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.
“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.
