New York politicians are transforming the city into the Big Crapple
Yesterday, I was chatting with two grammar school friends, who live on the Jersey Shore.
One suggested they come into the city to meet me for holiday cocktails — but the other protested. “You couldn’t pay me enough to visit that rat-infested hellhole,” he said.
After more than two decades of living in New York City, I am used to some variation of that sentiment — especially since the pandemic.
Normally, I laugh and move on. Sure, but it’s my rat-infested hellhole.
For once, however, I had to agree wholeheartedly.
Three years on from Covid lockdowns, the city somehow looks even shabbier. The streets are back to people capacity, but we’re outmatched by bustling rat colonies.
Garbage bags are piled all over the sidewalks. The once quaint picturesque streets of Soho — where I lived for 16 years — are cluttered with graffitied restaurant shelters and litter. The old hood could use a good bleach scrub.
Then there’s Sixth Avenue (and Fifth for that matter) in Midtown and the Brooklyn Bridge, both of which now resemble medieval open-air bazaars. For the last month, I’ve had many out of town visitors, which meant venturing out to these spots regularly.
And the degradation is as striking as it is disheartening.
The Brooklyn Bridge is a bottleneck of selfie-snapping tourists, shopping from vendors selling tacky tchotkes on folding tables. A flea market on our historic marvel.
Sixth Avenue, which is usually made grand this time of year by the corporate buildings’ glitzy holiday display, is a gauntlet of filth.
It’s lined with vendors, shoulder to shoulder, brazenly hawking bad knockoff luxury items on grimy blankets. Not the usual, few dudes on side streets looking both ways for cops, but an unsightly (presumably unlicensed) makeshift retail hovel.
Gotham truly does look like an unwashed and unloved city — a metropolis of muck.
The Big Crapple.
Visual evidence is all around the mechanisms that kept this city humming, or sputtering at times, have completely broken down.
No one is minding the shop, enforcing rules and laws, big and small. No one is making tough decisions to truly clean things up and make things better for residents and tourists.
So how are our city pols responding to our mounting problems? For one, they are making it more difficult for police to do their jobs, putting menial tasks at the top of their to-do list. So they’ll be unable to tackle the festering problems staring us in our faces.
On Wednesday the City Council passed controversial legislation that will require police to record any and all encounters — regardless of how ordinary.
Even Mary Jo Smith from Peoria, Ill., asking a beat cop for directions to FAO Schwarz, critics say.
Cops now need to record their age, race and gender (can’t make assumptions about that last one), something supporters of the most useless bill in history insist will help prevent racial profiling.
The absolute madness.
When will police, already completely stretched and demoralized, have time to actually enforce the law if they’re forced to be glorified secretaries?
“Under this bill, police officers would spend less time keeping New Yorkers safe and more time filling out paperwork — slowing response times and diverting officers from engaging with the public,” an NYPD spokesperson said.
It’s like buying a once-beautiful estate with a crumbling foundation and starting your restoration by requesting the contractor itemize their nuts and bolts, shine and buff their heavy machinery and then fix up the back garden.
This city is plagued by multiple festering problems, including a migrant crisis, the rising cost of living, falling transit revenues, crime, homelessness and of course, the inability to enforce quality of life issues.
Complaints about unsafe or slipping standards, mainly made on social media, are usually met with protestations from half-wits: “Move to the suburbs.” “It was worse in the 80s.”
Maybe in the 80s you dealt with a myriad of urban blight — but you didn’t pay a premium for it. I spent much of my childhood here, and I love a bit of grime and character.
This isn’t grime. It’s like they’re building a new Fresh Kills dump on some of our most iconic stretches.
New York City is my home, but it feels more and more, like our politicians are only interested in making it inhospitable for rational, tax-paying people.
How about next election cycle we start the clean-up by tossing them in the trash?
