GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: NYC ‘gateway’ and tourist destination overrun by mentally ill, drug abusers: ‘Humanitarian crisis.’
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.
A bedraggled security guard, who only gave Fisher as his name, said he sees doped-up derelicts do drugs “all day and all night” in the public courtyard at the Midtown Holiday Inn hotel along Eighth Avenue’s infamous “strip of despair.”
“It’s crazy out here,” the battle-weary Midtown security guard, 50, said.
As Kevin Williamson warned a decade ago, “the thing about [Mike] Bloomberg is, he’s a busy body and a nanny and self-regarding and sanctimonious and unbearable, and Jesus, are we going to miss him when he’s gone, because Bloomberg, for all of this faults and his weird little psychosis about bacon and salt and soft drinks and sugar and all the rest of it, and smoking, especially, basically kept what was best about the Giuliani administration.”
Manhattan now spirals back into the pre-Rudy Bad Old Days:
It wasn’t so long ago that things were completely crazy, when guests at cocktail parties chatted about strategies for dealing with muggers (it was widely believed that you should always carry what we called “mugger money” so as not to anger your attackers). Those who were brave enough to park cars on city streets made sure to remove the stereos when they parked, then place “No radio, nothing valuable in car” signs on their dashboards.
—“NYC, July 1993,” Kyle Smith, the New York Post, July 21, 2013.