Memo to Mayor Eric Adams and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg:
A Bronx cheer for your new “Midtown Community Improvement Coalition,” because — yes! — the squeegee men are back at the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 40th Street.
The hated scourges of the Ed Koch and David Dinkins mayoral years once again plague hapless, frightened motorists near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in broad daylight, as I saw and photographed a well-organized squad of four doing at 1 p.m. on Wednesday while they puffed away on acrid-smelling weed.
All it takes to get rid of them is a single NYPD cop unafraid of losing his or her pension just for enforcing laws against aggressive panhandling.
Instead, Adams and Bragg this week trumpeted the launch of a so-called “coalition” to improve quality of life and “protect public safety” in the West 30s and 40s — a group comprised of no fewer than 20 city agencies and “community partners,” many of which would sooner swallow cyanide-laced Kool-Aid than effectively cooperate.
The departments of Transportation, Health, Buildings, Sanitation and the FDNY, for example, step on one another’s toes over such rocket-science challenges as rules for outdoor cafes. Now, we’re asked to believe, they’ll join in a common front to vanquish the Hell’s Kitchen bad guys the way the Allies united against the Nazis at D-Day.
The “coalition” is a holiday-week ruse to make New Yorkers think the city is actually doing something about the district’s real problems.
According to NYPD CompStat data, Midtown South Precinct — which includes the coalition-focused areas — murders, rapes, felonious assault, petit larceny, retail thefts and shootings were all up through June 30 over the same period in 2023. The increases of between 10.9% (for assaults) and a horrific 125% (for rape) were not huge by totals, but are ominous signs of where the district is heading.
Increased vagrancy, drug use, rampant shoplifting and ever-rising cases of “petty crime” are plain for all to see.
Giving Bragg a say in cleaning them up is like putting the Prisoners’ Rights Project in charge. What an insult to the public! The ferocious prosecutor of alleged white-collar wrongdoers including Donald Trump has less interest in convicting violent, repeat offenders who attack bodega owners than in charging those who act in self-defense against muggers and crazies.
The coalition’s focus area is not the “vibrant Midtown business district,” as City Hall’ called it, but only its increasingly sleazy fringes: the mean streets bounded by West 34th and 45th streets and by Seventh and Ninth avenues, and Eighth Avenue between West 34th to 37th streets.
I know the zone north of Madison Square Garden too well. I’ve followed its ups and downs ever since I worked on West 36th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues in the 1970s. Despite a boom in new hotels and the arrival of a few decent restaurants, the streets and sidewalks increasingly look and smell as they did in the Bad Old Days of the early 1990s.
Case in point: The scaffold scourge has only gotten worse since Adams announced a “Get Sheds Down” campaign last year. The gloomy sidewalk structures — like the monster on the east side of Eighth Avenue between 38th and 39th streets — shelter fetanyl-addicted zombies who scare the patooties off everyone unfortunate to pass beneath them.
But although City Hall accurately mentioned “illegal scaffolding” as a problem, there’s not a thing it can do about them. The main problem isn’t landlords who keep sheds up too long, but the laws that spawned them in the first place, nominally to protect the public but, in fact, to enrich the rental companies and a supporting army of consultants, contractors and construction unions.
Some fine public servants lending their names to the coalition can be counted on to put their best efforts behind it — among them, Tom Harris and Barbara Blair, presidents respectively of the Times Square and Garment District alliances.
But wretched sidewalk conditions in the West 30s and 40s won’t be tamed by the coalition’s priorities. What’s truly needed is what used to be called a crackdown, a concept that’s a non-starter in today’s woke environment.
City Hall instead talks about “individuals in the area who may need connection to services such as housing or medical care” and “the power of government agencies, community service groups and mental health service providers” to help “those suffering on our streets.”
In other words, the perpetrators of Hell’s Kitchen’s squalor and menace are really the victims and deserving of tender loving care by bureaucratic organs and “advocates.”
But those who really deserve help are New Yorkers who live or work in the area and shouldn’t have to fear muggers or sexual predators — or having their windshields “washed” by dope-addled derelicts.
scuozzo@nypost.com
