal-and-wood-fired ovens to pay tens of thousands in dough to slice carbon emissions by up to 75%.
“We don’t want to hurt businesses in the city and we don’t want to hurt the environment. So, let’s see if we can find a way to get the resolutions we’re looking for,” said Adams.
Hizzoner’s comments came shortly after conservative shock artist Scott LoBaido of Staten Island threw 48 slices of pizza over the fence into City Park near the mayor’s office to protest the policy, which he likened to the Boston Tea Party.
“Give me pizza or give me death! This is New York!. New York is nothing without pizza,” an outraged LoBaido said, borrowing a phrase from the famous American patriot Patrick Henry.
He said with all the problems the Big Apple face city officials are instead “worried about a f***ing slice of pizza and they’re going to take it away.”
“These are small mom and pop businesses with pizza ovens and they’re going to take this away from them?! It’s all this politically correct woke bulls**t,” LoBaido said.
But Adams urged LoBaido and other pizza lovers to chill.
Hizzoner, a vegan pizza lover, said impacted restaurateurs and others can weigh on the new rules during a public comment period before they are finalized.
“Let the public weigh in and then we can have a conversation if we’re going to move forward or not,” added Adams. “And I’m going to call the person who threw the pizza over my gate to tell him he needs to bring a vegan pie to me so we can sit down and I want to hear his side of this.”
Iconic pizza joints facing the heat over the strict emissions policy include Lombardi’s in Little Italy, Arturo’s in Soho, John’s of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Macoletta in Astoria, Patsy’s in Turtle Bay and the Upper West Side, Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint Grimaldi’s near the Brooklyn Bridge and Totonno’s in Coney Island — that pride themselves on having their pies baked in coal-and-wood-fired ovens
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