As she walks around her Lower East Side neighborhood on a recent Saturday night, Diem Boyd’s list of grievances starts small: two empty airplane-size bottles of Jameson sitting on a trash-bin lid on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington streets.
But it rapidly grows to include a stretch limo funneling a group of dudes into a Delancey Street nightclub, then a mass of young people sporting expensive purses and North Face jackets standing outside dive bar Welcome to the Johnsons on Rivington.
“It’s frat boys and sorority girls,” says Boyd, a 44-year-old mother who works in advertising and has been living downtown since she was 18. “That’s not what Welcome to the Johnsons is supposed to be about.”
Still, she isn’t moved to yelling until she reaches the Skinny, the often-packed bar on Orchard Street, where a girl in a black dress walks out the front door at around 11 p.m., stumbles a few steps and then falls on the sidewalk.
“She was overserved!” Boyd shouts at the bouncer.
If she sounds like she’s trying to be the Batman of the bar scene, she’s close: Boyd is the founder of the most feared community group in the city, the LES Dwellers.
They’ve made it their mission to stop the spread of bars, clubs and hotels — and the ensuing crowds — that they say are turning their neighborhood into a bridge-and-tunnel version of Bourbon Street. (The group has embraced the nickname “Hell Square” for the nine-block area which is ground zero for its actions.)
Three years ago, after the building next door to her, 106 Rivington, was slated to become a bar and restaurant — on a block already teeming with watering holes — Boyd sprang into action.
“It was already completely insane,” she says. “[I thought,] ‘We do live here, and we can’t have any more bars in this area. I’m mad as hell.’ ”
She formed a coalition of 25 residents who attend community board meetings to oppose new liquor licenses, pester the New York State Liquor Authority about enforcement, and meet with the local police precinct about neighborhood safety.
They won their very first battle: In 2013, the State Liquor Authority denied a license to 106 Rivington, which remains empty.
More recently, the group was instrumental in shutting down the Derby — a bar and restaurant at Orchard and Stanton under the same ownership as nearby bars Spitzer’s Corner and Fat Baby — which closed in early January.
The Derby’s frustrated former owner, Rob Shamlian, put his hands up in defeat and says he will soon sell off his other bars, which have been fiercely targeted by the Dwellers as well.
“It’s a quality-of-life issue, and I’ve had enough of the hostile neighborhood groups,” Shamlian wrote on the blog Bowery Boogie. (He didn’t respond to The Post’s requests for comment.)
Business owners are afraid to tangle with them — or even talk about them.
“My fights with the Dwellers go deep,” says one nightlife professional who asked that his name not be used for fear of provoking them. “I don’t need any fuel for that fire.”
This feared faction is surprisingly young — which they use to their advantage.
Some members are the same age as the revelers littering the streets, so they run undercover operations to record nightlife parties that get out of hand.
They’re Internet-savvy, too. The group maintains a website and social media accounts documenting bar infractions, including a video of two girls brawling outside Arlene’s Grocery and another showing Boyd confronting a guy urinating in a store’s entryway.
“I’m young. I love going to bars,” says Dweller Ivan Villegas, 35, who lives on Stanton Street but prefers to drink in Bushwick. “I’m just against all the messiness that happens — the out-of-control free-for-all.”
In December, walking to his home late one night, Villegas used his phone to capture an 11-minute, nonstop, all-star collection of gripes: vomiting, fighting, screaming and arrests. (The video has 15,000 views on YouTube.)
The group is relentless in its efforts, contacting would-be bar owners in the neighborhood to demand they withdraw applications from the community board — tactics so combative, the board banned them for three months in 2013, saying the aggressive actions violated its code of conduct for block associations. (The board wouldn’t comment on its actions, referring all questions to the published minutes of its meetings.)
“I no longer wanted to be intimidated,” board member Ariel Palitz, an owner of the recently closed East Village club Sutra Lounge, said at an October 2013 meeting about banning the group. “Denying applicants based solely on the location hurts us. I am appealing to common sense.”
John Seymour, 37, co-owner of Sweet Chick, the restaurant that took over the old Max Fish space on Ludlow Street in July, lost a battle to get a liquor license after opposition from the group, which protested to the community board that it was too close to a school and too many other bars on the block.
Seymour says they go too far sometimes.
“I have lived here my entire life and believe we all have the right to live peacefully, but it seems that the LES Dwellers, more often than not, have adopted a ‘by any means necessary’ approach — and it’s my hope that every business and business owner can be looked at fresh,” he says.
While battles of bars versus residents aren’t uncommon in New York — where mixed-use urban living is the norm — the Dwellers’ situation might be particularly aggravating. In 2013, a member of the State Liquor Authority described Hell Square as “one of the most saturated areas in the city — probably one of the most saturated in the world.”
Navigating the streets is a weekly game of drunken Frogger for Boyd and the other residents. But they resist the idea that they’re get-off-my-stoop cranks.
Some are long-timers: Bob Kommel, 70, has been there since the days when drug dealers dotted the corners and he wouldn’t let girlfriends walk alone south of Katz’s Deli on Houston Street. He noticed the change a few years ago when the traffic got so bad, he couldn’t navigate his 1965 BMW motorcycle down the street.
“It took me half an hour or 45 minutes to go four blocks,” he says. “With all the limos and kids and the noise, I couldn’t move.”
For the Dwellers, there’s something more nefarious at work than just extra noise and puke.
“It becomes a lot of bridge and tunnel on weekends,” says one 43-year-old who’s lived on Stanton Street for a decade and asked not to be named for work reasons.
“They just get so drunk, they forget [people live here],” he adds, recalling the time last summer when he walked out of his apartment one morning to find a couple passed out on an abandoned couch in front of his building.
For Boyd — who says she once danced on a bar in her younger days — one moment this summer exemplified just how much the neighborhood has changed. The corner bar Spitzer’s had its windows open, when a loud commotion drove Boyd and several neighbors down to the street.
They saw a huge crew of people in the bar, belting along to Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville.”
“It was horrific,” she says. “We were like, ‘Where are we? This is not New York City.’ No one in a New York bar should be singing ‘Margaritaville.’ ”