A sweeping crackdown will clean up a troubled East Village street that locals recently told The Post had turned into a “s–thole” due to open drug use, mentally disturbed derelicts and troubling bursts of violence.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday that an NYPD-anchored coalition of city agencies and local groups will aim to fix public safety and quality-of-life problems along 14th Street, where three New Yorkers were recently knifed in broad daylight.
“We don’t want to play this ‘after the mayor leaves’ we go back to disorder,” he said during a news conference in the 14th Street Y.
“This is not a problem that’s coming back to this area.”
The effort between First Avenue and Avenue A will also bring increased police foot patrols, as well as a new $1 million NYPD Mobile Command Center, Adams said.
Years of growing complaints and fears about deteriorating safety along 14th Street hit a crescendo June 23, when police said Alejandro Piedra, 30, fatally stabbed Clemson Coxfield, 38, and wounded two others amid a fight between homeless people.
Locals complained to The Post afterward about open-air heroin use, sidewalks festooned with human waste, irksome street vendors and threatening vagrants — all problems that were entrenched for months or longer.
Democratic Council members Keith Powers and Carlina Rivera, whose districts straddle 14th Street, pressed for a wide-ranging and lasting response.
Both Powers and Rivera flanked Adams, along with a cavalcade of prominent pols, during his news conference in the local Y.
“We have felt for a few years now, the pain of living in a block that you don’t want to walk down to that feels unsafe, it feels out of control and spiraling out of control,” Powers said.
“This is a great start, and we have to sustain it.”
But the freshly minted “14th Street Community Improvement Coalition” drew mixed reviews from locals and workers along the corridor, where several NYPD cops were posted during a rainy Thursday.
Justin Rivera, a clerk at Petopia, worried the problems were too ingrained for the city’s plan to be effective, especially with emotionally disturbed people milling around the area near StuyTown.
“Just for the simple fact that there’s so many people on the street and so many people who are not all there,” he said. “There’s too much going on to try to tame them.”
The effort will include sanitation workers emptying litter baskets three times a day, cleaning up homeless encampments and scrubbing graffiti from private property, officials said.
The 9th and 13th NYPD precincts serving the area also set up a WhatsApp chat with business owners along the corridor to give them a real-time outlet to identify and address problems, according to officials.
A clerk at smoke shop on 14th Street and First Avenue took aim at the WhatsApp chat, calling it “stupid.”
“Who cares? Who even sees the messages? When all of this is going wrong on the streets they want us to message them?” he said.
“They should know what’s going on in the city already and take precautions on that.”
Several locals told The Post that they’ve seen an increased police presence in the weeks after the triple-slashing.
But they also said all it appeared to do was just cause troublesome homeless people pack up and move over to Avenue B.
“Homeless people aren’t dumb,” said Don Tapert, 76, an architect who has lived in the neighborhood for two decades. “They know to go where the police aren’t.”
