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 his name as Fisher, 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,” 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.”
The onslaught isn’t just in Midtown.
More than a dozen apparently mentally unwell people slept strewn out on benches or shuffled barefoot through Washington Square Park, some murmuring to themselves and others mumbling for money last week.
Craig James, 55, a Brooklynite who sells his art in the park, said begging derelicts intentionally target families, and often spit at them when they don’t pay up. Other scamming scalawags bump into unsuspecting parkgoers with trays of food, spilling them in hopes the sympathetic or frightened marks will pay up to replace it, he said.
“You can tell because the food is all dry and it’s full of cigarette butts, but most people don’t want to be bothered,” he said. “They know the tourists don’t want to be hassled.”
An apparently homeless man slept near the West Fourth Street subway stop outside a 7-Eleven, where clerk Rana Jamil said a ceaseless barrage of emotionally disturbed people leave him scared to work every day.
The shoplifting and violence have prompted the West Village store to put locks on refrigerators and forced several employees to quit, including one who only lasted a week, said Jamil, who predicted the site likely will close within “a couple of months.
“Nobody can run a business here,” he said.
Bottcher, in his letter to Adams, pressed the mayor to support a bill requiring the city’s health department to place licensed social workers in NYPD precincts.
He also pointed out that B-HEARD — a pilot program in which mental health workers help respond to 911 calls — only runs in 31 police precincts, none of which are on the West Side.
“Manhattan’s West Side is in need of this program now,” he wrote.
The squalor outside the Holiday Inn has scared off guests, many of whom have left scorching online reviews calling the hotel an “absolute garbage dump” and complaining about “sketchy” people doing drug deals outside.
Nicola Krebs, 31, a tourist visiting from New Zealand with her family, said she’s unlikely to stay at the hotel again.
“I love New York City,” Krebs told The Post, before adding, “It’s a bit off-putting with so many homeless people.
“They should actually give them help.”
Crime has actually been falling across most of the six police precincts covering Bottcher’s West Side district, according to NYPD crime statistics.
The exception happens to be the one serving the most visible area, at least in the world’s eyes: Midtown North, which covers the north edge of Times Square, the Theater District and Hell’s Kitchen.
Major felonies there rose 71% through the week from July 22 to July 28, compared to the same week last year, according to NYPD data.
Those crimes are up 10% so far this year in the precinct, compared to the same span in 2023, the data show.
But many of the complaints outlined by West Side locals, businesses and tourists to The Post fall under quality-of-life issues not easily reflected in crime statistics. They also could lead to calls to cops about people who are homeless or are experiencing mental health problems.
The Post on Friday requested the number of police contacts with emotionally disturbed people in the six West Side precincts Bottcher covers going back to 2022, only to be told by an NYPD spokesperson that it couldn’t gather the information by Sunday morning.
City Hall officials didn’t return The Post’s request for comment.
Bottcher said the situation is causing suffering for New Yorkers with serious mental illness, drug problems and who are living rough on the streets, in addition to the impact on locals and businesses.
He said the problem is in full view in Midtown.
“We are the gateway to New York City for millions of people every year,” he said. “We are the district that millions of people go to work in every day.”
