Midtown invasion of homeless, mentally ill, drug-abusers and weirdos greet millions of tourists and office workers. ‘The status quo cannot continue.’
By Haley Brown and Matt Troutman | New York Post
Unstable, strung-out, homeless weirdos have swarmed large parts of Manhattan’s West Side, littering streets with needles and menacing locals and tourists alike — and there’s no help in sight.
The invasion of homeless, mentally ill and drug-abusing people is a full-blown “humanitarian crisis” greeting millions of tourists and office workers who arrive in Midtown and its highly trafficked surrounding neighborhoods, wrote Councilman Eric Bottcher in a recent letter to the mayor asking for aid.
“Our neighborhoods need help right now,” he wrote. “The status quo cannot be allowed to continue.”
West Side wackadoos — including one dead-eyed junkie wandering with a needle sticking out of his hand along 36th Street near bustling Penn Station — were out in force as The Post visited the neighborhoods over the past two weeks
“It’s crazy out here,” said the battle-weary Midtown security guard, 50.
“They even have sex out here on the benches. They pee and defecate here.”
Entire swaths of the West Side, including near Washington Square Park, the West Fourth Street subway station in the West Village and the Garment District, are “particularly dire,” Bottcher wrote.
Stretched-thin NYPD precincts in the area are buried in endless calls about open drug sales and use, destroyed property, menacing acts of physical and verbal intimidation, shoplifting and more, according to Bottcher. And the cops can’t arrest their way out of the crisis, he said.
“We have people who have been arrested 50 or 100 times without any meaningful intervention,” Bottcher, who represents District 3 covering the area, told The Post.
“At what point does anyone do anything to interrupt that cycle?”
Staff at the Midtown Holiday Inn, where The Post watched a custodian outside clean up at least two spent needles, have resorted to turning on sprinklers in hopes of washing the unruly vagrants away.
But some homeless people are turning it into a shower experience — even using soap, as one hotel guest complained in an online review.
“We turn the sprinklers on to move them and they come inside cursing us out,” said Rocky Caban, 45, the hotel’s front desk supervisor. “They try to hit us and everything. We got the guard outside to try to stop them from coming inside.”
Caban pointed to a man nodding off on the benches: “Every day we gotta go through this.
“I see the same people every day. I see them get picked up and go in an ambulance and the next day they’re back outside.”
Two strung-out vagrants lay on the sidewalk outside Housing Works Community Healthcare, a 37th Street “harm reduction” center that offers a needle exchange and crystal methamphetamine treatment, when The Post visited Wednesday.
A few blocks over, two Port Authority cops chased a screaming man out of Carlo’s Bakery.
A security guard who has worked for two years in a 36th Street building told The Post that he sees people doing and selling drugs on the block “all the time.”
He noted a methadone clinic is nearby, but many homeless people he talks with during his workdays tell him they can’t afford their medication.
“They say, ‘I’m going to self-medicate and buy heroin,’” he said.
“They’d rather live on the street than a homeless shelter because people get robbed. People get stabbed. They’re more safe on the street.” ##