Let 2025 be the year City Hall finally makes good on decades of pledges to clean up The Hub commercial district in the South Bronx.
The Post has confirmed that the “Broadway of The Bronx” remains overrun by drug addicts, vagrants, spent drug paraphernalia and filth — not just following a cleanup effort this fall, but even after our exposé ran.
One major de Blasio-era effort to rescue the area was opening Roberto Clemente Plaza in November 2018; its architects optimistically described the $16 million “Herald Square of The Bronx” as a “green oasis amidst the chaos.”
Oops: Locals say the surrounding chaos instead overwhelmed the plaza almost immediately.
The Post encountered addicts shooting up in broad daylight, more suffering apparent overdoses and still others contorted into the “fentanyl fold.”
“These streets are full of zombies,” said Emilio Morales, general manager of the landmark Opera House Hotel, a three-star inn on East 149th Street. “It has never been as bad as it is now.”
How did it come to this: Daily public displays of drug-fueled depravity on city streets teeming with shops, shoppers, commuters and school kids?
Aside from the obvious neglect, The Hub is home to dozens of methadone clinics, addiction-treatment services and needle-exchange and harm-reduction programs.
Morales and other Hub business leaders are still awaiting a lasting City Hall response to their pleas for action.
A 2021 letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio brought promises of regular walkthroughs and $8 million to fight the opioid epidemic in The Bronx; Eric Adams’ City Hall in turn launched a “comprehensive, multi-agency approach” against drug activity and associated problems in The Hub, including a major sweep this October and November — but the squalor comes right back.
Long-time residents and observers say the junkie haven has defied long-lasting solutions for well over 40 years — yet that’s no reason for surrender.
Plainly, what’s needed is not just a sustained police presence but moving out most of the addict-serving progressive social programs: Spread them far and wide.
The Hub is also an excellent candidate for Mayor Adams’ new “Every Block Counts” multi-agency initiative focusing on ‘hoods with longstanding crime and quality-of-life issues. Instead of surrendering to the depravity and deviancy, City Hall needs to implement an all-hands approach.
Adams often claims that “prosperity and public safety go in hand-in-hand”; he needs to make that a reality in The Hub.
