Memo to Mayor Eric Adams and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg:
Cheers from the Bronx to the new “Midtown Community Improvement Coalition” because, yes, the Squeegee Men are back at the corner of 9th Avenue and West 40th Street.
A loathsome scourge from the Ed Koch and David Dinkins eras is once again tormenting hapless motorists in broad daylight near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, as I witnessed and photographed a well-organized group of four smoking pungent marijuana on a Wednesday afternoon at 1 p.m.
All it takes to get rid of them is a single NYPD officer who isn’t afraid to lose his pension for simply enforcing the law against aggressive panhandling.
Instead, Adams and Bragg this week touted the launch of a so-called “coalition” to improve quality of life and “protect public safety” in the West 30s and 40s, a group made up of more than 20 city agencies and “community partners,” many of whom would sooner gulp down cyanide Kool-Aid than work together effectively.
For example, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Health, the Department of Buildings, the Department of Sanitation, and the New York Fire Department are all stumbling over rocket science conundrums like regulating outdoor cafes, and we’re now being asked to trust that these departments will come together to defeat the bad guys in Hell’s Kitchen, just as the Allies did against the Nazis in the Normandy landings.
This “coalition” is a holiday week ploy to make New Yorkers think the city is actually doing something about the real problems in their district.
In the Midtown South precinct, which includes the area where the coalition is concentrated, murders, rapes, felonious assaults, petty thefts, retail thefts and shootings were all up through June 30 compared to the same period in 2023, according to NYPD CompStat data. While increases ranging from 10.9% (assault) to a frightening 125% (rape) aren’t huge in total, they’re an ominous sign of the direction the precinct is heading.
The increase in homelessness, drug use, rampant shoplifting, and a rise in “petty crime” are obvious to everyone.
Giving Mr. Bragg a say in those cleanups is like putting the Prisoners’ Rights Project in charge. An insult to the nation! Prosecutors who aggressively prosecute suspected white-collar criminals, including Donald Trump, are more interested in prosecuting people defending themselves against robbers and lunatics than they are in convicting violent repeat offenders who attack liquor store owners.
The coalition’s focus area is not what City Hall calls the “vibrant Midtown business district,” but rather its increasingly sleazy fringe: the rough streets bounded by West 34th and 45th Streets, Seventh and 9th Avenues, and Eighth Avenue between West 34th and 37th Streets.
I know the neighborhood north of Madison Square Garden well. I’ve watched it rise and fall since I worked on West 36th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in the 1970s. Despite the proliferation of new hotels and the opening of a few decent restaurants, the streets and sidewalks are looking and smelling more and more like the bad old days of the early 1990s.
For one thing, the scaffolding problem has only gotten worse since Governor Adams announced his “Take Down the Scaffolding” campaign last year. These dark, sidewalk structures, like the monstrous structure on the east side of Eighth Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets, harbor fetid zombies and scare away anyone unlucky enough to walk underneath them.
But while city hall correctly referred to “illegal scaffolding” as a problem, there is nothing it can do about it. The main problem is not homeowners who leave shacks standing for long periods of time, but the laws that gave rise to them in the first place – nominally to protect ordinary people, but in reality to enrich rental companies and the legions of consultants, contractors and building unions that back them.
The coalition includes some outstanding public servants who can be counted on to give their all, including Tom Harris and Barbara Blair, chairs of the Times Square Coalition and the Garment District Coalition.
But the terrible state of footpaths in the West Thirties and Forties is not going to be improved by the Coalition Government’s priorities. What’s really needed is what used to be called policing, but which is an impossible concept in today’s woke environment.
Instead, city officials are talking about “the power of government agencies, community service organizations and mental health service providers” to help “people in our community who may need connections to services like housing and health care” and “people suffering on the streets.”
In other words, the perpetrators of Hell’s Kitchen degradation and terror are in fact victims, deserving of tender loving care from bureaucracies and “advocates.”
But the people who really need help are the New Yorkers who live or work in this community, who shouldn’t have to fear robbers, sex offenders, or having their windshield “washed” by drug-addicted vagrants.
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