A not funny thing happened on Fulton Street last week.
The vacant downtown storefront at the corner of Cliff Street, once slated to be a southern-style cafe, became home instead to High Society, an unlicensed pot shop.
Wait, you say — didn’t Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams pledge to rid the city of thousands of illegal, dangerous storefront dope dealers?
Hah! The unlicensed marijuana merchants aren’t just holding out in the face of the “crackdown,” but — as High Society’s arrival proves — they’re multiplying.
Pandemic-driven economic trends combined with “woke” government policies and attitudes set the city up for the pot-on-every-corner plague that’s worse than sidewalk bridges which stand forever.
And Hochul’s alleged “crackdown” won’t make a dent.
The 2020 lockdown, instigated by business-hating elected officials and “scientists,” killed off innumerable shops and restaurants and left long-empty spaces behind.
The retail wipeout made normally responsible landlords willing — make that desperate — to rent vacant storefronts to anybody.
Smoke sellers have the run of the town for multiple reasons.
Insurmountable licensing hurdles deterred legitimate marijuana merchants from challenging the unscrupulous profiteers.
The license rules, too, were enacted under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who effectively turned state government over to far-left Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrew Stewart-Cousins.
The Big Apple long had more storefronts than the market can bear, especially in Manhattan. Online shopping increased the number of vacant stores further.
But it wasn’t until the 2020 lockdown that the situation turned into a catastrophe.
Many older tenement buildings, where most of the unlicensed pot spots are concentrated, are so hard up for rent revenue, they’d lease to the devil.
That’s surely why the owner of the three-story building at the 34 Cliff Street, on the corner of Fulton Street — an entity identified in city records as “Dr. Fulton” — let High Society in the door.
They no doubt were frustrated at not finding a new tenant after Peaches Low Country Kitchen walked away from the space where it never opened despite years of “coming soon” signs.
There aren’t enough sportswear shops or food outlets to fill all the dark storefronts.
Tenements are marijuana magnets for the same reason that fancy, modern buildings now lease their ground floors to tenants they never considered in the past — such as walk-in medical and dental clinics, doggie “spas,” laser-treatment salons and classrooms.
The ground-floor former site of Lester’s clothing store, a neighborhood Upper East Side fixture for a half-century, is now home to Goldfish Swim School with a giant pool that draws stares through the window.
But tenements have small, narrow spaces that lend themselves only to candy store-size uses — such as unlicensed dope dens.
No fewer than eight of them stand within a two-block radius of my home on First Avenue in the East 70s — most of which replaced small cafes and take-out food shops that never recovered from the lockdown.
Shop and restaurant owners also balk at opening new places because they fear proliferating shoplifting raids, which grew out of the perverted mindset that “minor” crimes committed by “disadvantaged” youths shouldn’t be prosecuted.
That of course leaves more room for pot shops.
Maybe Hochul and Adams will eventually find a way to boot the weed pushers despite political, bureaucratic and judicial resistance to getting rid of them.
Of course, our elected leaders could also find a way to bring back the Brooklyn Dodgers.
A few unlicensed spots that were recently padlocked by the NYPD popped up again overnight.
Turn-em-loose judges, feckless bureaucrats and well-paid lawyers game the system in dealers’ favor.
Until New Yorkers wake up to “woke” devastation, politicians who say they’re committed to shutting down pot shops are blowing smoke in our eyes.
